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The Story Of The Real Bowling Green Massacre

Nathan Tempey

Published Feb 6, 2017

Modified Feb 7, 2017

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Nathan Tempey

Published Feb 6, 2017

Modified Feb 7, 2017

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Presidential adviser and alternative facts manufacturer Kellyanne Conway appeared on Fox News's Media Buzz on Sunday to lash out at the journalists who wrote about her making up a "Bowling Green massacre" to justify her boss's ban on immigrant travel from seven Muslim-majority countries. On Friday, Conway claimed that in the MSNBC Hardball interview where she mentioned the nonexistent massacre she was referring to two Iraqi citizens arrested in 2011 in Bowling Green, Kentucky for supporting insurgents in their home country, and had meant to say "Bowling Green terrorists," as opposed to "massacre."

"I misspoke one word," she told Fox's Howard Kurtz on Sunday. She called critics "haters," and said, "I'm sure it will live on for a week," thereby ensuring that the issue would remain a subject of conversation going into a second week. Conway has not backed away from the related lie that former president Barack Obama issued a Trump-esque ban on immigration—his administration did slow its processing of applications as it reassessed immigration procedures in response to the Kentucky arrests, but never halted the flow of refugees and immigrants from Iraq entirely as Trump did briefly. Also, Cosmopolitan now reports that Conway not only mentioned the fictional massacre in a January 29th interview, four days before the MSNBC interview aired, but she expanded on the details of said massacre.

"He did, it’s a fact," she said of Obama's nonexistent immigrant travel ban, according to Cosmo. "Why did he do that? He did that for exactly the same reasons. He did that because two Iraqi nationals came to this country, joined ISIS, traveled back to the Middle East to get trained and refine their terrorism skills, and come back here, and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre of taking innocent soldiers' lives away."

Conway also referenced a "Bowling Green attack" in another January 29th interview, with TMZ.

Jihadist groups that were precursors to the Islamic State in Syria, now the Islamic State, did exist in Iraq in 2011, but leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not usher the group into its present form until 2014, when he declared the creation of an Islamic caliphate amid the chaos of the Syrian civil war. The two men who were successfully prosecuted were convicted of providing weapons, money, and bomb diagrams that they believed were bound to support the group Al Qaeda in Iraq.

To be clear, there was an actual Bowling Green massacre. It just took place in 1643, directed by the colonial government based around what is now Manhattan's Bowling Green. As Indian Country Media Network reports, William Kieft, governor of the Dutch colony then known as New Netherland, of which New Amsterdam (what is now the Financial District) was the capital, ordered European soldiers to attack two camps of refugee Lenape Native Americans. The refugees had fled raiding Mahicans and were living first among the Dutch colonists in Fort Amsterdam, at the southern tip of Manhattan, then among members of the Hackinsack tribe on the west side of the Hudson River, and in huts in what is now the Lower East Side.

The order to massacre the natives was meant as collective punishment for recent altercations between natives and colonists, and went against the direction of the province's ruling council. From the Network:

"Infants were torn from their mother’s breast and hacked to death in the presence of their parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water,” wrote a Dutch witness to the massacre, David Pietersz de Vries. "Other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown."

Here is a bit more of a description of the massacre:

The soldiers killed 80 in the encampment on the west side of the Hudson, and another 30 at the camp near what is now the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge. The savage Europeans brought back the severed heads of some of their victims as trophies, and the mother of Cornelius Van Tienhoven, secretary of the province, reportedly celebrated by kicking the heads around like soccer balls.

This was done with the tacit support of the Dutch Reformed Church, a leader of which called indigenous people in New Netherland "entirely savage," "devilish," and "stupid as garden poles," and much of the subsequent genocide of indigenous people across the continent was done with the explicit blessing of leaders of the Catholic Church and other Christian authorities, who also viewed non-Christians as inhuman. It seems that perhaps the call for a total and complete shutdown of a religious group entering the United States came 500 years too late.

Updated to make clearer that the bulk of the European colonists in the Dutch province of New Netherland were not Catholic.

Tagged

bowling green

bowling green massacre

dutch

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kellyanne conway

muslim ban

native american genocide

native americans

new amsterdam

pavonia massacre

refugees

Nathan Tempey

Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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