US media shamefully justified a string of Canadian church burnings:
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2015 that at least 3,200 students died, later revising that figure to 4,100. The No. 1 cause of death was tuberculosis; influenza hit hard, too. Far from home, children were often buried on site, their graves marked with wooden crosses, most of which deteriorated and disappeared.
So this year’s “discoveries” are better called “confirmations.” As Assembly of First Nations national chief Perry Bellegarde declared, “While it is not new to find graves at former residential schools in Canada, it’s always crushing to have that chapter’s wounds exposed.”
Yet the US press treated the news as if Canada had been hiding genocidal death camps. ...
Those headlines were false — according to all three chiefs who made the discoveries. “This is not a mass grave site, this is just unmarked graves,” Cowessess First Nation chief Cadmus Delorme said of the biggest site. Indeed, the remains aren’t even believed to be all of children. A band leader said the site was a community cemetery, including graves of nonindigenous people — unmarked because wooden markers had decomposed.
Church critics used that framing to justify, and even encourage, the rash of arsons. “Burn it all down,” tweeted the head of the BC Civil Liberties Association and the chair of the Newfoundland Canadian Bar Association Branch. “It’s very dangerous to conflate the string of church fires with violence against mosques,” activist Nora Loreto said, insisting they weren’t “hate crimes” — in other words, the Catholic Church had it coming. ...
Natives don’t believe the arsonists are their fellow indigenous. The attackers “must have no feelings or respect for elders or ancestors” who built the churches, said 90-year-old Carrie Allison.
One fire destroyed six stained-glass windows created to show indigenous culture can coexist with Catholicism. For mainstream media, though, the “genocide” story was too good to check: They could attack the Roman church and whites in one fell swoop. Yet it’s Canada’s natives who are being traumatized yet again.
