I have a stepchild who attended UC Santa Cruz. She therefore received an education that was decidedly polemical. Consequently, to her and her boyfriend who also attended UCSC, there is simply no question that Israel is an evil intrusion on the natural rights of the Palestinian people and principally responsible for the turmoil in the Middle East, that global warming caused by human activity is beyond question, and that Fahrenheit 911 is a documentary worth seeing. To the best of my knowledge, she did not harbor such views before attending UCSC.
Some time ago she and I were engaged in discussion, and she repeated the canard that the United States distributed smallpox infested blankets to Indians on the Great Plains. Although I have long been a student of history, I had not heard that story and was frankly puzzled by it. Now, thanks to the controversy over Ward Churchill's 911 remarks and the articles about him that have been circulated on the Net, I know that he is the source of this despicable lie. I question whether this particular falsehood would have reached UCSC had it not borne the imprimatur of being the product of a professor at a major research university.
The moral here is that, when the academy ceases to be scholarly and instead becomes politicized in its staffing, structure, research, and course offerings, it ceases to produce scholars and instead produces ill-educated polemecists.
The smallpox infested blanket story gets around, and is to be found almost everywhere. It's very popular among the politically correct. Apparently the story goes back to the 19th century. It's the kind of thing that is difficult to disprove. (You can't prove a negative.) But even if it happened--which I doubt--it was not a common practice and it would have played a very small part in the diminishment of the Indian.
Indians were susceptible to various European disaeases, which often produced deadly epidemics among them. That was simply bad luck, not deliberate policy.
Human history all over the world is a history of migrations, invasions, and population displacements. Until modern times it was part of the normal course of events.
Should we blame the Chinese or the Arabs for the Black Death, which wiped out maybe half the European population in the 14th century? There really isn't much point. It's better to get on with it and deal with the situation, instead of whining.