Editor, OBSERVER:

A recent opinion piece “We must open our eyes to Mideast wrongs” (Sept. 25) is poorly conceived.

The suggestion that the Native Americans lacked disease because of a “human right to clean water” is silly. Europeans had more exposure to deadly diseases because of their proximity to the mammals they domesticated such as the cow and sheep, not because of Native sanitation methods.

Furthermore, the Aztecs, of whom the writer mentions as having “cities of 20,000 people,” had no concept of anything like “human rights”– the Aztec Empire, and many other Native societies, were slave empires. The hagiography on Natives is a small point in her piece, but it speaks to a childish understanding of the subject she’s speaking on. I’d love to see the day where she forfeits her home to the Native tribes to “honor our treaties.”

Native American society, like White European society, was and remains complicated and multifaceted, and framing the settling of this country as the unambiguous defeat of a good civilization by an evil civilization is divisive and, frankly, racist against Whites.

CHUCK CARROLL,

Fredonia