In case anyone forgot it was Columbus Day, here’s the required annual trashing of the dead white explorer, as published in the Raleigh News & Observer today:

Columbus sailed with baggage

CHAPEL HILL — Were it not for Muslims, Columbus would not have discovered America.

Sept. 11, 2001 was the tragic consequence of long-simmering anti-Western grievances harbored by many in the Islamic world. Those grievances go back at least to 1492, the year that Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain on a voyage to find a sea route to India that resulted instead in the discovery of the New World. …

Unwittingly, Columbus undertook his historic journey over the broken spirit of the Islamic people. Now, half a millenium later, that repressed people, like a long-dormant volcano, is erupting.

Hmm. That’s a 512-year-old grievance. And a direct line from there to the World Trade Center?

I can beat that, on behalf of my Huguenot ancestors who fled Bourbon France in 1680 after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; my Swiss immigrant ancestors who had to seek a pardon from George III after mixing in the wrong politics in colonial Carolina in 1768; my Highland Scots ancestors who came to America following the suppression of the clans; and all my Southern ancestors who lived under martial law imposed by their own government after a second independence movement proved unsuccessful. And I won’t even mention my Cherokee relatives.

Time to move on, I think. History still doesn’t justify slaughter of the innocent.