Misidentification

For John, BLUF:  See the previous post.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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‘Jerk punks’ torched a statue of General Lee.  It honors a WWII veteran, not the Confederate leader.

From The Wash Post! by Reporter Antonia Noori Farzan, 21 February 2019

Here is the lede plus four:

Just outside downtown Dunn, N.C., a historic antebellum-style house honors Maj. Gen. William C. Lee, a hometown hero often described as the father of the U.S. Army’s airborne infantry.  The World War II veteran served as the first commanding general for the 101st Airborne Division, nicknamed the “Screaming Eagles,” and helped plan the Allied forces’ D-Day invasion of Normandy.

He’s a widely respected, if somewhat obscure, military figure — which is why, after anonymous vandals attempted to torch a statue of him last week, museum officials concluded it had been a case of mistaken identity.  They suspect that the perpetrators thought they were burning a memorial to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

“This is not a Civil War museum and this is not Robert E. Lee,” Mark Johnson, the curator for the Maj. Gen. William C. Lee Airborne Museum, told WNCN on Tuesday.  “This is General William C. Lee from United States Army Airborne from World War II.”

Dunn, a city of under 10,000 people, is located in the greater Raleigh-Durham area, where some of the most heated debates over removing Confederate memorials have taken place in recent years.  In August 2017, protesters in Durham, N.C., took matters into their own hands by toppling a bronze statue depicting a Confederate soldier that sat in front of the city’s old courthouse.  A year later, activists and students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used ropes to pull down the monument known as Silent Sam, which was originally erected in honor of UNC graduates who died fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

While the vandals who targeted the memorial to William C. Lee last week didn’t leave anything behind that would explain their motivation, Johnson told the Daily Record that he thought they were trying to make a similar statement about racism and slavery.

Ed Driscoll, the InstaPundit blogger Of this item qasked:

WAS IT OVER WHEN THE CONFEDERATES BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?

The clueless iconoclasts.  How can we follow them?  They would lead us off a cliff.  Which would be painful.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff