Posted on 11/26/2012 10:17:50 AM PST by Thurifer the Censer
Yeah - they were terrorists.
Unlike the great patriots today who sit on their collective asses smoking pot, listening to obnoxious music and breaking store windows in their quest for “fairness”....
There are different sorts of terrorists - those intent on extinguishing liberty and those intent on establishing or preserving it. The original tea party participants were the latter.
Apparently, the only way to gain recognition and consideration of your agenda from the U.S. Government these days, is to be a terrorist
I grew up counting on stability in this country. Not sure that is an option now.
Yeah. while I have no idea what if any agenda this TX Edu Organization has, I think it was characterizing the Boston Tea Party in an ironic light, from the point of view of our British Colonial Masters. So it was most likely the exact opposite of the way most posters here seem to be taking it.
Another reason to homeschool... LIBERAL TEACHERS
CNN - BOSTON, April 20 - National Guard units seeking to confiscate a cache of recently banned assault weapons were ambushed on April 19th by elements of a para-military extremist faction. Military and law enforcement sources estimated that 72 were killed and more than 20 injured before government forces were compelled to withdraw.
Speaking after the clash, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage declared that the extremist faction, which was made up of local citizens, has links to the radical right-wing tax protest movement. Gage blamed the extremists for recent incidents of vandalism directed against internal revenue offices.
The governor, who described the group’s organizers as “criminals,” issued an executive order authorizing the summary arrest of any individual who has interfered with the government’s efforts to secure law and order.
The military raid on the extremist arsenal followed wide-spread refusal by the local citizenry to turn over recently outlawed assault weapons. Gage issued a ban on military-style assault weapons and ammunition earlier in the week. This decision followed a meeting in early April between government and military leaders at which the governor authorized the forcible confiscation of illegal arms. One government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, pointed out that “none of these people would have been killed had the extremists obeyed the law and turned their weapons over voluntarily.”
“Government troops initially succeeded in confiscating a large supply of outlawed weapons and ammunition. However, troops attempting to seize arms and ammunition in Lexington met with resistance from heavily-armed extremists who had been tipped off regarding the government’s plans.
During a tense standoff in Lexington’s town park, National Guard Colonel Francis Smith, commander of the government operation, ordered the armed group to surrender and return to their homes. The impasse was broken by a single shot, which was reportedly fired by one of the right-wing extremists. Eight civilians were killed in the ensuing exchange.
Ironically, the local citizenry blamed government forces rather than the extremists for the civilian deaths. Before order could be restored, armed citizens from surrounding areas had descended upon the guard units. Colonel Smith, finding his forces overmatched by the armed mob, ordered a retreat.
Governor Gage has called upon citizens to support the state/national joint task force in its effort to restore law and order. The governor has also demanded the surrender of those responsible for planning and leading the attack against the government troops. Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock, who have been identified as “ringleaders” of the extremist faction, remain at large.
Colonial News Network (CNN) April 20, 1775
Time to re-adjust our education sytem.
Does anyone know where the reset button is?
Now, having said all that, I believe they are true patriots. I feel sometimes you have to look at it from the other perspective, if nothing else but to strengthen your position.
Apparently the idiots who wrote that didn’t realize that the Boston tea partiers kept a written account of what was damaged that night - down to a broken door knob or latch... and paid for it later, after their point had been made.
Tossing tea into a harbor is not causing fear. No blood was shed. No threats to kill the captain, or his wife or children were made. No women and children were targetted. No women and chidlren were used as human shields. It made no British citizens 'knees quake or quiver. No redcoat peed in his trousers at the sight of blood because there was none to see. Terrorists do not pay for broken doorknobs or ponder the ethics of property destruction.
The Boston tea party is a poor example of a terrorist act because it does not meet the criterion for terrorism.
The "educators" would have been better served to find an example of mob violence against loyalists- of which there was some- if their point is that you can find people who go outside ethical behavior into the realm of terror if you look hard enough. Instead we see people go outside ethical behavior to define terrorism so loosely that they can apply it to anyone, so that they can then make moral equivalency argument to students when apologizing for Palestinian terror, etc, which is where this is headed. It ends when the word "terrorism" ceases to have meaning.
I don't remember any violence or threat of violence, just the destruction of property. That property was intended to be sold and taxed so that funds were raised to support the military might of a nation and de-leverage from debts incurred due to a previous war.
Sabotage. An act or acts with intent to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the national defense of a country by willfully injuring or destroying, or attempting to injure or destroy, any national defense or war materiel, premises, or utilities, to include human and natural resources.
Perhaps the word they were looking for was saboteur?
Who writes trash like this?
Errors:
1) ‘at our nations biggest port’.
- We were not yet a nation. We were a British colony.
2) ‘believed to be a terrorist organization’
- Really? WHO did they kill? WHO did they terrorize. That’s right, nobody.
3)’a large quantity of merchandise’
- Really? It was TEA. ‘merchandise’ is far to vague a description.
4)’considered to be valuable to its owners’
- Well, duh. They had just sailed across an ocean with the product to sell it.
5) ‘and loathsome to the perpetrators’
- Oh right. That is why the owners spent all that time sailing the Tea across the ocean to the port of Boston. Perhaps they were going to force it down the throats of the Americans? Oh no. That’s right, it is because Americans like and drink Tea. They were protesting the Tea tax raising the price of the Tea, not the Tea itself.
The author probably did not even know what Tea was.
Well said. It was not terrorism. It wasn’t really even vandalism. I would call it a protest or at most civil disobedience-something I thought the Democrats revered.LOL
I’m sure the libs do. King George III was more in favor of liberty than Maobama is.
the placard read in part "the terrorist Thomas Paine..."
got a chuckle out of that
I wonder how this propaganda pravda treats the foundiung of the Republic of Texas?
Perhaps the criteria for terrorism was different then, than it is now?
Suppose if there were something similar to FR in Britain back then, how do you think they would view it?
Damn.. And all this time I thought it was a protest over a video.
Thanks for the info. I’m going to have to take anothert look at it. I have forgotten a lot of it.
Good reporting Lowbridge!
I especially liked the kicker in the last paragraph.
Please be careful about using the TRUE original source of articles. This is NOT the original source of the article and there is a completely different slant in the original!
Please refer to the original article in “The Blaze” linked here:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/was-the-boston-tea-party-terrorism-texas-schools-are-teaching-just-that-and-more/#
Here are some comments from the CBSHouston posting to show this disparity:
Ian Harac - “This strikes me as a good way to teach kids how propaganda can distort the truth, and how the same event can be perceived differently based on people’s pre-existing biases. Assuming it’s being taught as how the British might “spin” the events, this is a valuable thing for students to learn and understand.”
Why Ask - “It was, read the original article at The Blaze, this ‘terrorist story’ was not taught as history, it was used as a lesson about not taking biased news reporting at face value. The reporter here completely left that part of the Blaze article out so this sites version of the story is very misleading.”
...
“This article is very misleading because it leaves out any context about the lesson plan. This ‘News Story’ about terrorists was to be told to the students as if it were a current event and then the teacher was to ask them about their reactions to it. Only then were they to be told that it was really about the Boston Tea Party.
The point of the lesson was to teach critical thinking skills to students by showing how even normal biases in reporting effects how stories in the news are presented to them. They were supposed to come away thinking about how maybe not all reports by the media should simply be accepted at face value.
It is kind of ironic considering that thanks to lazy reporting [CBS] and some people accepting that bad reporting at face value it has now become a real life example of exactly what it was trying to teach our children about.”
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