Washington, May 4(ANI): Native Americans, or American Indians, have objected to the US' military code for the raid which killed Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Pakistan's Abbottabad city: "Geronimo."
Geronimo was a prominent Native American leader of the Chiricahua Apache who fought against Mexico and the US for their expansion into Apache tribal lands for several decades during the Apache Wars (1851-1900).
"There is little doubt [the] use of a leader like Geronimo to refer to bin Laden is ill-advised," the Washington Post quoted Keith Harper, a partner at the D.C. firm of Kilpatrick Townsend and Stockton and a member of the Cherokee Nation, as saying.
Harper had represented the plaintiff class of 500,000 individual American Indians in the landmark Indian trust funds lawsuit, which last year settled its claims against the US government for 3.4 billion dollars.
He was also the principal adviser and chair of the Native American Domestic Policy Committee for the Obama campaign.
"No one would find acceptable calling this arch-terrorist by code name Man-dela, Revere or Ben-Gurion. An extraordinary Native leader and American hero deserves no less," Harper said.
Tom Holm, a former Marine, a member of the Creek/Cherokee Nations and a retired professor of American Indian studies at the University of Arizona, said: "Robert E. Lee killed more Americans than Geronimo ever did, and Hitler would seem to be evil personified, but the code name for bin Laden is Geronimo?" (ANI)
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