TROUBLE SPEAK

Colorado legislature attacks 9-11 essay as 'evil'

Pressure building against professor who said U.S. victims not innocent

Posted: February 3, 2005; 1:00 a.m. Eastern; © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

The fate of a University of Colorado professor under fire for saying American victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were not innocent while praising the hijackers could be decided tonight at a meeting of the college's Board of Regents.

The state House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution yesterday blasting 3-year-old comments by professor Ward Churchill as "an evil and inflammatory blow against America's healing process."

The non-binding measure also says Churchill's essay "contains a number of statements and contentions that are deplorable and do not reflect the values of the people of the State of Colorado."

The lawmakers' action comes just one day after a call by Gov. Bill Owens for the ouster of Churchill.

"All decent people, whether Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, should denounce the views of Ward Churchill," wrote Owens. "Not only are his writings outrageous and insupportable, they are at odds with the facts of history."

As WorldNetDaily reported, the controversy stems from an essay Churchill wrote titled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," written shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. In it, he describes the thousands of American victims who died in the World Trade Center inferno as "little Eichmanns" (a reference to notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann) who were perpetuating America's "mighty engine of profit." They were destroyed, he added, thanks to the "gallant sacrifices" of "combat teams" that successfully targeted the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

"Let's get a grip here, shall we?" Churchill said in his essay. "True enough, [those in the World Trade Center] were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the 'mighty engine of profit' to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly."

On Monday, Churchill stepped down as chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department but remains a professor of ethnic studies and coordinator of American Indian studies at the Colorado school.

Some lawmakers yesterday urged the legislature to re-examine the amount of money set aside for the Ethnic Studies Department, saying while Churchill has a right to free speech, taxpayers need not subsidize his opinions.

"Maybe if his funding goes away, he will as well," Rep. Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, told the Denver Post.

Earlier this week, Churchill issued a statement calling media coverage of the issue "grossly inaccurate."

"I am not a 'defender' of the Sept. 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned," his statement said.

Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y., near Syracuse tonight, but Tuesday officials at the school canceled the appearance, citing security concerns and death threats they had received.

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TROUBLE SPEAK

Ward Churchill's statement

Read what controversial professor says about 9-11 uproar

Posted: February 3, 2005; 1:00 a.m. Eastern

The following is a statement issued Jan. 31 by University of Colorado Prof. Ward Churchill, responding to controversy about comments regarding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.

· The piece circulating on the internet was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Most of the book is a detailed chronology of U.S. military interventions since 1776 and U.S. violations of international law since World War II. My point is that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.

· I am not a "defender"of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people "should" engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable."

· This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world. My feelings are reflected in Dr. King's April 1967 Riverside speech, where, when asked about the wave of urban rebellions in U.S. cities, he said, "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed . . . without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government."

· In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that "we" had decided it was "worth the cost." I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.

· Finally, I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as "Nazis." What I said was that the "technocrats of empire" working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns." Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.

· It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American "command and control infrastructure" in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a "legitimate" target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than "collateral damage." If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these "standards" when the are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.

· It should be emphasized that I applied the "little Eichmanns" characterization only to those described as "technicians." Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack. According to Pentagon logic, were simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's my point. It's no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.

· The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9-11-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the "Good Germans" of the 1930s and '40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else.

· These points are clearly stated and documented in my book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which recently won Honorary Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award. for best writing on human rights. Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today's world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42699

TROUBLE SPEAK

Is prof under fire really an Indian?

Churchill kicked out of AIM 12 years ago as 'treacherous,' 'masquerading' white man

University of Colorado Prof. Ward Churchill

Following what it described as a 25-year internal investigation of Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor now in the center of a storm of national controversy, the American Indian Movement kicked out the activist the group called "deceitful" and "treacherous" and who it condemned as a white man masquerading as an Indian.

Churchill, a tenured professor of ethnic studies and coordinator of American Indian studies at the Colorado school, came under fire in recent days for an essay he wrote following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which he condemned the 3,000 victims and praised the al-Qaida hijackers.

After years of activism within AIM, Churchill was a ringleader of a breakaway "self-styled radical" faction that associated with extremists such as Noam Chomsky and Winona LaDuke, according to AIM records.

"They use publications like Houghton-Mifflin, Random House Publishers, South End Press and Speak Out Speakers Bureau, who allow Ward Churchill and others to perpetuate their literary, academic and Indian fraud on the unknowing public," said a 1999 AIM report.

Churchill was first expelled from the International Indian Treaty Council Sept. 23, 1986. Seven years later, on Nov. 24, 1993, he was expelled from AIM. Later, on Nov. 3, 1999, AIM leaders officially called for educators to remove his books from their curricula and libraries.

But AIM didn't stop there. Even more relevant, perhaps, to the current controversy was this recommendation from the group: "We request that organizations such as the National Indian Education Association and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium create a watchdog-type agency to review what books are being published by these literary, academic, and Indian frauds so that their revisionist writings are not finding their way into our education curriculum. This problem is of epidemic proportions, and must be stopped."

"If only someone had listened to the Indian folks back then," wrote blogger Yael (Anne) Lieberman.

Tuesday, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens urged the university to fire Churchill. And the state House passed a non-binding resolution yesterday calling his comments "evil and inflammatory." A similar measure was awaiting action in the Senate.

The CU regents plan to discuss Churchill's future at a special meeting today.

Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y., near Syracuse today, but officials at the school canceled the appearance, citing security concerns and death threats they had received.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42700