Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Haven't We Given the Native Americans A Lot Better Things to Complain About?

When the Navy SEALs completed their mission and killed Usama bin Laden, the message they sent back home was "Geronimo EKIA."

That meant Geronimo (the codename of the mission), enemy killed in action.

Now some Native American groups are objecting to the nomenclature.

The name Geronimo was picked precisely because that Indian hero was hard to catch and spent years evading the forces out to get him. But Native American groups don't see it that way. They see it has their hero being compared to the second-worst person in the history of the world (following Hitler).

I can sort of understand their upset but they have to understand that the name Geronimo was not chosen because Geronimo was a terrorist, but because he was an enigma, like Bin Laden, hard to find.

I wouldn't have been insulted if the mission had been called Koufax, because Bin Laden was hard to hit.

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