US anti-statue campaign turns on Columbus landmark
NEW YORK’S mayor, Bill de Blasio, has said he may order the removal of the city’s landmark Christopher Columbus statue amid national soul-searching over the removal of Confederate-era monuments.
The statue, the centrepiece of the city’s Columbus Circle, was commissioned in 1892 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus landing in the Americas.
It has been suggested by local government officials in several US cities that monuments to Columbus should be taken down because of the explorer’s brutal treatment of indigenous communities.
The Columbus statue is one of scores of monuments under review as part of an effort to remove “symbols of hate”. But Sal Albanese, Mr de Blasio’s rival for the Democratic nomination for the New York mayoral election in November, warned removing the statue would be the start of a “slippery slope”.
Mr de Blasio is also being asked, by Jewish activists, to order the removal of a statue of Peter Stuyvesant, the antisemitic Dutch governor of New York.
“Peter Stuyvesant was an extreme racist who targeted Jews and other minorities including Catholics and tried to prohibit them from settling in New Amsterdam,” Nitsana Darshan-leitner, head of the Shurat Hadin-israel Law Center, told the New York Post.
The debate over Columbus and Stuyvesant comes at a time when several local authorities and protesters have removed monuments to Confederate-era generals. Donald Trump stepped into the argument last week , asking whether statues of Washington and Jefferson were next.