Catholic League president Bill Donohue has excoriated the National Education Association (NEA) for its malicious attack on Christopher Columbus.
The NEA, which represents more than three million teachers and administrators, is a “decidedly left-wing organization,” Dr. Donohue notes in Thursday’s essay, and is “hyper-critical” of the United States and Western civilization in general.
In its “frontal assault” on Columbus, the NEA, America’s largest labor union, draws heavily on the tendentious and thoroughly debunked pseudo-historical work of Howard Zinn, “a man who hated America with a passion,” Donohue writes.
The NEA’s most prominent resource for teachers on Columbus and the Indians is the Zinn Education Project, named after the man who wrote A People’s History of the United States, which Donohue dubs “the most dishonest book on American history ever written.”
Replicas of Columbus’ ships Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria in the parade of ships celebrating Independence Day in New York Harbor, New York, New York, July 4, 1992. (Allan Tannenbaum/Getty)
The stated goal of the Zinn Education Project is “Abolishing Columbus Day,” based on Zinn’s disingenuous anti-Columbus propaganda posing as history.
As a helpful resource exposing Zinn’s lies, Donohue suggests Mary Grabar’s book Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America, which takes apart Zinn’s fabrications.
“Zinn would have the reader believe that the Indians were doing just fine before the white man came along,” Donohue observes. “Never once does he attempt to explain why many tribes engaged in savage warfare against each other (the Hurons and the Iroquois are one of many examples), nor does he discuss cannibalism, human sacrifice, and other acts of cruelty that existed before the Europeans arrived.”
A car adorned with American and Italian flags at the Columbus Day Parade in Medford, Massachusetts, USA, 9th October 1978. (Barbara Alper/Getty)
Zinn also refrains from commenting on the numerous Indians who defected to the side of the Europeans, rebelling against the “butchery” they had experienced at the hands of some tribes, Donohue writes.
“If Zinn was a liar, what does that make the NEA? It is actively peddling his malicious falsification of American history,” he concludes.
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