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Notes -
Do Algonquin natives have a right to shoot up Americans and Canadians for colonialism?
That's what the French and Indian war was. If there had been continued resistance, terrorism, and guerrilla fighting by the Native Tribes after the 19th century. Which year would it have gone from righteous to not righteous? 1935? 1970? 2001?
It becomes terrorism after the treaty is signed ending the war. If descendants of the Natives want to call those treaties unfair and demand reparations, I think they have a right to peacefully protest for it, and situationally I might even support their cause. They don’t have a right to commit violence.
Similarly, Arabs don’t have a right to start armed conflicts, and they’re in the wrong when they do so.
"Arabs don't have a right to start armed conflicts" seems like quite the broad claim. Could you explain your reasoning? Did Saudi Arabia not have a right to provide aid and intelligence to fight against ISIS?
As for the treaties, that bypasses a perceived issue of state vs non-state status. Lots of the people in question aren't meaningfully bound by a treaty, because they're from a different tribe, because their tribe wasn't organized enough to sign one, etc. Is a miqmaq obligated by a treaty signed by cherokee and anishinaabe? Presumably not, based on our understanding of how these work.
To be clear, no one has the right to start armed conflicts. ISIS started the fight, Saudi Arabia is justified in fighting an aggressor.
That's a fair point, and I would have to do a fair amount more thinking to come to what I would consider a fair belief about when natives are allowed to use violence to fight back vs not. But in any case, I don't think there's any reasonable justification where Palestinians can shoot up music festivals. At the very least, Palestininian leadership should make some clear demands from Israel and only start shooting after Israel says no, instead of just rejecting every Israeli deal as not good enough without making counter offers.
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Yes, and in the example of the settlement of the Americas, almost all of “Western civilization”, even as authors sometimes romanticized native life, was on the general side of the colonizers and settlers. The point is that when it’s your family being raped, murdered and/or scalped, the noble savage of the plains rhetoric dies quickly. Israel is in the same place. The Palestinians have a ‘right’ to defend themselves, but exercising that right will only tighten the noose.
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