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Why We Owe the Kurds
Daesh aka ISIL aka ISIS is the enemy of the United States,
of Canada, and of every Indian nation that occupies the same real estate. They believe they have been deputized by God to convert us or kill us and so our choices are convert or die. Most of us approach a disagreement threatening war as a different choice: Do we fight or do we talk?
Sympathetic Indians refer to persons in my profession as “briefcase warriors;” unsympathetic Indians offer less complimentary descriptions. I’ll plead guilty to having a predilection for talking over fighting. Even if my instincts didn’t swing that way, I’m too old for fighting.
But we cannot talk to Daesh.
This is not a slander. This is a straightforward description of their theology, to which we had better pay more attention than has been the case so far.
The colonists like to claim they came to North America seeking religious freedom, a load of bull that is taught as fact to the children in K-12. In fact, they came to North America seeking the “freedom” to oppress others for their religious beliefs. The oppression was visited not only-–or even primarily — on American Indians.
The poet John Greenleaf Whittier described religious freedom as understood in the colonies in How the Women Went from Dover: