Excerpts: 

...At its deepest level, multiculturalism represents a denial of all Western 
claims to truth...Multiculturalism is based on a thoroughgoing repudiation of 
Western cultural superiority...

Yet it is not Columbus the man who is being indicted but what he represents: 
the first tentative step toward the European settlement of the Americas. 
Consequently, the debate over Columbus is a debate over whether Western 
civilization was a good idea and whether it should continue to shape the 
United States... 

It is no coincidence that it was Columbus who reached the Americas and not 
American Indians who arrived on the shores of Europe...

It is true that Columbus harbored strong prejudices about the peaceful 
islanders whom he misnamed "Indians"-he was prejudiced in their favor. For 
Columbus, they were "the handsomest men and the most beautiful women" he had 
ever encountered. He praised the generosity and lack of guile among the 
Tainos, contrasting their virtues with Spanish vices...

So why did European attitudes toward the Indian, initially so favorable, 
subsequently change?... Columbus and those who followed him came into sudden, 
unexpected, and gruesome contact with the customary practices of some other 
Indian tribes... (that) enjoyed fully justified reputations for brutality and 
inhumanity... Spaniards were not shocked to witness slavery, the subjection 
of women, or brutal treatment of war captives; these were familiar enough 
practices among the conquistadors. But they were appalled at the magnitude of 
cannibalism and human sacrifice...

Cannibalism was prevalent among the Aztecs, Guarani, Iroquois, Caribs, and 
several other tribes. Moreover, the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of South 
America performed elaborate rites of human sacrifice, in which thousands of 
captive Indians were ritually murdered, until their altars were drenched in 
blood, bones were strewn everywhere, and priests collapsed with exhaustion 
from stabbing their victims. The law of the Incas provided for punishment of 
parents and others who displayed grief during human sacrifices. When men of 
noble birth died, wives and concubines were often strangled and buried with 
them.

Multicultural textbooks, committed to a contemporary version of the noble 
savage portrait, cannot acknowledge historical facts that would embarrass the 
morality tale of white invaders despoiling the elysian harmony of the 
Americans...

The charge of genocide is largely sustained by figures showing the 
precipitous decline of the Indian population...Undoubtedly the Indians 
perished in great numbers. Yet although European enslavement of Indians and 
the Spanish forced labor system extracted a heavy toll in lives, the vast 
majority of Indian casualties occurred not as a result of hard labor or 
deliberate destruction but because of contagious diseases that the Europeans 
transmitted to the Indians. 

The spread of infection and unhealthy patterns of behavior was also 
reciprocal. From the Indians the Europeans contracted syphilis. The Indians 
also taught the white man about tobacco and cocaine, which would extract an 
incalculable human toll over the next several centuries. The Europeans, for 
their part, gave the Indians measles and smallpox. (Recent research has shown 
that tuberculosis predated the European arrival in the new world.) Since the 
Indians had not developed any resistance or immunity to these unfamiliar 
ailments, they perished in catastrophic numbers...

This was a tragedy of great magnitude, but the term "genocide" is both 
anachronistic and wrongly applied in that, with a few gruesome exceptions, 
the European transmission of disease was not deliberate. As William McNeill 
points out in Plagues and Peoples, Europeans themselves probably contracted 
the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century as a result of contagion from 
the Mongols of Central Asia-some twenty-five million (one third of the 
population) died, and the plague recurred on the continent for the next three 
hundred years. Multicultural advocates do not call this "genocide." 

The reason advocates of multiculturalism charge Columbus with genocide is 
that they need to explain how small groups of Europeans were able to defeat 
overwhelming numbers of Indians, capsize their mighty native empires, and 
seize their land...

...left-wing Mexican novelist and diplomat Carlos Fuentes argues that the 
Europeans prevailed over the Indians because their empirical approach to 
knowledge gave them enormous civilizational (advantage). By contrast, the 
Indians relied on a combination of direct perception, dreams, hallucination, 
and appeals to the spirits. Fuentes writes in The Buried Mirror, "The 
so-called discovery of America, whatever one might ideologically think about 
it, was a great triumph of scientific hypothesis over physical perception." 

The West even supplied the Americas with a doctrine of human rights that 
would (ironicaly) provide the basis for a sustained critique of Western 
colonialism...Long before Columbus, Indian tribes raided each other's land 
and preyed on the possessions and persons of more vulnerable groups. What 
distinguished Western colonialism was neither occupation nor brutality but a 
countervailing philosophy of rights that is unique in human history...

Shortly after the Spanish established their settlements in the Americas, the 
King of Spain in the mid-sixteenth century called a halt to expansion pending 
the resolution of a famous debate over the question of whether Spanish 
conquest violated the natural and moral law. Never before or since, writes 
historian Lewis Hanke, has a powerful emperor "ordered his conquests to cease 
until it was decided if they were just." The main reason for the King's 
action was the relentless work of exposing colonial abuses that was performed 
by a Spanish bishop, Bartolome de las Casas. A former slave owner, Las Casas 
underwent a crisis of conscience which convinced him that the new world 
should be peacefully Christianized, that Indians should not be exploited, and 
that those who were had every right to rebel. Las Casas wrote his Account of 
the Destruction of the Indies, he said, "so that if God determines to destroy 
Spain, it may be seen that it is because of the destruction that we have 
wrought in the Indies." 

... his basic position in favor of Indian rights was directly adopted by Pope 
Paul III, who proclaimed in his bull Sublimis Deus in 1537: 

Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by the Christians 
are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their 
property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; nor should 
they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen it shall be null and 
of no effect. Indians and other peoples should be converted to the faith of 
Jesus Christ by preaching the word of God and by
 the example of good and holy living.

Leading Jesuit theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez 
interpreted the Bible and the Catholic tradition to require that the natural 
rights of Indians be respected...

Multicultural activists rely on the sleight-of-hand in which "I cannot know" 
becomes "I cannot judge" which becomes "I know that we are all equal." A 
skeptical confession of ignorance mysteriously becomes a dogmatic assertion 
of cultural egalitarianism...

The object is not diversity but knowledge: students should learn ways to seek 
to distinguish truth from falsehood, beauty from vulgarity, right from wrong. 
Knowledge is both a matter of ascertaining fact and a developing of the tools 
to formulate "right opinion." To use Plato's famous image, we live our lives 
in a cave, mistaking shadows for reality, but it is the aspiration of an 
authentic multicultural education to help us move from opinion to knowledge, 
to climb out of the darkness into the illuminating light of the sun.