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Jolie Rouge
02-06-2005, 04:58 PM
Sun Feb 6, 2005


DENVER - A professor who likened World Trade Center victims to a notorious Nazi refused to apologize but said his treatise was a "gut response" to the terrorist attacks.


"I don't believe I owe an apology," Ward Churchill said Friday on CNN's "Paula Zahn Now" program — his first public comments since the University of Colorado began a review that could lead to his dismissal.

Meanwhile, Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and Eastern Washington University canceled plans for Churchill to speak on campus, citing public safety concerns. Stephen Jordan, president of Eastern Washington University, declined Friday to say whether specific threats had been made.

Churchill defended the essay in which he compared those killed in the Sept. 11 attack to "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who organized Nazi plans to exterminate European Jews. He said the victims were akin to U.S. military operations' collateral damage — or innocent civilians mistakenly killed by soldiers. "I don't know if the people of 9-11 specifically wanted to kill everybody that was killed," he told Zahn. "It was just worth it to them in order to do whatever it was they decided it was necessary to do that bystanders be killed. And that essentially is the same mentality, the same rubric."


In an interview published Saturday in the Rocky Mountain News, Churchill added, "This was a gut response opinion speech written in about four hours. It's not completely reasoned and thought through."


Churchill said his speech had been misinterpreted. "I never called for the deaths of millions of Americans," he said.

Early editions of the Sunday Denver Post reported Churchill gave another magazine interview in which he was asked about the effectiveness of protests of U.S. policies and the Iraq war, and responded: "One of the things I've suggested is that it may be that more 9/11s are necessary."

The interview prompted Gov. Bill Owens to renew his call for Churchill's firing. "It's amazing that the more we look at Ward Churchill, the more outrageous, treasonous statements we hear from Churchill," Owens said.


The furor over Churchill's essay erupted last month after he was invited to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. The speech was later canceled.
Churchill, who recently resigned as chairman of the ethnic studies department but remains a tenured professor, said he would sue if he were dismissed.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&e=1&u=/ap/speaker_protest

Jolie Rouge
02-06-2005, 05:10 PM
Rosen: The professor must go
February 4, 2005

Isn't it ironic that a man who trampled on the free speech rights of Italian-Americans marching in the Columbus Day parade, now hides behind the First Amendment to save his job at the University of Colorado?

Let's make one thing clear: this is not a First Amendment issue. As an American citizen, Ward Churchill can defame the memory of Americans murdered on 9/11 and spew his brand of mindless bile without fear of legal prosecution because the First Amendment prohibits Congress from making laws that abridge his freedom of speech. But this isn't a criminal matter; it's an employment issue, and his employer, CU-Boulder, should be free to fire him for his hateful, absurd and grossly insensitive utterances. Liberty is not license. Freedom of speech is not absolute.

On my radio show Monday, Churchill conceded that students and faculty should be held to the same standard regarding penalties for reprehensible expression. Students have been suspended or expelled for statements far less offensive than Churchill's. Where's their First Amendment protection?

Churchill has referred to those murdered on 9/11 by al-Qaida fanatics as "little Eichmanns," and has declared that those innocent civilians - among them women and children, and the firefighters and police who tried to save their lives - got what they deserved. Imagine the fate of a CU professor who said something like: "CU women deserve to be raped; they're little sluts"? The point is that, even when protected by tenure, the right of professors to speak their mind with impunity is not absolute. You remember how quickly CU president Betsy Hoffman suspended football coach Gary Barnett for remarks that turned out to be entirely defensible. (She later had to apologize for slandering him on national TV.) No one can say precisely where the line is but Churchill has crossed it and he deserves to be fired far more than the 9/11 victims deserved to die.

Almost as sickening as Churchill's hateful, anti-America tirades were some of the mealy-mouthed early responses of some CU regents, administrators and faculty members (News columnist and CU law professor Paul Campos excepted). Interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano said "I may personally find his views offensive," but then went on to misrepresent the First Amendment as a defense for Churchill. When he got nailed for that "may" qualifier and had a few days to see which way the wind was blowing, he belatedly summoned the courage to stiffen his tepid criticism.

Regent Patricia Hayes explained that the regents' meeting, scheduled for yesterday, was to be less about considering Churchill's termination and more "to show the community and the rest of the university that we are appalled." In other words, it would be public posturing to cover their backsides. I'm not impressed that they're "appalled," that goes without saying. As I write this, I'm hoping some regents show a stiffer backbone and take action. If Churchill isn't fired for cause, and pronto, CU officials might find Coloradans and their elected representatives unreceptive to their pleas for more taxpayer money from the legislature this year.

Churchill has equated America with Nazi Germany. He also reiterated that statement on my radio show Monday. In an interview with a left-wing organization, Satya, Churchill - pictured in combat fatigues, a Che-style beret, dark glasses and cradling an assault weapon - declared that more 9/11s may be necessary, and that he wants the "U.S. out of North America, off the planet, out of existence altogether."

As an Indian activist, he's so blinded by his hatred for America and the white man that he can't think straight, much less objectively. He doesn't just have a chip on his shoulder; he has a giant redwood. And this was the chairman of CU's Ethnic Studies Department?

Ironically, Churchill has turned his self-indulgent obsession into a profitable career. If CU is pressed for cash, it should not only terminate Churchill, it should eliminate this department and this major. There's nothing in it that can't be adequately covered in history, sociology, anthropology and other legitimate disciplines. What do you do with an ethnic studies major, anyway, other than repeat the cycle and teach ethnic studies, fomenting anger and resentment within the next generation of college students? It's a breeding ground for divisiveness, separatism and irredentist fantasies to settle past scores.

Don't waste any tears on Churchill. If CU fires him, he won't be unemployed long. He'll likely become a celebrity and martyr in leftist academe, and be snatched up by some other depraved university. That's OK. At least he won't be peddling his hatred at the expense of Colorado taxpayers.

www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_3521446,00.html

Jolie Rouge
02-06-2005, 05:14 PM
He's Fought for His Views, Now His Job
Sat Feb 5, 2005
By David Kelly Times Staff Writer

BOULDER, Colo. — Ward L. Churchill has been angry for years, shaking a clenched fist at American power from the streets of Denver and the lecterns of academia. He has compared his country to Nazi Germany and urged the hanging of "war criminals" like Henry Kissinger, President Clinton and Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State whom he called "that malignant toad."

Most of all, he has been a firm believer in karma: What America sows, it shall surely reap. "Payback," he said. "Can be a real mother."

For years, the radical views of the gray-haired professor in the dark glasses were heard mostly by his students at the University of Colorado at Boulder and his fellow travelers on the far left. That all changed two weeks ago, when a paper surfaced that Churchill had written comparing victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to Nazis.

Now he's fighting for his academic life. Churchill has resigned as chairman of the ethnic studies department, but remains a professor. The university board of regents is investigating whether he should be fired, the governor wants him dismissed, the state Legislature has condemned him. And Indian groups are calling him a fraud, saying he's not a Native American, as he has said.

The controversy flared when Churchill, 57, was invited to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., on Native American prison issues. Before the lecture, a paper he wrote after the Sept. 11 attacks, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," was unearthed by Hamilton academics.


In it, Churchill argued that America deserved what happened Sept. 11 and had gotten off "very, very cheap." Using occasionally crude language, he ridiculed Americans in general and spoke in admiring terms of the Al Qaeda hijackers. If anything, he wrote, the "combat teams" were too patient and restrained in their attacks.

Churchill called the Pentagon a legitimate target and said: "As for the World Trade Center…. Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? … True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break."

The guilt of those who died at ground zero, he wrote, was having toiled in the "very heart of America's global financial empire." For that, Churchill called them "little Eichmanns," after Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann.

Hamilton College canceled the speech. On Thursday, University of Colorado regents publicly apologized to all Americans for Churchill's comments, while the state Senate passed a resolution denouncing the statements as "evil and inflammatory."

Controversy isn't new to Churchill. The longtime activist's writings include "Life in Occupied America," "Acts of Rebellion," "In a Pig's Eye: Reflections on the Police State, Repression and Native Americans" and "Fantasies of the Master Race."

Churchill did not respond to numerous requests for comment. But in a CNN interview Friday, he said he "probably could have been clearer" in his writing, but his goal had been to provoke the public. The point, he said, was to make Americans realize they were not immune to the suffering their government inflicted on others. As for the "little Eichmanns" comment, he said it didn't apply to janitors, food service workers and children killed in the attacks. "I don't believe I owe an apology to anyone," he said.


Born near Peoria, Ill., Churchill has a master's degree in communications and is a U.S. Army veteran.

He has led numerous protests on behalf of Native Americans. Two weeks ago, Churchill and seven others were acquitted in the blocking of last year's Columbus Day Parade in Denver, which they said honored genocide. "Ward is an extremely intelligent man, an advocate of nonviolence," said David Lane, a civil rights attorney representing Churchill. "He is very concerned about the underdog, both nationally and internationally. In this case, all he was doing was calling for an analysis on why 9/11 happened. When you are commenting on matters of public opinion, you can say whatever you want. He is blunt, direct and to the point — and that puts a lot of people off."

But others see him differently, including some Native Americans angry over his claims to be one of them. At the top of his resume, Churchill lists his enrollment in the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. Yet the chief of the Oklahoma tribe, George Wickliffe, said they "had no association with Churchill in any capacity whatsoever."

Churchill says he is three-sixteenths Cherokee.

Suzan Shown Harjo — president of the Morning Star Institute, a Native American rights group in Washington, D.C. — has Census data showing Churchill as born to parents listed as white. She said he had not shown up on the rolls of the tribes he said he belonged to. "This is not a Native person. He goes around college campuses, saying he was at the occupation of Alcatraz, Wounded Knee and at the Bureau of Indian Affairs takeover in 1972. But no one can remember him being there," she said. "I was at the BIA takeover as a reporter, and I never saw him."

David Bradley, a well-known Indian artist in Santa Fe, earned Churchill's wrath by championing federal legislation that required those selling their work as Indian art to be able to prove their tribal ties. "In the 1980s, money was flying like confetti around here. You had dozens of people pretending they were Indian and selling their art," Bradley said. "We had everything stolen from us for 500 years, and I wasn't going to let them take our art as well."

Churchill, who is also a painter, took issue with the effort. "He wrote this slanderous attack about me. He tried to impugn my motives," Bradley said. "He ought to be fired. Shame on CU [University of Colorado] for giving this con man a job."

Bradley believes Churchill opposed the law because it affected his ability to sell his paintings.

Churchill attacked the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts legislation, saying it gave rise to "witch hunts" among tribes looking for phony Indians and put undue importance on racial purity.

The American Indian Movement, based in Minnesota, has called for his dismissal from the university, saying he "fraudulently represented himself as an Indian" to build his career.

But firing a tenured professor isn't easy, and University of Colorado officials worry about stifling free speech.

For the next month, Interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano will review Churchill's writings and recordings to see if there is evidence that could end in dismissal. Insubordination, incompetence and inciting violence are offenses that can lead to firing. "One argument that could be made is that his writings and speeches have degenerated to a point where they are representative of professional incompetence," said Paul Campos, a law professor at the university and a columnist for the Rocky Mountain News. "In the same way, a college would not tolerate a member of the history department who said the Holocaust didn't happen."

Campos said even professors should have limits. "A position that says you cannot fire a tenured professor because of anything he says is untenable — politically, morally and ethically," he said. "And I have had people in positions of power tell me that if this guy can't be fired, they can't support the notion of tenure."

Among Churchill's staunchest defenders are his students.

Thursday, dozens of them protested at the board of regents meeting, eventually shutting it down with their shouting. "I agree with the spirit of his paper," said Shawn Baily, a former Churchill student. "If I wrote it, I wouldn't have put it that way. If they fire him, I will withdraw from the University of Colorado."

Even some who didn't agree with his Sept. 11 comments enjoyed his class, saying he welcomed dissent and argument. "He's an amazing professor — the one I will always remember," said Darrell DeFabry, 21. "I was challenged on so many levels. How often can you say that?"


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=3&u=/latimests/20050205/ts_latimes/hesfoughtforhisviewsnowhisjob

Jolie Rouge
02-09-2005, 10:36 PM
Professor sticks with comparison of Nazis, 9/11 victims
Wednesday, February 9,

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2005/EDUCATION/02/09/colorado.prof.ap/vert.colorado.ap.jpg

Professor Ward Churchill is the author of a paper that compared 9/11 victims to a Nazi who planned for Jewish extermination.

BOULDER, Colorado (AP) -- A University of Colorado professor who likened September 11 victims to Nazis got a standing ovation when he told a campus audience of more than 1,000 people that "I'm not backing up an inch."

Ward Churchill, who had filed a lawsuit after the state university threatened to cancel his address, was interrupted several times by thunderous applause.

Churchill has resigned as chairman of the university's ethnic studies department. Gov. Bill Owens has called for Churchill to be fired, and the university's Board of Regents is investigating whether the tenured professor can be removed. "I don't answer to Bill Owens. I do not answer to the Board of Regents in the way they think I do. The regents should do their job and let me do mine," Churchill said to thunderous clapping. "I'm not backing up an inch. I owe no one an apology."

In an essay, Churchill wrote that workers in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who ensured the smooth running of the Nazi system. Churchill also spoke of the "gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that struck America.

The ethnic studies professor said Tuesday his essay was referring to "technocrats" who participate in what he calls repressive American policies around the world. A longtime American Indian Movement activist, he said he is also culpable because his efforts to change the system haven't succeeded. "I could do more. I'm complicit. I'm not innocent," he said.

The Boulder Faculty Assembly, which represents professors at the Boulder campus, has said Churchill's comments were "controversial, offensive and odious" but supports his right to say them based on the principle of academic freedom.

During his 35-minute speech, Churchill said the essay was not referring to children, firefighters, janitors or people passing by the World Trade Center who were killed during the attacks.

The essay and follow-up book attracted little attention until Churchill was invited to speak last month at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, which later canceled his talk out of security concerns.

University of Colorado officials cited those same concerns but backed off after Churchill filed a lawsuit earlier Tuesday asking a judge to force the school to let him speak.

The crowd Tuesday night was loud and orderly as Churchill spoke: "I do not work for the taxpayers of the state of Colorado. I do not work for Bill Owens. I work for you," he said.

About two dozen police officers were scattered inside and around the ballroom where the speech was given. Most of those attending supported Churchill. "I've read some of Ward's work," said 26-year-old Vinita Laroia, an environmental studies major. "I think what he has to say is true and interesting. I wanted to hear his actual voice say what he's thinking."

The ACLU issued a statement defending Churchill's right to speak out and called on regents, legislators and the governor "to stop threatening Mr. Churchill's job because of the content of his opinions."

David Horowitz, a champion of conservative causes who has long accused American universities of overstocking their faculties with leftists, has said firing Churchill would violate his First Amendment rights and set a bad precedent. He called instead for an inquiry into the university's hiring and promotion procedures to see how Churchill managed to rise to the chairmanship of the school's ethnic studies department.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/02/09/colorado.prof.ap/index.html

Jolie Rouge
02-09-2005, 10:42 PM
Ward Churchill's Essay and Statement: Updated...Feb 9

http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read.html?id=2739

Feb 1- (Political Gateway)- Below you will find Ward Churchill's statement regarding the new media highlight of his 2001 essay. The statement is followed by his essay from 2001 with his own notes at the end.

[b]]Update: Colorado Gov. Bill Owens has sent a letter regarding Ward Churchill. That text is first, followed by Ward's Response to the original attacks, followed by his original essay. Feb 1st

Update Again: Remarks By Chancellor Phil DiStefano At The Colorado University Board Of Regents Special Meeting Feb 3rd.

Update Feb 9: Bill O'Reilly on Fox News has stated his argument that Ward Churchill should be tried for treason or sedition. He states Churchill wants the government to be overthrown and is helping with his hate speech. His guest, an expert in such matters said Churchill is not guilty of either.


Remarks By Chancellor Phil DiStefano At The CU Board Of Regents Special Meeting
Feb. 3, 2005

In the past week, the University of Colorado has been at the center of a fierce debate that has raised a fundamental question: what are the boundaries of free expression, academic freedom and tenure protections?

This question is especially salient in the face of the most offensive - the most appalling -- political expression, such as many of Professor Ward Churchill's comments in his essay regarding the events of September 11.

As I have said, I personally find the statements in Professor Churchill's essay to be repugnant and hurtful to everyone touched by that tragedy. And I know that many of you share those feelings.

Beyond our visceral reactions to statements within the essay, we all have spent hours responding to parents, students, alumni, news media, and citizens throughout Colorado and across the country.

The debate has fostered passionate calls for the immediate termination of Professor Churchill's employment based on his essay. We also have heard fervent pleas to uphold the tenets of the Constitution regarding free expression and due process, and the Laws of the Regents regarding academic freedom and tenure.

Even as the debate continues, we must understand the serious nature of actions to terminate or suspend a professor on the basis of conduct that includes political speech.

Before such a decision could be made, the University must observe due process as required by the U.S. Constitution and the Laws of the Regents. We must have faith in our processes to guide our actions in the most thoughtful and equitable manner.

Therefore, today I announce a course of action that will provide due process, as well as help us understand the boundaries of our most fundamental protections as citizens and faculty members.

Within the next 30 days, the Office of the Chancellor will launch and oversee a thorough examination of Professor Churchill's writings, speeches, tape recordings and other works.

The purpose of this internal review is to determine whether Professor Churchill may have overstepped his bounds as a faculty member, showing cause for dismissal as outlined in the Laws of the Regents.

Two primary questions will be examined in this review: (1) Does Professor Churchill's conduct, including his speech, provide any grounds for dismissal for cause, as described in the Regents' Laws? And (2) if so, is this conduct or speech protected by the First Amendment against University action?

As Chancellor, I will personally conduct this review and will ask two distinguished deans, Arts and Sciences Dean Todd Gleeson and Law Dean David Getches, to assist me with this process.

In this review, I will also draw upon additional resources, including University Counsel to provide legal advice as needed.

At the conclusion of this examination, I will determine whether to issue a notice of intent to dismiss for cause, other action as appropriate, or no action.

If a notice to dismiss for cause or some other action were to be issued, the subsequent process will be governed by the Laws of the Regents.

At this time, I ask for your support of this course of action to address the important questions before us - in a manner that ensures due process and thoughtful examination. Indeed, the principles at stake deserve nothing less than our most careful deliberation. Thank you.

Jolie Rouge
02-09-2005, 10:46 PM
Text of Owens' letter on Churchill

Here is the text of Gov. Bill Owens' letter Tuesday on the subject of the controversy surrounding University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill. The letter was sent to the College Republicans at the University of Colorado and its president, Isaiah Lechowit.

=========

February 1, 2005

Dear Friends:

We have come to a teaching moment at the University of Colorado. I applaud every person on the University of Colorado campus who has come to speak out against the indecent, insensitive and inappropriate comments and writings of Ward Churchill.

All decent people, whether Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, should denounce the views of Ward Churchill. Not only are his writings outrageous and insupportable, they are at odds with the facts of history. The thousands of innocent people - and innocent they were - who were murdered on September 11 were murdered by evil cowards. Indeed, if anyone could possibly be compared to the evildoers of Nazi Germany, it is the terrorists of the 21st century who have an equally repugnant disregard for innocent human life.

No one wants to infringe on Mr. Churchill's right to express himself. But we are not compelled to accept his pro-terrorist views at state taxpayer subsidy nor under the banner of the University of Colorado. Ward Churchill besmirches the University and the excellent teaching, writing and research of its faculty.
Ideas have consequences, and words have meaning. If there is one lesson that we hope that all Coloradans take from this sad case - and especially our students - it is that civility and appropriate conduct are important. Mr. Churchill's views are not simply anti-American. They are at odds with simple decency, and antagonistic to the beliefs and conduct of civilized people around the world. His views are far outside the mainstream of civil discourse and useful academic work.

His resignation as chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department was a good first step. We hope that he will follow this step by resigning his position on the faculty of the University of Colorado.

Sincerely,
Bill Owens



Churchill's statement
January 31, 2005

The following is a statement from Ward Churchill:

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 9-1-1-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.

Ward Churchill
Boulder, Colorado
January 31, 2005

Jolie Rouge
02-09-2005, 10:49 PM
"Some People Push Back" On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
written by Ward Churchill 9-11-2001

When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously – and quite charitably, all things considered – replied that it was merely a case of "chickens coming home to roost."

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable – in fact, widely predicted – result of the 1991 US "surgical" bombing of their country's water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other "infrastructural" targets upon which Iraq's civilian population depends for its very survival.

If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough – and it should be noted that this sort of "aerial warfare" constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of "civilized" behavior – the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims' ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the lives of even their toddlers.

All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered – are still suffering – a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.

The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41st "freedom-loving" father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43rd: "The world must learn that what we say, goes," intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere.

How Old George conveyed his message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.

In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 "towel-heads" and "camel jockeys" – or was it "sand ******s" that week? – in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance.

It was a performance worthy of the nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany's "innocent civilians" until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.

There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed – nay, empowered – their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.

If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans. And the price exacted from the Germans for the faultiness of their moral fiber was truly ghastly.

Returning now to the children, and to the effects of the post-Gulf War embargo – continued bull force by Bush the Elder's successors in the Clinton administration as a gesture of its "resolve" to finalize what George himself had dubbed the "New World Order" of American military/economic domination – it should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests against US policy.

One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halladay, repeatedly denounced what was happening as "a systematic program . . . of deliberate genocide." His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was "unaware" of them.

Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halladay's assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his "allegations," she calmly announced that she'd decided it was "worth the price" to see that U.S. objectives were achieved.

Jolie Rouge
02-09-2005, 10:52 PM
The Politics of a Perpetrator Population

As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns..

There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting "Jeremy" and "Ellington" to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little "Tiffany" an "Ashley" had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays – for "our kids," no less – as an all-absorbing point of political focus.

In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing "moral witness" as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable.

Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the "resistance" expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as "a principle of moral virtue" that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of "challenging" the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these "dissidents," in fact, that they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage against suffering such retaliatory "violence" as having their windows broken by persons less "enlightened" – or perhaps more outraged – than the self-anointed "peacekeepers."

Property before people, it seems – or at least the equation of property to people – is a value by no means restricted to America's boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or any of the swarm of comfort zone "pacifists" queuing up to condemn the black block after it ever so slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.

Small wonder, all-in-all, that people elsewhere in the world – the Mideast, for instance – began to wonder where, exactly, aside from the streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America's purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.

The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of delusions engendered by sheer vanity and self-absorption.

So, too, were the implications in terms of anything changing, out there, in America's free-fire zones.

Tellingly, it was at precisely this point – with the genocide in Iraq officially admitted and a public response demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans, including most of those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it – that the combat teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on September 11 began to infiltrate the United States.

Meet the "Terrorists"

Of the men who came, there are a few things demanding to be said in the face of the unending torrent of disinformational drivel unleashed by George Junior and the corporate "news" media immediately following their successful operation on September 11.

They did not, for starters, "initiate" a war with the US, much less commit "the first acts of war of the new millennium."

A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less continuously by the "Christian West" – now proudly emblematized by the United States – against the "Islamic East" since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago. More recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel's dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered "Desert Shield" in 1990, or at any of several points in between. Any way you slice it, however, if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war – and they can – then the same is true of every US "overflight' of Iraqi territory since day one. The first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course. That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint.

They did not license themselves to "target innocent civilians."

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . . Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they 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. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not "cowards."

That distinction properly belongs to the "firm-jawed lads" who delighted in flying stealth aircraft through the undefended airspace of Baghdad, dropping payload after payload of bombs on anyone unfortunate enough to be below – including tens of thousands of genuinely innocent civilians – while themselves incurring all the risk one might expect during a visit to the local video arcade. Still more, the word describes all those "fighting men and women" who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the Persian Gulf, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods filled with random human beings. Whatever else can be said of them, the men who struck on September 11 manifested the courage of their convictions, willingly expending their own lives in attaining their objectives.

Nor were they "fanatics" devoted to "Islamic fundamentalism."

One might rightly describe their actions as "desperate." Feelings of desperation, however, are a perfectly reasonable – one is tempted to say "normal" – emotional response among persons confronted by the mass murder of their children, particularly when it appears that nobody else really gives a damn (ask a Jewish survivor about this one, or, even more poignantly, for all the attention paid them, a Gypsy). That desperate circumstances generate desperate responses is no mysterious or irrational principle, of the sort motivating fanatics. Less is it one peculiar to Islam. Indeed, even the FBI's investigative reports on the combat teams' activities during the months leading up to September 11 make it clear that the members were not fundamentalist Muslims. Rather, it's pretty obvious at this point that they were secular activists – soldiers, really – who, while undoubtedly enjoying cordial relations with the clerics of their countries, were motivated far more by the grisly realities of the U.S. war against them than by a set of religious beliefs.

Jolie Rouge
02-09-2005, 10:54 PM
And still less were they/their acts "insane."

Insanity is a condition readily associable with the very American idea that one – or one's country – holds what amounts to a "divine right" to commit genocide, and thus to forever do so with impunity. The term might also be reasonably applied to anyone suffering genocide without attempting in some material way to bring the process to a halt. Sanity itself, in this frame of reference, might be defined by a willingness to try and destroy the perpetrators and/or the sources of their ability to commit their crimes. (Shall we now discuss the US "strategic bombing campaign" against Germany during World War II, and the mental health of those involved in it?)

Which takes us to official characterizations of the combat teams as an embodiment of "evil."

Evil – for those inclined to embrace the banality of such a concept – was perfectly incarnated in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba the Hutt, blandly spewing the news that she'd imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of Iraq. Evil was to be heard in that great American hero "Stormin' Norman" Schwartzkopf's utterly dehumanizing dismissal of their systematic torture and annihilation as mere "collateral damage." Evil, moreover, is a term appropriate to describing the mentality of a public that finds such perspectives and the policies attending them acceptable, or even momentarily tolerable.

Had it not been for these evils, the counterattacks of September 11 would never have occurred. And unless "the world is rid of such evil," to lift a line from George Junior, September 11 may well end up looking like a lark. There is no reason, after all, to believe that the teams deployed in the assaults on the WTC and the Pentagon were the only such, that the others are composed of "Arabic-looking individuals" – America's indiscriminately lethal arrogance and psychotic sense of self-entitlement have long since given the great majority of the world's peoples ample cause to be at war with it – or that they are in any way dependent upon the seizure of civilian airliners to complete their missions.

To the contrary, there is every reason to expect that there are many other teams in place, tasked to employ altogether different tactics in executing operational plans at least as well-crafted as those evident on September 11, and very well equipped for their jobs. This is to say that, since the assaults on the WTC and Pentagon were act of war – not "terrorist incidents" – they must be understood as components in a much broader strategy designed to achieve specific results. From this, it can only be adduced that there are plenty of other components ready to go, and that they will be used, should this become necessary in the eyes of the strategists. It also seems a safe bet that each component is calibrated to inflict damage at a level incrementally higher than the one before (during the 1960s, the Johnson administration employed a similar policy against Vietnam, referred to as "escalation").

Since implementation of the overall plan began with the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it takes no rocket scientist to decipher what is likely to happen next, should the U.S. attempt a response of the inexcusable variety to which it has long entitled itself.

About Those Boys (and Girls) in the Bureau

There's another matter begging for comment at this point. The idea that the FBI's "counterterrorism task forces" can do a thing to prevent what will happen is yet another dimension of America's delusional pathology.. The fact is that, for all its publicly-financed "image-building" exercises, the Bureau has never shown the least aptitude for anything of the sort.

Oh, yeah, FBI counterintelligence personnel have proven quite adept at framing anarchists, communists and Black Panthers, sometimes murdering them in their beds or the electric chair. The Bureau's SWAT units have displayed their ability to combat child abuse in Waco by burning babies alive, and its vaunted Crime Lab has been shown to pad its "crime-fighting' statistics by fabricating evidence against many an alleged car thief. But actual "heavy-duty bad guys" of the sort at issue now?

This isn't a Bruce Willis/Chuck Norris/Sly Stallone movie, after all.. And J. Edgar Hoover doesn't get to approve either the script or the casting.

The number of spies, saboteurs and bona fide terrorists apprehended, or even detected by the FBI in the course of its long and slimy history could be counted on one's fingers and toes. On occasion, its agents have even turned out to be the spies, and, in many instances, the terrorists as well.

To be fair once again, if the Bureau functions as at best a carnival of clowns where its "domestic security responsibilities" are concerned, this is because – regardless of official hype – it has none. It is now, as it's always been, the national political police force, and instrument created and perfected to ensure that all Americans, not just the consenting mass, are "free" to do exactly as they're told.

The FBI and "cooperating agencies" can be thus relied upon to set about "protecting freedom" by destroying whatever rights and liberties were left to U.S. citizens before September 11 (in fact, they've already received authorization to begin). Sheeplike, the great majority of Americans can also be counted upon to bleat their approval, at least in the short run, believing as they always do that the nasty implications of what they're doing will pertain only to others.

Jolie Rouge
02-09-2005, 10:57 PM
Oh Yeah, and "The Company," Too

A possibly even sicker joke is the notion, suddenly in vogue, that the CIA will be able to pinpoint "terrorist threats," "rooting out their infrastructure" where it exists and/or "terminating" it before it can materialize, if only it's allowed to beef up its "human intelligence gathering capacity" in an unrestrained manner (including full-bore operations inside the US, of course).

Yeah. Right.

Since America has a collective attention-span of about 15 minutes, a little refresher seems in order: "The Company" had something like a quarter-million people serving as "intelligence assets" by feeding it information in Vietnam in 1968, and it couldn't even predict the Tet Offensive. God knows how many spies it was fielding against the USSR at the height of Ronald Reagan's version of the Cold War, and it was still caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As to destroying "terrorist infrastructures," one would do well to remember Operation Phoenix, another product of its open season in Vietnam. In that one, the CIA enlisted elite US units like the Navy Seals and Army Special Forces, as well as those of friendly countries – the south Vietnamese Rangers, for example, and Australian SAS – to run around "neutralizing" folks targeted by The Company's legion of snitches as "guerrillas" (as those now known as "terrorists" were then called).

Sound familiar?

Upwards of 40,000 people – mostly bystanders, as it turns out – were murdered by Phoenix hit teams before the guerrillas, stronger than ever, ran the US and its collaborators out of their country altogether.

And these are the guys who are gonna save the day, if unleashed to do their thing in North America?

The net impact of all this "counterterrorism" activity upon the combat teams' ability to do what they came to do, of course, will be nil. Instead, it's likely to make it easier for them to operate (it's worked that way in places like Northern Ireland). And, since denying Americans the luxury of reaping the benefits of genocide in comfort was self-evidently a key objective of the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it can be stated unequivocally that a more overt display of the police state mentality already pervading this country simply confirms the magnitude of their victory.

On Matters of Proportion and Intent

As things stand, including the 1993 detonation at the WTC, "Arab terrorists" have responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq with a total of four assaults by explosives inside the US. That's about 1% of the 50,000 bombs the Pentagon announced were rained on Baghdad alone during the Gulf War (add in Oklahoma City and you'll get something nearer an actual 1%). They've managed in the process to kill about 5,000 Americans, or roughly 1% of the dead Iraqi children (the percentage is far smaller if you factor in the killing of adult Iraqi civilians, not to mention troops butchered as/after they'd surrendered and/or after the "war-ending" ceasefire had been announced).

In terms undoubtedly more meaningful to the property/profit-minded American mainstream, they've knocked down a half-dozen buildings – albeit some very well-chosen ones – as opposed to the "strategic devastation" visited upon the whole of Iraq, and punched a $100 billion hole in the earnings outlook of major corporate shareholders, as opposed to the U.S. obliteration of Iraq's entire economy.

With that, they've given Americans a tiny dose of their own medicine..

This might be seen as merely a matter of "vengeance" or "retribution," and, unquestionably, America has earned it, even if it were to add up only to something so ultimately petty.

The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of "getting even," a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the "terrorists" to "break even" for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that's to achieve "real number" parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage – the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory – they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.

Were this the intent of those who've entered the US to wage war against it, it would remain no less true that America and Americans were only receiving the bill for what they'd already done.

Payback, as they say, can be a real m*********** (ask the Germans).

There is, however, no reason to believe that retributive parity is necessarily an item on the agenda of those who planned the WTC/Pentagon operation. If it were, given the virtual certainty that they possessed the capacity to have inflicted far more damage than they did, there would be a lot more American bodies lying about right now.

Hence, it can be concluded that ravings carried by the "news" media since September 11 have contained at least one grain of truth: The peoples of the Mideast "aren't like" Americans, not least because they don't "value life' in the same way. By this, it should be understood that Middle-Easterners, unlike Americans, have no history of exterminating others purely for profit, or on the basis of racial animus. Thus, we can appreciate the fact that they value life – all lives, not just their own – far more highly than do their U.S. counterparts.

Jolie Rouge
02-09-2005, 10:59 PM
The Makings of a Humanitarian Strategy

In sum one can discern a certain optimism – it might even be call humanitarianism – imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.

Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name – indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it – mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

Now they do.

That was the "medicinal" aspect of the attacks.

To all appearances, the idea is now to give the tonic a little time to take effect, jolting Americans into the realization that the sort of pain they're now experiencing first-hand is no different from – or the least bit more excruciating than – that which they've been so cavalier in causing others, and thus to respond appropriately.

More bluntly, the hope was – and maybe still is – that Americans, stripped of their presumed immunity from incurring any real consequences for their behavior, would comprehend and act upon a formulation as uncomplicated as "stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe."

Either way, it's a kind of "reality therapy" approach, designed to afford the American people a chance to finally "do the right thing" on their own, without further coaxing.

Were the opportunity acted upon in some reasonably good faith fashion – a sufficiently large number of Americans rising up and doing whatever is necessary to force an immediate lifting of the sanctions on Iraq, for instance, or maybe hanging a few of America's abundant supply of major war criminals (Henry Kissinger comes quickly to mind, as do Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton and George the Elder) – there is every reason to expect that military operations against the US on its domestic front would be immediately suspended.

Whether they would remain so would of course be contingent upon follow-up. By that, it may be assumed that American acceptance of onsite inspections by international observers to verify destruction of its weapons of mass destruction (as well as dismantlement of all facilities in which more might be manufactured), Nuremberg-style trials in which a few thousand US military/corporate personnel could be properly adjudicated and punished for their Crimes Against humanity, and payment of reparations to the array of nations/peoples whose assets the US has plundered over the years, would suffice.

Since they've shown no sign of being unreasonable or vindictive, it may even be anticipated that, after a suitable period of adjustment and reeducation (mainly to allow them to acquire the skills necessary to living within their means), those restored to control over their own destinies by the gallant sacrifices of the combat teams the WTC and Pentagon will eventually (re)admit Americans to the global circle of civilized societies. Stranger things have happened.

In the Alternative

Unfortunately, noble as they may have been, such humanitarian aspirations were always doomed to remain unfulfilled. For it to have been otherwise, a far higher quality of character and intellect would have to prevail among average Americans than is actually the case.

Perhaps the strategists underestimated the impact a couple of generations-worth of media indoctrination can produce in terms of demolishing the capacity of human beings to form coherent thoughts. Maybe they forgot to factor in the mind-numbing effects of the indoctrination passed off as education in the US.

Then, again, it's entirely possible they were aware that a decisive majority of American adults have been reduced by this point to a level much closer to the kind of immediate self-gratification entailed in Pavlovian stimulus/response patterns than anything accessible by appeals to higher logic, and still felt morally obliged to offer the dolts an option to quit while they were ahead.

What the hell? It was worth a try.

But it's becoming increasingly apparent that the dosage of medicine administered was entirely insufficient to accomplish its purpose.

Although there are undoubtedly exceptions, Americans for the most part still don't get it.

Already, they've desecrated the temporary tomb of those killed in the WTC, staging a veritable pep rally atop the mangled remains of those they profess to honor, treating the whole affair as if it were some bizarre breed of contact sport. And, of course, there are the inevitable pom-poms shaped like American flags, the school colors worn as little red-white-and-blue ribbons affixed to labels, sportscasters in the form of "counterterrorism experts" drooling mindless color commentary during the pregame warm-up.

Refusing the realization that the world has suddenly shifted its axis, and that they are therefore no longer "in charge," they have by-and-large reverted instantly to type, working themselves into their usual bloodlust on the now obsolete premise that the bloodletting will "naturally" occur elsewhere and to someone else.

"Patriotism," a wise man once observed, "is the last refuge of scoundrels."

And the braided, he might of added.

Braided Scoundrel-in-Chief, George Junior, lacking even the sense to be careful what he wished for, has teamed up with a gaggle of fundamentalist Christian clerics like Billy Graham to proclaim a "New Crusade" called "Infinite Justice" aimed at "ridding the world of evil."

One could easily make light of such rhetoric, remarking upon how unseemly it is for a son to threaten his father in such fashion – or a president to so publicly contemplate the murder/suicide of himself and his cabinet – but the matter is deadly serious.

They are preparing once again to sally forth for the purpose of roasting brown-skinned children by the scores of thousands. Already, the B-1 bombers and the aircraft carriers and the missile frigates are en route, the airborne divisions are gearing up to go.

To where? Afghanistan?

The Sudan?

Iraq, again (or still)?

How about Grenada (that was fun)?

Any of them or all. It doesn't matter.


The desire to pummel the helpless runs rabid as ever.

Only, this time it's different.

The time the helpless aren't, or at least are not so helpless as they were.

This time, somewhere, perhaps in an Afghani mountain cave, possibly in a Brooklyn basement, maybe another local altogether – but somewhere, all the same – there's a grim-visaged (wo)man wearing a Clint Eastwood smile.

"Go ahead, punks," s/he's saying, "Make my day."

And when they do, when they launch these airstrikes abroad – or may a little later; it will be at a time conforming to the "terrorists"' own schedule, and at a place of their choosing – the next more intensive dose of medicine administered here "at home."

Of what will it consist this time? Anthrax? Mustard gas? Sarin? A tactical nuclear device?

That, too, is their choice to make.

Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.

"You've got to learn, " the line went, "that when you push people around, some people push back."

As they should.

As they must.

And as they undoubtedly will.

There is justice in such symmetry.

Jolie Rouge
02-09-2005, 11:00 PM
ADDENDUM

The preceding was a "first take" reading, more a stream-of-consciousness interpretive reaction to the September 11 counterattack than a finished piece on the topic. Hence, I'll readily admit that I've been far less than thorough, and quite likely wrong about a number of things.

For instance, it may not have been (only) the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins.

Or maybe it was some or all of the at least 3.2 million Indochinese who perished as a result of America's sustained and genocidal assault on Southeast Asia (1959-1975), not to mention the millions more who've died because of the sanctions imposed thereafter.

Perhaps there were a few of the Korean civilians massacred by US troops at places like No Gun Ri during the early ‘50s, or the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians ruthlessly incinerated in the ghastly fire raids of World War II (only at Dresden did America bomb Germany in a similar manner).

And, of course, it could have been those vaporized in the militarily pointless nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are others, as well, a vast and silent queue of faceless victims, stretching from the million-odd Filipinos slaughtered during America's "Indian War" in their islands at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the real Indians, America's own, massacred wholesale at places like Horseshoe Bend and the Bad Axe, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, the Wa****a, Bear River, and the Marias.

Was it those who expired along the Cherokee Trial of Tears of the Long Walk of the Navajo?

Those murdered by smallpox at Fort Clark in 1836?

Starved to death in the concentration camp at Bosque Redondo during the 1860s?

Maybe those native people claimed for scalp bounty in all 48 of the continental US states? Or the Raritans whose severed heads were kicked for sport along the streets of what was then called New Amsterdam, at the very site where the WTC once stood?

One hears, too, the whispers of those lost on the Middle Passage, and of those whose very flesh was sold in the slave market outside the human kennel from whence Wall Street takes its name.

And of coolie laborers, imported by the gross-dozen to lay the tracks of empire across scorching desert sands, none of them allotted "a Chinaman's chance" of surviving.

The list is too long, too awful to go on.

No matter what its eventual fate, America will have gotten off very, very cheap.

The full measure of its guilt can never be fully balanced or atoned for.


Ward Churchill is professor of American Indian Studies with the Department of Ethnic studies, University of Colorado at Boulder.


http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read.html?id=2739

Political Gateway Special Report

Jolie Rouge
02-09-2005, 11:09 PM
Churchill probe ordered
CU officials ponder firing prof; regents apologize to nation
By Charlie Brennan,
Rocky Mountain News
February 4, 2005

AURORA - The University of Colorado Board of Regents ordered an investigation Thursday into whether embattled ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill should be fired, and then took the extraordinary step of apologizing to the nation for Churchill's writings about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In a raucous meeting where university leaders were shouted down by Churchill supporters who defied orders to be silent, the regents voted unanimously to authorize a 30- day investigation to determine whether there is cause to fire Churchill, 57.

In what may be an unprecedented action by any major university, the regents also apologized "to all Americans, especially those targeted in the 9/11 attacks and those serving in our armed forces, for the disgraceful comments of professor Churchill."

Two protesters were arrested during the meeting.

Churchill has been the subject of a firestorm of controversy since concerns were raised last week about an essay he wrote on Sept. 11, 2001, in which he compared "technocrats" working in the World Trade Center to notorious Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann and said the United States invited the terrorist attacks through a long history of violent domination of other cultures.

Contacted Thursday night about the regents' decision, Churchill said, "No comment. Until I receive something official from the regents or the university, I'm not going to comment until I know more about what I'm responding to."

The investigation to determine whether Churchill should be fired will be directed by Interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano, who has been in that post just two weeks. He will be assisted in the process by Arts and Sciences Dean Todd Gleason and School of Law Dean David Getches.

The probe could put any or all of Churchill's published writings and public remarks under a microscope; this week, he told students in one class he has authored 24 books and 70 other book chapters.

DiStefano's investigation will lead to a report to the regents, who will then make a recommendation to CU President Betsy Hoffman, who holds the power to make a final decision.

"Two primary questions will be examined in this review," DiStefano said: "One, does professor Churchill's conduct, including his speech, provide any grounds for dismissal for cause, as described in the regents' laws?

"And, two, if so, is this conduct or speech protected by the First Amendment against university action?"

The rules established by the regents state that a tenured professor can be fired only for professional incompetence, neglect of duty, insubordination, conviction of a felony or any offense involving moral turpitude, sexual harassment, or "other conduct" that falls below minimum standards of professional integrity.

David Lane, Churchill's attorney, predicted that, ultimately, nothing will come of the CU probe.

Dismissing Thursday's session as "a lot of hand-wringing and tongue-clucking," Lane said "Ward Churchill is entitled, under the First Amendment, to have any opinions about anything - especially matters of public concern - and he is allowed to write those opinions without fear of reprisal from Bill Owens or the regents of the University of Colorado."

Ultimately, Lane predicted, "They will condemn his writings, (but) beyond that, do absolutely nothing, as the law requires. That is the correct result."

Police arrested two of Churchill's supporters - one at the beginning of the meeting and one who could not be subdued until he was grabbed by several officers, one of whom was nearly knocked to the ground in the struggle.

The two-hour meeting deteriorated into chants of "Let him go, let him go," as regents were escorted from the meeting hall on CU's Fitzsimons campus.

Hoffman could not make herself heard, even with the microphone in front of her, as the meeting deteriorated into chaos. Finally, appearing speechless at the disorder that had engulfed the room, the president also made her retreat.

Prior to the meeting's termination, each regent spoke out - several struggling to be heard over remarks directed at them by dissenters - against the substance of Churchill's now infamous essay, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens." Some went much further.

Regent Tom Lucero called for a far-reaching evaluation of CU's overall curriculum.

"It naturally follows that I will be seeking justification for all departments and their academic value and merit to the university community," Lucero said. "I want to scrutinize whether or not it is necessary to eliminate courses and departments of questionable academic merit."

Owens, who said Wednesday that he had asked Hoffman to fire Churchill, endorsed the regents' decision to take "the necessary first step" in reviewing the professor's employment status.

The governor added, "However, I deplore the behavior displayed by some students at the regents' meeting. Their abhorrent behavior underscores the culture of violence that can be spawned by inflammatory speeches and essays such as those by Mr. Churchill."

In the wake of the meeting's turbulent climax, Hoffman said it was critical to her to emphasize "the importance of civil debate, the importance of dissent, the importance of the opportunity for people to speak freely, and also for faculty to understand the responsibility that goes with free speech."

Hoffman would not speak to whether she believes Churchill, a tenured professor on the faculty of CU since 1981, should be removed from his post.

"I will not even comment at this point," she said. "It would prejudge any process."

Churchill's essay, written the day that terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon claimed nearly 3,000 lives, took on new life more than three years after he penned it, when protests arose after he was announced as a panelist in a presentation on "The Limits of Dissent."

That event, which was to have taken place Thursday night at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., was canceled after more than a hundred threats of violence convinced Hamilton officials they could not guarantee public safety.

On Monday, Churchill, who has heard himself branded as "Osama bin Churchill" in recent commentary, voluntarily stepped down as chairman of the CU Ethnic Studies Department, taking a pay cut of about $18,000, but retained his position as a tenured faculty member.

Excerpt from CU resolution

• "The Board of Regents apologizes to all Americans, especially those targeted in the 9/11 attacks and those serving in our armed forces, for the disgraceful comments of professor Churchill."

• Online Extra: To read the full text of the regents' statement, click on Today's links at RockyMountainNews. com. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0%2C1299%2CDRMN_15_3522241%2C00.html

RELATED STORIES

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RELATED LINKS

Audio: Listen to excerpts from Churchill's talks

Poll: Should Ward Churchill resign his professorship?

Jolie Rouge
02-18-2005, 09:46 PM
U. of Colo. Professor to Speak in Hawaii

http://channels.netscape.com/fotosrch/2/20050217COEA101.jpg

HONOLULU (AP) - A University of Colorado professor whose essay about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks ignited a national controversy has accepted an invitation to speak next week at the University of Hawaii. Several university and community organizations are sponsoring Ward Churchill's visit Tuesday to the Manoa campus.

University President David McClain on Friday criticized Churchill's comparison of victims of the World Trade Center attacks to Holocaust organizer Adolph Eichmann, but defended the appearance as an expression of free speech.

In an essay written shortly after the 2001 attacks, Churchill called some victims ``little Eichmanns.'' The ethnic studies professor said later that his essay referred to ``technocrats'' who work for what he calls repressive American policies around the world. He has defended his essay and said he owes no one an apology.

McClain said Friday that he finds Churchill's comments ``personally offensive, wildly inaccurate and remarkably hurtful to those who lost loved ones there on that day.'' But he added, ``Freedom of inquiry and of expression are what universities are all about and freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our democracy.''

The essay drew attention after a campus newspaper reported on it in advance of Churchill's planned visit to a New York school last month. That visit was canceled, as were several others to U.S. colleges, but other schools have invited him to speak in support of his free-speech rights.

On the floor of the Hawaii Senate on Friday, Sen. Fred Hemmings said Churchill's sponsors invited, ``under the guise of academic freedom and freedom of speech, a very evil person.''

The visit jeopardizes the ``reputation and the wisdom of the University of Hawaii and those who bring him here,'' said Hemmings, a Republican. ``It also jeopardizes financial support.''

A professor in one of the departments sponsoring the speech defended the invitation. ``We wanted to signal that we really believe in free expression not just for non-controversial ideas, but for controversial ideas, because that's what free expression is for,'' said Robert Perkinson, a professor of American studies.

Churchill's comments led Colorado's governor to call for his firing and the University of Colorado Board of Regents to launch an investigation into whether a tenured professor could be removed. Churchill resigned from his post as chair of Colorado's Department of Ethnic Studies but has threatened to sue the university if he is fired from the faculty.

02/18/05 23:15

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=ne-main-9-l1&flok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20050218%2F2315289878.htm&sc=1110

mesue
02-20-2005, 10:04 PM
Wow Jolie you must really dislike this guy to devote so much attention to this story. Thanks for keeping us all posted on it, I had already heard about his statements early on. The thing is while you might not like what he is saying, we live in a country where one can speak their mind and state their opinion without fear, oh yeah the whole world of conservatives are shuddering in unison over what he said and going after him, too bad. Too bad because they the conservatives are always the first ones to say lets send them young people to war to fight for our rights and our freedoms and the first ones to remind everyone how freedom is not free but the first time someone exercises that right in a way that is not in their agenda and says something they disagree with, then American's have too much freedoms ( a statement once made by our current President about freedom). So let me get it straight when someone says something that the conservatives in this world thinks is ok then the freedom to speak ones mind is a good thing but if they disagree with it, the world should crucify him. You can't have it both ways, because if you can deny someone the right to speak his mind then who is free. I don't neccesarily agree with what he said but he had every right to say it whether you or I or anyone else liked it and that is called freedom of speech. I fully support his right to speak his mind or to write an essay on his thoughts. And Jolie even though we very seldom agree I'm betting you agree with me on this one. And while you might find it offensive what he said you can't deny that he had the right to say it if there is such a thing as freedom of speech in this country. Freedom of Speech does still exist, doesn't it?

Jolie Rouge
02-20-2005, 10:12 PM
Wow Jolie you must really dislike this guy to devote so much attention to this story.

No. I think he is rather asine - but that is usually NOT grounds for termination.

I just didn't like getting second hand information and out of context quotes from his papers. So I took the trouble to track it down and try to show both sides of the arguement.

mesue
02-20-2005, 10:59 PM
I agree its certainly not grounds for termination. I have to wonder though and think about the fact that if he had said something just as outrageus, (and I am not saying I find his thoughts outrageous but apparently the current media and conservatives do) but in complete support of the current political thinking in this country would he not be being celebrated or totally ignored if too far out there. I personally find President Bush's statement about not even thinking about Osama Bin Laden much anymore just as bizarre or outrageous. After all OBL is supposed to be responsible for 911 we went into Afghanistan and Iraq due to the attack and now the man who started it all seldom crosses our president's mind.

mesue
02-21-2005, 03:41 AM
One more thought on this and that is that Ward Churchill is a brilliant man and we would do well to listen to him. He never said that all the people killed in the WTC were Little Eichmans. He is saying we were attacked and that these people felt they had a reason for doing what they did, they felt justified in doing what they did. What Ward Churchill is basically saying is that we need to look at why they feel this way, what policies has the USA used overseas to give these people the idea they have a right to do this. 911 was not just some random killing, these people did not wake up one morning and go to a map and pick our country to attack. They did not pick us because they hate our freedoms, they picked us because they hate our policies and what they feel our policies has done to them. I am not saying that they were right but I am saying that we can not win this war against terrorism by blowing up the world, by invading countries that do not like us, there are currently 65 countries that have terrorists in them, are we and can we blow them all up or would it not be simpler and save millions of lives including the lives of our own military to re-examine our policies and work toward doing the right thing? What we do does affects the rest of the world and not always in a good way, it is time that we recognize that, own it and seek to fix it. Below is a schedule of when a program comes on that has Ward Churchill's answers to the attack on his essay. It is without a doubt one of the most informative programs I have ever watched. FSTV is on both dish and direct satellite programming and also some cable companies do carry their programming. Oh thanks Jolie I had heard about this of course and was aware of most of it but it was only after reading your posts that I cruising through the list of what was on the tv saw this program was coming on and watched it.
http://www.freespeech.org/fsitv/fscm2/genx.php?name=home
"When They Came for Ward Churchill"
Embattled Professor Ward Churchill speaks on the controversy over his essay, his treatment by the media and the people calling for his firing, and even execution, for 'treason'. In this hour-long program, Prof. Churchill invites FSTV into his home to tell the side of the story told nowhere else on American television: his side.
Schedule(ET): Feb 18th(Fri-8pm), 19th(Sat-3am, 7am & 7pm), 20th(Sun-8am & 3pm), 21st(Mon-4am & 3pm), 22nd(Tues- 8pm & 11pm), and 23rd(Wed-3:30pm).

Jolie Rouge
02-21-2005, 09:38 PM
CENSOR THIS COLUMN
Tue Feb 15, 2005
By Ted Rall

Ward Churchill and the Redefinition of Censorship

NEW YORK--Nothing should appear in a newspaper unless it has first been approved by a government censor, say half the high school students in a recent poll. So free-speechers are losing the never-ending war over freedom of expression. This is because censorship is being redefined.


The latest skirmish over the First Amendment concerns Ward Churchill, an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which is a liberal enclave in a conservative state. Hamilton College in upstate New York, which had invited Professor Churchill to speak about American Indian activism, cancelled his appearance after someone Googled his name and found an essay he had written three years earlier--which appeared without a smidgen of attention at the time, much less controversy.

"Some People Push Back" is a furious rant written mere hours after the September 11th attacks, and one suspects the tone of the piece owes much to the revulsion that thoughtful Americans felt for the mindless "United We Stand" jingoism that stifled attempts at serious analysis of the terrorists' motivations in the immediate aftermath. "The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not 'cowards,'" Churchill wrote, presaging remarks that got Bill Maher fired by ABC a few months later. "The word describes all those 'fighting men and women' who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the Persian Gulf [during the 1991 Gulf War], enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods filled with random human beings."

But these are not the comments which caused Hamilton College officials to disinvite Professor Churchill after more than 100 death threats led them to conclude they couldn't guarantee his safety. By this point most people accept that it takes some stones to fly a plane into a building. Mohammad Atta was a mass murderer, but not a wimp.


After World War II, Churchill reminds us, "Pious Americans...led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed--nay, empowered--their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name. If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans."

After calling those killed in the Pentagon legitimate military targets, he challenged the presumed innocence of the World Trade Center victims, calling them "little Eichmanns": "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. Recourse to 'ignorance'--a derivative, after all, of the word 'ignore'--counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in... it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants [dying in Iraq due to trade sanctions]."



My two cents: Actually, the World Trade Center was no nerve center of American capitalism. Second-tier real estate in an inconvenient corner of Manhattan's financial district, the towers were home to hundreds of two-man representative offices for obscure foreign import-export outfits. That's why so many foreigners died that day. The biggest Wall Street brokerages and investment banks keep their offices further downtown, closer to the action. Only one notable personality, conservative commentator Barbara Olsen, died on 9/11, and she was on one of the planes. No boldface names from the business world died. The 2,800-plus New Yorkers who perished in the towers were mostly clerks. Even if you buy the notion of "collective guilt," the WTC victims, some of whom were illegal immigrants, waiters and maintenance staff, were as innocent as could be. On the other hand, the citizens of a democracy surely bear some responsibility for the actions of their government.


So did Hamilton College censor Ward Churchill?


Not according to the letters of the editor section of the "liberal" New York Times. "Those who present forums to college students," wrote one Dean Brown, "should investigate those who are offered the privilege of speaking...those opinions...do not need to be given a soapbox."


Attorney Thomas Boyden wrote in 1999, "There is no such thing as 'private censorship.' It is only when government uses its coercive powers to inhibit speech that censorship occurs." This is a boilerplate conservative trope. Jay Ambrose, writing in the right-wing Washington Times, used it to justify Disney's 2004 cancellation of a distribution agreement for the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11": "Don't call it censorship, which is what the government does when it tells private parties they cannot say something publicly."


Like Winston Smith in "1984" I'd heard this repeated so often that I began to believe it was true. But the dictionary doesn't relate censorship to government action. The verb to censor is simply "to examine books, films, or other material and to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable." As a noun, a censor is "a person who is authorized to read publications or correspondence or to watch theatrical performances and suppress in whole or in part anything considered obscene or politically unacceptable." A censor can be an editor, producer or high school principal.


Censorship is grounded in motivation. An editor who, faced with space limitations, decides not to run an article because it's less interesting or important than another isn't a censor. He becomes a censor, however, if he cans a piece because of taste or political concerns.


As Ambrose points out, "No company--whether a film studio, newspaper corporation or whatever--can or should publish or distribute everything that comes its way." He's got a point. Who wants to read a paper containing 290 million letters to the editor? Nevertheless, we should ask ourselves three simple questions to determine whether a voice is being censored or edited:


1. What are the reasons for the suppression?

Were Professor Churchill an inept lecturer or ignorant about American Indian activism, the subject he was originally invited to discuss, Hamilton might have a legitimate reason to disinvite him. But his critics don't say that. He is being savaged for sins of tastelessness (insulting the dead) and political incorrectness (arguing that ordinary Americans, tacitly complicit in their government's genocidal foreign policies, had it coming on 9/11). These are dictionary definitions of censorship.


2. What is being suppressed?

Popular opinions don't require protection. The First Amendment was written to protect free expression that causes discomfort, even rage, by the majority. Both the censor and the civil libertarian will probably disagree with Churchill's assessment of American collective guilt, but the true defender of free speech recognizes his own revulsion as further reason to err on the side of open discussion over silence.


3. Who is being suppressed?

Perhaps the most reliable barometer of censorship is the relative sociopolitical status of people and institutions urging the suppression versus the voice being suppressed. In one corner of the Churchill controversy, we have a 57-year-old ethnic studies instructor with unusually strident political views. In the other there's Colorado's governor and state legislature, hundreds of right-wing talk radio hosts around the country, and Bill O'Reilly, the hugely popular Fox News talking head--all of which have demanded that the University of Colorado fire him. These calls have prompted vandals to trash his car and threaten his life. Only the powerful may censor; only the weak can be censored.


The most ironic aspect of censorship is that it attracts wider attention to comments that were previously ignored. After the speech police went after Ward Churchill, the readership of his 9/11 essay shot up by millions. He became nationally known. Had the right-wingers managed to censor themselves, only a few hundred souls would ever have seen it in an obscure journal called "Pockets of Resistance."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=127&ncid=742&e=8&u=/ucru/20050216/cm_ucru/censorthiscolumn




... each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants [dying in Iraq due to trade sanctions]."

If Sadamn had allowed the UN inspectors to do their jobs, the sactions could have been addressed.

Further if Sadamn had used the money from the Oil for Food progamn as it was intended instead of stealing 23 Billion and using it for palaces and treasures for his family and cronies, the people of Iraq would have had food & medicine.

Jolie Rouge
02-21-2005, 09:45 PM
NOT CRAZY HORSE, JUST CRAZY
Wed Feb 16, 2005
By Ann Coulter

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has written that "unquestionably, America has earned" the attack of 9/11. He calls the attack itself a result of "gallant sacrifices of the combat teams." That the "combat teams" killed only 3,000 Americans, he says, shows they were not "unreasonable or vindictive." He says that in order to even the score with America, Muslim terrorists "would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people."


To grasp the current state of higher education in America, consider that if Churchill is at any risk at all of being fired, it is only because he smokes.

Churchill poses as a radical living on the edge, supremely confident that he is protected by tenure from being fired. College professors are the only people in America who assume they can't be fired for what they say.

Tenure was supposed to create an atmosphere of open debate and inquiry, but instead has created havens for talentless cowards who want to be insulated from life. Rather than fostering a climate of open inquiry, college campuses have become fascist colonies of anti-American hate speech, hypersensitivity, speech codes, banned words and prohibited scientific inquiry.

Even liberals don't try to defend Churchill on grounds that he is Galileo pursuing an abstract search for the truth. They simply invoke "free speech," like a deus ex machina to end all discussion. Like the words "diverse" and "tolerance," "free speech" means nothing but: "Shut up, we win." It's free speech (for liberals), diversity (of liberals) and tolerance (toward liberals).

Ironically, it is precisely because Churchill is paid by the taxpayers that "free speech" is implicated at all. The Constitution has nothing to say about the private sector firing employees for their speech. That's why you don't see Bill Maher on ABC anymore. Other well-known people who have been punished by their employers for their "free speech" include Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Jimmy the Greek and Andy Rooney.

In fact, the Constitution says nothing about state governments firing employees for their speech: The First Amendment clearly says, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." Firing Ward Churchill is a pseudo-problem caused by modern constitutional law, which willy-nilly applies the Bill of Rights to the states -- including the one amendment that clearly refers only to "Congress." (Liberals love to go around blustering "'no law' means 'no law'!" But apparently "Congress" doesn't mean "Congress.")

Even accepting the modern notion that the First Amendment applies to state governments, the Supreme Court has distinguished between the government as sovereign and the government as employer. The government is extremely limited in its ability to regulate the speech of private citizens, but not so limited in regulating the speech of its own employees.

So the First Amendment and "free speech" are really red herrings when it comes to whether Ward Churchill can be fired. Even state universities will not run afoul of the Constitution for firing a professor who is incapable of doing his job because he is a lunatic, an incompetent or an idiot -- and those determinations would obviously turn on the professor's "speech."

If a math professor's "speech" consisted of insisting that 2 plus 2 equals 5, or an astrophysicist's "speech" was to claim that the moon is made of Swiss cheese, or a history professor's "speech" consisted of rants about the racial inferiority of the slaves, each one of them could be fired by a state university without running afoul of the constitution.

Just because we don't have bright lines for determining what speech can constitute a firing offense, doesn't mean there are no lines at all. If Churchill hasn't crossed them, we are admitting that almost nothing will debase and disgrace the office of professor (except, you know, suggesting that there might be innate differences in the mathematical abilities of men and women).


In addition to calling Americans murdered on 9/11 "little Eichmanns," Churchill has said:

The U.S. Army gave blankets infected with smallpox to the Indians specifically intending to spread the disease.

Not only are the diseased-blanket stories cited by Churchill denied by his alleged sources, but the very idea is contradicted by the facts of scientific discovery. The settlers didn't understand the mechanism of how disease was transmitted. Until Louis Pasteur's experiments in the second half of the 19th century, the idea that disease could be caused by living organisms was as scientifically accepted as crystal reading is today. Even after Pasteur, many scientists continued to believe disease was spontaneously generated from within. Churchill is imbuing the settlers with knowledge that in most cases wouldn't be accepted for another hundred years.


Indian reservations are the equivalent of Nazi concentration camps.

I forgot Auschwitz had a casino.


If Ward Churchill can be a college professor, what's David Duke waiting for?



The whole idea behind free speech is that in a marketplace of ideas, the truth will prevail. But liberals believe there is no such thing as truth and no idea can ever be false (unless it makes feminists cry, such as the idea that there are innate differences between men and women). Liberals are so enamored with the process of free speech that they have forgotten about the goal.

Faced with a professor who is a screaming lunatic, they retreat to, "Yes, but academic freedom, tenure, free speech, blah, blah," and their little liberal minds go into autopilot with all the slogans.

Why is it, again, that we are so committed to never, ever firing professors for their speech? Because we can't trust state officials to draw any lines at all here? Because ... because ... because they might start with crackpots like Ward Churchill -- but soon liberals would be endangered? Liberals don't think there is any conceivable line between them and Churchill? Ipse dixit.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=108&ncid=742&e=10&u=/ucac/20050217/cm_ucac/notcrazyhorsejustcrazy

mesue
02-22-2005, 04:22 AM
And would you have expected anything else from Ann Coulter? I am forever amazed by those who want to tear someone down because of what they said but yet sit there and promote war all for the sake of democracy and part of that democracy is supposed to be freedom of speech now she is saying freedom of speech within reason the way I read it. I agree with what he said maybe he could have said it without the shock value of naming all of our little indiscretions of the past but just the same it is not giving into the terrorists to recognize why they hate us, it is not giving into the terrorists to find a better way to deal with the rest of the world. It is to our own advantage to do so. The American people are not stupid or blind one day they will recognize this. For they the American people are the first to send aid they are the first to offer help and I am not talking about our government I am talking about the generosity of the American people.

Jolie Rouge
02-22-2005, 08:24 AM
Notice that I posted two different columns from opposite ends of the issue.

**

I resent the fact that Churchill would justify terrorist actions by using examples two and three HUNDRED old. Three thousand people - mainly low level clerks & secretaries not the power brokers Churchill derides - died because "... the Raritans whose severed heads were kicked for sport along the streets of what was then called New Amsterdam, at the very site where the WTC once stood ?" That is why we call is TERRORISM.

mesue
02-24-2005, 07:52 AM
Notice that I posted two different columns from opposite ends of the issue.

**

I resent the fact that Churchill would justify terrorist actions by using examples two and three HUNDRED old. Three thousand people - mainly low level clerks & secretaries not the power brokers Churchill derides - died because "... the Raritans whose severed heads were kicked for sport along the streets of what was then called New Amsterdam, at the very site where the WTC once stood ?" That is why we call is TERRORISM.

I don't think he was trying to justify terrorism just pointing out that terrorism has been going on for sometime in different forms. What he clearly seems to be saying is that we need to look at what our policies are that are causing us to be attacked which seems pretty fundamental to me. Are we creating our own monsters by our policies with some of these other countries? The question at least seem worth looking into.

Jolie Rouge
03-16-2005, 01:50 PM
Putting the 'Sham' in Shaman
March 15, 2005
By Rich Lowry

Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who called the victims of 9/11 "little Eichmanns," is a sign of our times. Not just because his error-riddled work and reflexive hostility toward American power reflect the mediocrity and stale orthodoxy of much of academia. He also belongs to one of the nation's hottest ethnic groups: the fake Indian.


Churchill has described himself as three-sixteenths Cherokee, or one-sixteenth Cree, or both. But what's a few sixteenths here or there? He has never documented his ancestry, and he gained his membership in the Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians when it allowed in people who aren't Indians. Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee who has long known Churchill, told John J. Miller of National Review magazine, "Right away, I could tell he was a faker, because he refused to talk about his family."


In an article in the magazine's latest issue, Miller documents the rash of "professional imposters who have built entire careers by putting the sham into shaman."


According to Miller, "Between 1960 and 2000, the number of Americans claiming Indian ancestry on their census forms jumped by a factor of six." Churchill described himself as a "Caucasian" when he served in Vietnam. He became an "American Indian" when he was filling out an affirmative-action form at the University of Colorado to become a lecturer in Native American studies.


Churchill is part of a great tapestry of American Indian-related fraud. Non-Indian arts and crafts are marketed as "Indian made," a practice Congress has tried to discourage with the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. The possibility of opening casinos sends lily-white opportunists scouring for any drop of Indian blood. Then there are the affirmative-action hucksters, like the California contractor who got preferential treatment on account of his one-sixty-fourth Indian ancestry.


There is no marketing quite like faux Native American status. Forrest Carter wrote a book in the mid-1970s called "The Education of Little Tree" about being raised as an orphan by his Cherokee grandparents. "Students of Native American life," said the introduction to the paperback edition, "discovered the book to be as accurate as it was mystical and romantic." In 1991, the book became a cult smash and hit the paperback nonfiction best-seller list. Then it was switched to the fiction best-seller list.


It turned out that Forrest Carter was Asa Carter, a former white supremacist with a vivid imagination. A recent edition of "Little Tree" explains that it is "autobiographical if not all factually accurate. For instance, Granma is based on family memories of Carter's great-great-great grandmother, who was a full Cherokee, combined with the author's own mother, who read Shakespeare to him when he was a child." Got that?



Carter was in the same tradition as Iron Eyes Cody, the "Indian" actor who made the Keep America Beautiful TV ads so memorable in the 1970s. He had more than a hundred movie roles as an Indian, even though his real name was Espera DeCorti.


Falsified Native American ancestry and experiences are most readily rewarded by those who worship multiculturalism and conceive of Indians as near-mystical beings. Carlos Castaneda tapped into this audience with his New Age classic "The Teachings of Don Juan," a book based on his dubious meetings in the desert with a Yaqui sorcerer who taught him (conveniently for the college market) the marvels of mind-altering drugs. In response to Castaneda and his many imitators, the National Congress of American Indians has denounced "non-Indian 'wannabes' and self-styled New Age shamans."


Indian fakery is reprehensible not just because it is based on lies, but because it falsifies and cheapens the Native American experience to which it is supposed to pay tribute. Miller quotes a writer who calls this "cultural genocide," scoring the fakers for their "misrepresentation and appropriation of indigenous spirituality." The author of those words was Ward Churchill. Who knew? He is not just an apologist for mass murder, but — on his own terms — a practitioner of cultural genocide.


http://www.kingfeatures.com/0305/lowry031505.php3

Jolie Rouge
03-16-2005, 01:54 PM
What he clearly seems to be saying is that we need to look at what our policies are that are causing us to be attacked which seems pretty fundamental to me. Are we creating our own monsters by our policies with some of these other countries?


"... the Raritans whose severed heads were kicked for sport along the streets of what was then called New Amsterdam, at the very site where the WTC once stood ?"


So the actions of those in the 1600's justifies & legitimizes the actions of TERRORISTS in the 2000's ??

mesue
03-17-2005, 12:25 AM
No of course not, he is merely pointing out that we have a history of abuse toward the Native Americans and also that our history books tend to change or slant history to where our actions look better or are more forgivable. Take Iraq for instance there was a time when we supported Saddam Hussein and had friendly relations with him but the man was just as awful a dictator as he was when we invaded Iraq both times and we knew it and were still friends with him and selling him arms to build up his military.

Jolie Rouge
05-16-2005, 06:47 PM
Colo. Professor Submits Report in Probe

DENVER (AP) - A University of Colorado professor facing possible dismissal after being accused of plagiarism and lying about his American Indian heritage denied those charges Monday and submitted a lengthy report to a committee investigating his actions.

Ward Churchill, who first came under fire for an essay comparing Sept. 11 victims to the Nazi bureaucrat who planned the Holocaust, offered a 50-page, single-spaced report to a university committee investigating the allegations.

His lawyer, David Lane, said Churchill also submitted his tribal membership card showing he is an associate member of the Keetoowah Cherokee band. Lane said Churchill's membership was based on an investigation by a tribal genealogist. ``Permeating the entire response is 'Look, this is motivated by my First Amendment rights being trampled on. For me to even have to answer this is a denial of my First Amendment rights, but since you asked, here is my answer,''' Lane quoted Churchill as saying.


Churchill, who Lane said was out of town, did not immediately return phone messages left by The Associated Press.


In his response to the plagiarism allegations, Lane said Churchill in one instance simply took articles written by other people and put them together for a chapter of one book, which Churchill did not take credit for. ``His name does not appear as the author of the piece. He was asked to edit it, and he did. He checked for typos, punctuation, grammar, those type of things. He never claims himself as the author,'' Lane said. ``That is not plagiarism.''



05/16/05 23:05

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news/story.jsp?floc=ne-us-12-l3&flok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20050516%2F2305289127.htm&sc=1110

mesue
05-17-2005, 11:16 AM
Thank you for finding this and posting it. Jolie have you not noticed that in recent years the few that have said anything at all negative about the Bush Administration or our government have been attacked in every way? And it is not they are proven wrong or evidence comes forward that proves them wrong, thats only fair, but I am talking about this type of attempt to tarnish his name. They could not prove him a liar or get him to back down so they come up with a charge of plagiarism which he clearly denies and his name is not on it and so therefore there can be no plagiarism. Then they tried to say he was stealing the Native American Heritage which he is clearly not, he was recognized by the Native Americans as one of their own long before this essay was written.
I keep hearing Americans talking about freedom of speech but in the current political climate if you exercise that right in a way that the powers that be do not like they will shut you up and shut you down, not by proving you wrong but by attacking on all levels. Do we have freedom of speech in this country when just by stating an opinion, ones job is called in jeopardy, ones life is threatened, what is freedom of speech? To me it is the right to speak out on any issue without fear of retribution from the powers that be.
Whether one likes what he is saying or not this mans freedom of speech is in jeopardy and when one mans freedom of speech is in jeopardy everyone elses is too. I don't neccessarily like everything that is said on here on many issues but each of us have a right to say what we think and how we feel, and even I don't neccessarily like how Ward Churchill said what he did but the main thing was that we need to understand why we were attacked, if we don't look beyond that window of anger we will never change anything and this type of thing will continue.
I guess what I think Ward Churchill is saying is that we should each get up each day and care whether a child around the world has food to eat and we should care whether the one down the street has food also and we should all work to make the whole world better and if we allow our corporations to suck the life out of other countries while impovishing the people who live in that country by the lack of care by these corporations and government policies then terrorism will continue to happen and will never stop as long as we continue on this same path and don't change our ways. I'll get off my soapbox now again thanks for the post of the new info and I am now handing the soapbox over to you.

Jolie Rouge
05-17-2005, 06:14 PM
Jolie have you not noticed that in recent years the few that have said anything at all negative about the Bush Administration or our government have been attacked in every way?

This is not limited to the current administration. Paula Jones was audited four years in a row by the IRS as well as others who spoke against Clinton or his administration. Seems to run with the territory.

mesue
05-18-2005, 07:52 AM
This is not limited to the current administration. Paula Jones was audited four years in a row by the IRS as well as others who spoke against Clinton or his administration. Seems to run with the territory.

This has gotten worse over the years continuously, I am not trying to say the democrats are better than republicans on this just that it has progressively gotten worse over the years and now with the Patriot Act they have more power to abuse. I am not anti- republican or pro-democrat I recognize that we need a balance of both in our government, too much of one party upsets the equilibrium and we get to where there is no compromise.

Jolie Rouge
05-16-2006, 01:14 PM
Colorado Professor Cited for Misconduct
By CHASE SQUIRES, Associated Press Writer
05/16/06

BOULDER, Colo. - An investigation of a professor who likened some of the Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi found serious cases of misconduct in his academic research, including plagiarism and fabrications, a University of Colorado spokesman said Tuesday.

One member of the five-person investigative committee recommended that ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill be fired, and four recommended he be suspended, university spokesman Barrie Hartman said.

Churchill, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, declined immediate comment Tuesday.

The professor touched off a firestorm with an essay relating the 2001 terrorist attacks to U.S. abuses abroad. The essay referred to some World Trade Center victims as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who carried out Adolf Hitler's plan to exterminate European Jews during World War II.

University officials had earlier determined Churchill could not be fired for his comments about the terrorist attacks, but they launched an inquiry into allegations about his research. The committee's 125-page report said Churchill falsified, fabricated and plagiarized some of his research, did not always comply with standards for listing other authors' names and failed to follow accepted practice for reporting results.

The decision on his future at the university will be made by school officials later this year. Churchill has said if he is fired, he will sue.

Churchill's wife, Natsu Saito, who also teaches in the ethnic studies department, said Tuesday she had resigned her tenured teaching position at the school but said she and Churchill have no plans to leave Boulder.

In her resignation letter, Saito accused the university of reneging on promises to her and the department, ignoring racial harassment of the department and individuals, and treating Churchill unfairly. She said her decision to resign was not prompted by the pending report.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060516/ap_on_re_us/embattled_professor;_ylt=AqaA1och7uqS2XAjviVMvpGs0 NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--

Jolie Rouge
05-16-2006, 08:32 PM
While we are unanimous in finding that Professor Churchill’s research misconduct is serious and that we should express the degree of that seriousness through a recommendation about sanctions, our discussions have not led to unanimity about what particular sanctions are warranted. What follows, then, is the only portion of our report that presents multiple views.

* Two members of the Committee conclude and recommend that Professor Churchill should not be dismissed. They reach this conclusion because they do not think his conduct so serious as to satisfy the criteria for revocation of tenure and dismissal set forth in section 5.C.1 of the Law of the Regents, because they are troubled by the circumstances under which these allegations have been made, and because they believe that his dismissal would have an adverse effect on other scholars’ ability to conduct their research with due freedom. These two members agree and recommend that the most appropriate sanction, following any required additional procedures as specified by the University’s rules, is a suspension from University employment without pay for a term of two years.

* Three members of the Committee believe that Professor Churchill’s research misconduct is so serious that it satisfies the criteria for revocation of tenure and dismissal specified in section 5.C.1 of the Laws of the Regents, and hence that revocation of tenure and dismissal, after completion of all appropriate procedures, is not an improper sanction. One of these members believes and recommends that dismissal is the most appropriate sanction; the other two believe and recommend that the most appropriate sanction is suspension from University employment without pay for a term of five years.

Finally, the Committee had the following comments about its report: The Committee notes that the Laws of the Regents of the University of Colorado define “academic freedom” as “the freedom to inquire, discover, publish and teach truth as the faculty member sees it, subject to no control or authority save the control and authority of the rational methods by which truth is established.”

We understand and were careful to distinguish “misconduct in research,” which is addressed by the University of Colorado’s Administrative Policy Statement on Misconduct in Research and Authorship, from the issue of “truth” addressed by the Regents’ Laws’ definition of academic freedom. The Committee observes also that the allegations we were asked to investigate were initiated in the wake of the public outcry concerning some highly controversial essays by Professor Churchill dealing with, among other things, the 9/11 tragedy. While not endorsing either the tone or the contents of those essays, the Committee reaffirms, as the University has already acknowledged, that Professor Churchill’s right to publish his views was protected by both the First and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of free speech. Although those essays played no part in our deliberations, the Committee expresses its concern regarding the timing and perhaps the motives for the University's decision to forward charges made in that context. We point out finally that when Professor Churchill was hired as an Associate Professor with tenure in 1991 and promoted to (full) Professor in 1997, the University knew that he did not have a Ph.D. or law degree, as commonly expected for faculty at this institution, and was aware that he was a controversial public intellectual.


http://www.pirateballerina.com/

Jolie Rouge
05-16-2006, 08:38 PM
Photo latest fuel in Churchill flap
Author says CU prof used picture of hers without permission
By Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News
May 16, 2006

The photograph of a child's grave in University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill's 2004 book about Indian boarding schools jumped out at Brenda Child.

That's because Child, a member of the Red Lake Ojibwa tribe, took the picture and published it in 1998 in her own award-winning book on the same subject. "I was surprised that was there because he's never sought my permission to use it and it appeared without my knowing that it would be in his book," said Child, a University of Minnesota faculty member in American studies.

Worse, from Child's standpoint, is the caption Churchill appended to the photograph. It said that half the children at the nation's Indian boarding schools suffered the same fate as the child whose grave is pictured in the photograph.

That figure is a "tremendous exaggeration," Child said. "That is just beyond belief." No historian has an accurate estimate on the true number of deaths, she said.

The flap over the photo comes to light just as the university's standing committee on research misconduct prepares to release a report on its investigation of Churchill on seven charges, including whether Churchill falsified data or misrepresented historical facts in some of his scholarly work. The report could be released as early as today.

Churchill and his attorney, David Lane, could not be reached for comment.

CU officials investigating the research misconduct allegations contacted Child in April to ask about Churchill's use of her photograph.

Because Churchill credits Child at the end of the caption, it could be construed that she endorses the misinformation, Child said.

"I thought, 'I don't want anybody thinking that I said this in my book, because it's not true,' " she said.

CU business professor Joseph Rosse, the member of the committee who contacted Child, declined to elaborate. "I need to protect the whole process, which includes not only respondents, but complainants," Rosse said.

In fact, Child did not file a complaint with CU, and she is not pursuing the matter legally. "I looked at it, I saw it, I thought, 'That's wrong,' but it didn't seem worth pursuing," Child said.

Churchill's 2004 book, Kill the Indian, Save the Man, and Child's 1998 volume, Boarding School Seasons, go over an ugly piece of U.S. history that is not in dispute.

Beginning in the 1870s, Indian children as young as 5 years old were taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools far from their homes. The intent was to strip Indians of their culture and make them more like "Americans."

The children were given Christian names, their hair was shorn, their native clothes were replaced by European garb and they were forbidden to speak their native languages. Parents who objected were confronted by reservation police or even U.S. soldiers. Nineteen Hopi fathers were imprisoned at Alcatraz, the nation's harshest prison at the time, for eight months in 1895, according to the Library of Congress Web site.

Some of the schools exist today, but reforms begun in the late 1920s softened the harshness of the institutions.

Child's book, which won the North American Indian Prose Award, is based on letters written by students at the schools and their families, including Child's relatives.

Churchill's book dwells heavily on similarities between the treatment of Indians and the Nazi Holocaust, a major theme in all of Churchill's work.

He credits Child's book in 15 footnotes. Child said the attributions are correct and the quotations are rendered accurately.

But then there's the photo.

It shows the gravestone of a 16- year-old Chippewa boy who died at a Kansas Indian school in 1902. Child said she doesn't mind that Churchill misspelled her name as "Childs" in the caption; it's rendered correctly in the footnotes. But she doesn't understand why Churchill exaggerated the number of deaths. "If several students a year died in any particular school, that's a tragedy, especially for children separated from their families. It doesn't need to be exaggerated," she said.

"Which is kind of the whole thing on Churchill," she added. "What happened to Indians in the United States is bad enough, without making anything up."

Child's grandmother attended the Indian boarding school at Flandreau, S.D., in the 1920s. "I want to portray that history as fairly as I can and as honestly as I can," she said.


On the horizon

The University of Colorado committee that investigated research misconduct allegations against professor Ward Churchill is expected to release its findings today. Here's what happens next:

• CU officials plan to hold an afternoon press conference at the school's Coors Events and Conference Center.

• The report also will be available online.

• After Churchill and his attorney have time to respond to the findings, the standing committee will make a recommendation to the chancellor and provost about what action - if any - CU should take against Churchill.

• The final decision will be left to Chancellor Phil DiStefano. CU officials have said they would like to announce that decision within the next month.



http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DRMN_957_4701982,00.html

Jolie Rouge
06-26-2006, 04:02 PM
U. of Colorado chancellor to cut Churchill
By JUDITH KOHLER and DAN ELLIOTT, Associated Press Writers
38 minutes ago

BOULDER, Colo. - The top official at the University of Colorado's flagship campus said Monday he intends to fire Ward Churchill, the professor who compared some World Trade Center victims to a Nazi and then landed in hot water over allegations of academic misconduct.

Interim Chancellor Philip DiStefano said Churchill has 10 days to appeal his decision to a faculty committee. Churchill, a tenured professor of ethnic studies, has denied allegations of plagiarism and other misconduct and has said he would file suit if fired.

Churchill did not immediately return telephone messages Monday.

In an essay written shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Churchill described some of the victims in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann. The essay was largely ignored until January 2005, when it came to light before Churchill was to speak at Hamilton College in upstate New York.

The essay triggered calls for Churchill to be fired, but university officials concluded he could not be dismissed because of free speech protections. They did order an investigation into allegations of academic misconduct, which concluded two weeks ago.

The school's committee on research misconduct said Churchill "has committed serious, repeated, and deliberate research misconduct."

DiStefano agreed and said he has told Churchill he plans to dismiss him.

Churchill has been relieved of academic work but will remain a paid faculty member as long as the firing is in the appeals process, university officials said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060626/ap_on_re_us/embattled_professor;_ylt=ArNDmjyQuHqPGc0.PGt_F2BH2 ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-

Jolie Rouge
07-14-2006, 08:36 PM
Ward Churchill Mocks 9/11 Victims as Being 'Tweezed into Submission'

Filmed by Walking Eagle Productions – Hundreds of leftist activists converged from The Mid-Atlantic Radical Book Fair to hear controversial Ethnic Studies Professor Ward Churchill give his speech, "Rules for Thee, but Not for Me: The Politics of 'Academic Misconduct' in a Time of Intellectual Repression." Churchill stunned parts of the audience with an off-the-cuff joke of how the passengers on the planes hijacked by terrorists during 9/11 were laughingly "tweezed into submission" and forced to fly the plane into buildings.

(PRWEB) July 14, 2006 -- On the July 4th weekend at Baltimore’s Mid-Atlantic Radical Book Fair, University of Colorado-Boulder’s Professor of Ethnic Studies, Ward Churchill, spoke to a semi-filled theater of left-wing activists from around the country. Walking Eagle Productions, a documentary film company focusing on free speech, academic freedom, and American Indian issues, filmed the speech in its entirety. It was Churchill’s first public speech given just several days after CU’s Interim Chancellor, Phil DiStefano, announced plans to fire Ward Churchill based on multiple grounds of serious research misconduct (as reported on CU's own Web site). Churchill’s speech for the event was thus titled, "Rules for Thee, but Not for Me: The Politics of 'Academic Misconduct' in a Time of Intellectual Repression."

The Book Fair hosts issued a statement of solidarity with Churchill on their web site, dismissing all of the findings by CU as part of a grand right-wing conspiracy. "Churchill has given us the best history of state repression after the 1960’s," announced one of the event hosts to the audience. "He’s become the most visible target for the right-wing in their quest to muzzle anyone who speaks out, especially radicals and progressives in the universities here."

For the first half hour, Churchill attacked CU’s Investigative report on his academic misconduct, downplaying the findings as merely "a matter of a few footnotes." Next, Churchill switched subject matter and commentary, which included:

• Equating the oppression of smokers to the oppression of ethnic minorities and the poor "Now, a little personal venom comes out here," started Churchill. "I couldn’t smoke my cigarettes without pretending I was going to be spreading nerve gas through the environment." (Soft laughter.)

"There are, right now, a list of repressive social things - Usually I get smoking and that ends it right there. All progressives suddenly decide state intervention to repress the social habits of communities of color and poor people as for their own good like it's something to be applauded because, after all, (snickering) 'I don’t like the smell!'"

• Frequent Nazi references and comparison of politicians, media pundits, and his critics to "Nazis" and "Holocaust deniers," including Bill O’Reilly, David Horowitz, and Dick Cheney. Churchill also compared CU Boulder to German university models from the WWII Nazi era.

• Digression into quality-of-life issues. "You can’t really deliver a lecture with all the skateboards sailing by, each of which is louder as it goes down concrete than a Harley-David (sic) motorcycle on full throttle. People standing on ‘em impersonating ghetto people, although usually they’re coming, in Colorado, from $180,000 a year families, so they had their baseball caps on backward and headphones plugged in as they sail out into traffic because the sign says 'Yield to Pedestrians' while they, I don’t know, what is it you do on cell phones now? You use them with mini-computers, right? Text-messaging, or something?"

After some polite applause and soft laughter, Churchill blurted out a joke regarding what he perceived as the hilarity over how passengers on the 9/11 flights were "easily" hijacked by terrorists and flown into the World Trade Center.

"You do remember, the incident which the terrorists overpowered the stewardess on the aircraft and tweezed her eyebrows with his tweezers, until she screamingly submitted to fly the plane into a building remember that one?" Joked Churchill. "Tweezers… tweezed into submission."

A smattering of nervous laughter followed, but at least one person in the audience was left with an entirely different reaction. "I was disgusted by that statement," said Peter Fotopoulos, an attendee from Churchill’s home state of Colorado. "It shows all that talk he made about mourning the suffering and deaths of Iraqi Children – that was the excuse he has given all along for his statement. Yet here he’s actually laughing about the mass murder of American citizens, including children, on those hijacked planes. Since when does any humanitarian do that – laugh about people being murdered? It was absolutely disgusting of him to do that. I had a friend who was killed in the World Trade Center. Ward’s exploited not just my friend’s death but now the murder of the flight’s passengers; he’s been laughing all the way to the bank."

"Maybe what we’re seeing is Churchill finally speaking his mind unfiltered, and it’s not a pretty picture," said Grant Crowell, a producer with the documentary film company Walking Eagle Productions (WEP), who attended of Churchill’s speaking event. "It’s a radical departure from his own writings, which may now come across as just feigned humanitarian outrage, especially when he shifts towards mocking murdered American citizens, including children."

(The complete video of the event is available on the Walking Eagle Productions media server. Part one shows a one hour segment of Ward Churchill's opening speech. Part two contains 45 minutes of Ward Churchill fielding questions from the audience, including an opening one on free speech from WEP's very own Grant Crowell. (Audo versions of part one and part two are also available for listening.)

# # #

Trackback URL : http://www.prweb.com/chachingpr.php/Q3Jhcy1QaWdnLU1hZ24tU3F1YS1JbnNlLVplcm8=


Pirate Ballerina stays on the (head) case. http://www.pirateballerina.com/index.php

In her essay "Lesson of Churchill fiasco: Indian studies needs clear standards", Professor Elizabeth Cook-Lynn seems to have a good grasp of the scandal that is Ward Churchill:

What it all means to ethnic studies is fairly predictable, but what it means to Indian studies, always the ''orphan'' of academia as the late Vine Deloria Jr. named it, is much more frightening. For those Indian scholars who have spent the last 30 years developing what they call an ''empowerment model'' of education at U.S. universities across the land and particularly in the West, this Churchill matter has ushered in what might become a shameful period inherent in the predictable and necessary Churchill disgrace.

Masquerading as an Indian, professionally engaging in an ''enrollment'' fiasco with a Cherokee tribe, marching in the streets of Denver as a member in good standing of the American Indian Movement, using other scholars' work as his own and interpreting his own version of history from an unfettered imagination, professor Churchill has disgraced himself and the people he presumes to represent. The shame of this fiasco is that the alternative historical narrative of America, which Churchill has claimed as his own research domain, does not have to be exaggerated or falsified. It is there for anyone to see and recount in all its bloody reality.

...but then falls into the very hole she just identified:

Indeed, the awful historical experience of American Indians of the last 500 years is a verifiable history of genocide and disenfranchisement and bare survival. The crimes of identity theft and academic lying perpetuated by Churchill are not just a matter of disrespect for an emerging discipline, as the committee suggests. They are in danger of becoming institutionalized if the University of Colorado does not understand that American Indian studies as interpreted through the ideological filter of the colonial paradigm of ethnic studies provides the impetus for such crimes.

I would like to say that the Churchill matter will not affect Indian studies and that the substantial academic work that Native scholars have achieved in the past decades will continue. Yet that is for the future to behold. We in Indian studies have often worried that our autonomous academic disciplinary development over the past 30 years has not been taken seriously by related disciplines, and we therefore have often failed to embrace ethnic studies because of its colonial ambiguity and comparative approach.

Jolie Rouge
12-12-2006, 02:42 PM
New School Students Cheer Ward Churchill Speech
By ANNIE KARNI -- Special to the Sun
December 12, 2006

An ethnic studies professor from the University of Colorado, Ward Churchill, received a standing ovation last night from a crowd of more than 200 New School students after blaming the 2001 World Trade Center attacks on America's support of Israel and its sanctions against Iraq in 1996.

In a two-hour speech at the New School titled "Sterilizing History: The Fabrication of Innocent Americans" delivered without notes, Mr. Churchill traced what he called a pattern of mass murder as American foreign policy from the time of the country's inception to the events of September 11, 2001, which he said the country was essentially asking for.

Mr. Churchill also called the president of the New School, Robert Kerrey, a former senator of Nebraska, a "mass murder and serial killer to boot" for having served in Thanh Phong, Vietnam. Mr. Churchill also served in Vietnam, an act for which he said he has spent the rest of his life apologizing.

Mr. Churchill received cheers from the audience for comparing Mr. Kerrey to the serial killer Charles Manson. "That's who you've got moral equivalency in the president's chair at this institution," Mr. Churchill said. "How about a cage rather than a president's suite?"

Mr. Churchill was invited to the New School by a student group, the Women of Color. The university was not involved in the invitation. "We brought him here because he offers a framework in which we can conceptualize the struggles our community is dealing with," a junior at the New School, Jamila Thompson, said. "A person's work should be engaged critically, and his work allows us to build broad-based networks with Native Americans, Latinos, and anti-racist whites."

Mr. Churchill arrived on the national stage after September 11, 2001, when he wrote that many victims of the World Trade Center attacks were "little Eichmanns," comparing them to the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann because they worked as technocrats of an evil empire.

While students yesterday jumped to his defense, arguing that his "little Eichmann" statement was taken out of context when it was publicized on Fox News, Mr. Churchill yesterday seemed happier to cultivate his image as a provocative figure than to defend himself. "The only people who consider me controversial are little Eichmanns themselves," he said, again inciting peels of laughter from the audience of New School students.

While campus police were out in force and metal detectors were set up outside the auditorium for Mr. Churchill's appearance due to fear of a possible attack against the professor, the talk drew little protest from the student body.

Only one student group, the Free Thought Coalition, posted fliers on campus yesterday objecting to Mr. Churchill's appearance on campus.

Mr. Churchill's critics call him a symbol of academic free speech gone wrong and an ethnic fraud. His Native American ancestry has been called into question by some who think he is not of Native American descent, but is exploiting a culture that is not his own to propagate his politics. "He exploits their culture and has never done anything for their groups," a documentary filmmaker, Grant Crowell, who is making a film on Mr. Churchill titled "Hate U: The Politics of Teaching Hate," said. "Someone like Ward Churchill totally manipulates academic freedom and identity politics."

The University of Colorado has tried to fire Mr. Churchill, but has been unable to take such recourse against a tenured faculty member for exercising his freedom of speech.

Mr. Churchill has also been accused of research misconduct.

New School Students Cheer Ward Churchill Speech - December 12, 2006 - The New York Sun (http://www.nysun.com/article/44971)



The University of Colorado has tried to fire Mr. Churchill, but has been unable to take such recourse against a tenured faculty member for exercising his freedom of speech.

Mr. Churchill has also been accused of research misconduct.

The University of Colorado is firing Churchill for plagiarism and academic misconduct, not for exercising his freedom of speech. The findings of the panel investigating his plagiarism were unanimous as to the fact of his plagiarism and research misconduct, but split over the appropriate punishment--with the vote being 6-3 in favor of firing him.

The man is not of Native American blood, does not have all the academic credentials he claimed, has been proven guilty of plagiarism, and his supposed service in Viet Nam is at least questionable. This is a figure whom the public should believe about anything?

Jolie Rouge
07-24-2007, 11:51 AM
Churchill supporters ready for 'D-Day'
CU increases security for today's pivotal vote
By Brittany Anas
Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Supporters of Ward Churchill are calling today "D-Day" in the struggle to defend the embattled University of Colorado professor and free speech on the campus.

Meanwhile, officials on the Boulder campus plan to take extra security measures as the regents hear — behind closed doors — attorneys' arguments in Churchill's academic-misconduct case. "In any event, where feelings run high and opinions are strong, you have to take the appropriate security measures," said CU spokesman Bronson Hilliard.

The Board of Regents will vote at a public meeting late in the afternoon whether to fire Churchill, a tenured professor, because of plagiarism, fabrication and other violations an investigative panel first reported finding in his work more than a year ago.

There's been a flurry of posts on Churchill-watching blogs such as Pirate Ballerina, which has been counting down the days until today's "dismissalooza." Critics of Churchill say his case is not a political one — but rather an issue of academic integrity and an abuse of tenure, higher-education's coveted job protection.

'Preparing for the worst'

Hilliard said that as a matter of security, he couldn't discuss the measures university officials will put in place today, nor could he comment on any changes in the levels of police and security guard staffing. "We feel good about the level of security that we have," Hilliard said. "What we have to do is provide safety for the public to express their opinions, and safety for the board to get their business done."

CU Regent Pat Hayes, chairwoman of the board, said she hopes the day goes smoothly. "We are hoping for the best and preparing for the worst," she said.

In February 2005, CU canceled a speech by Churchill because of safety concerns, then allowed it to go on as scheduled after the student group hosting the event retracted claims of getting death threats.

That same month, a tussle broke out at a regents' meeting on the Churchill case. An Adams County jury in February acquitted activist Shareef Aleem, who was charged with second-degree assault after a fight with a law-enforcement officer at the meeting.

Churchill, and many of the scholars and students backing him, say the investigations, hearings and meetings over the past 2½ years have been part of a politically motivated attack on unpopular points of view.

Churchill says he expects the regents will vote to fire him today — something he said he believes they've set out to do since his 9/11 essay touched off national controversy in January 2005. The essay compared some victims of terrorism to a notorious Nazi.

Then-Gov. Bill Owens called on Churchill to be fired for his essay in the days after it became widespread.

Supporters plan peaceful events

A core group of Churchill's supporters — including CU students and professors — are urging those who join them today for an on-campus vigil and rally to keep the peace.

Among those who will publicly defend him are Margaret LeCompte, an education professor; Emma Perez, associate professor and former chairwoman of ethnic studies; Hadley Brown, a student-body president; and Ann-erika White Bird, of a group called Students for True Academic Freedom.

The pro-Churchill group plans a small rally at 7:30 a.m. on the south plaza of the University Memorial Center before the regents begin meeting. The board is scheduled to meet in public at 8 a.m. in the UMC to announce it will go into executive session.

Supporters plan to keep the vigil going while the hearing happens behind closed doors, then hold a larger rally at 3:30 p.m. before the regents vote in public on Churchill's employment fate. The university also will provide an open microphone for people to voice their opinions after the vote.

Churchill's supporters are sending a message of urgency in an attempt to rally support before the university's last official step in the dismissal case. "Our enemies are watching — this attack on Prof. Churchill is a key right-wing 'test case' for a much broader national assault," says the supporters' e-mail. "The easier they think it is to fire Ward Churchill on bogus charges of research misconduct, the more attacks we'll see on professors, staff and students, on ethnic studies and women's studies programs, and on critical thinking."

Churchill's attorney, David Lane, has said today's hearing should be public. But confidentiality rules governing dismissal-for-cause cases — which were drawn up by faculty members and adopted by the regents — call for the hearing to be private, according to CU officials.

The regents and CU president, as well as Churchill and his supporters, plan separate public appearances after the vote.

Today's vote

The University of Colorado regents will decide whether to fire professor Ward Churchill after a special meeting and hearing today. Here's a schedule of the day — including official university proceedings and demonstrations planned by supporters:

7:30 a.m.: Churchill supporters meet on the south terrace of the University Memorial Center to hold a small rally and begin staging a vigil. Organizers said they plan to hold the vigil throughout the day while the hearing happens behind closed doors.

8 a.m.: The Board of Regents will meet in public in the UMC to announce that it will go into executive session.

8:15 a.m. until at least 4 p.m.: In private, the regents will be briefed by the board's attorneys before holding a hearing.

The private hearing will include arguments from Churchill and his attorney; university counsel; and the counsel representing CU's Privilege and Tenure Committee. Each party will have a set amount of time to present its case to the board. Regents can ask questions, but no new evidence can be presented.

The regents will then deliberate.

3:30 p.m.: Churchill supporters will rejuvenate their demonstration with a large rally. They are urging those who join them to be peaceful.

4 p.m. or later: Regents will meet again in a public session in the UMC's Glenn Miller Ballroom to vote on CU President Hank Brown's recommendation that Churchill be fired.

Video of the meeting will be streamed online at http://www.cu.edu.

After the meeting: Brown and Regent Pat Hayes, chairwoman of the board, will hold a news conference in UMC Room 235. Media credentials are required, but the conference will also be streamed online. CU said an open microphone will be available at the end of the day for anybody who wants to express "their personal opinions on topics related to the events of the day."

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2007/jul/24/supporters-ready-for-d-day/

Jolie Rouge
07-24-2007, 11:54 AM
Judgment day for Churchill today
Embattled CU prof may be fired today;
Regents will determine his fate in vote after closed session
By Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News
July 24, 2007

University of Colorado ethnic-studies professor Ward Churchill faces dismissal today at the hands of the school's Board of Regents after 2 1/2 years of national controversy and investigations. Protesters backing Churchill have vowed to hold demonstrations at the Boulder campus. CU officials say police will be present.

Churchill has told Boulder's Daily Camera he expects to be fired today.

He is charged with academic misconduct, ranging from plagiarism to inventing facts and even entire historical episodes. Among the more unusual charges is that Churchill published essays under the names of other people then cited them in his footnotes as independent sources supporting his views.

A faculty investigative committee upheld the charges one year ago. The matter then crawled through an extensive appeals process, with CU President Hank Brown recommending dismissal in May.

The regents will meet today in closed session to hear the charges and Churchill's response. They will then deliberate in private but vote in public on whether to fire him.

If Churchill is dismissed, his severance pay will be one year's salary, currently $96,392. It was not immediately clear if he will continue to receive benefits such as health insurance or employer's contributions to his retirement plan, said CU Vice President Ken McConnellogue.

The money already in his retirement fund won't be affected.

He has continued to receive his salary, although he has not taught since the fall 2005 semester. Part of the time, he was on sabbatical, and he also used compensatory time off he'd accumulated for teaching extra courses in previous semesters. More recently, he has been on paid leave.

The nine regents have been silent on the case, explaining that they will act on evidence they have read and testimony at today's hearing, not public pressure. "We need to listen to what professor Churchill has to say in his testimony tomorrow, even though we have read thousands of pages of it," said Pat Hayes, chairwoman of the regents, on Monday.

Churchill was largely unknown to the public in 2005 when word spread that he had compared victims at New York's World Trade Center to "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who helped carry out the the Holocaust.

A panel of administrators ruled that Churchill's political remarks were protected by the Constitution. But they called for an investigation of his academic works.

Churchill has vowed to sue if he is fired. Legal scholars have given him little chance of prevailing in court: Judges usually defer to governing boards on personnel matters, particularly when due process has been followed.

The regents and Brown have done precisely that, said RL Widmann, an English professor who leads CU's faculty council.

About 25 faculty members have been involved in reviewing the charges against Churchill during the various stages of the investigation, Widmann said.

The regents will be closeted with a special counsel assigned by the state attorney general's office as they discuss possible actions.

The mechanics of how Churchill vacates his office in the basement of the Ketchum Building will probably be worked out with the campus' human-resources department or the dean's office, -McConnellogue said.

Churchill's wife, Natsu Saito, continues to be a member of the Georgia State University Law School faculty, an official said.

The charges

Behind the move to dismiss Ward Churchill are questions about the accuracy and integrity of his scholarly works. Findings of a faculty investigative committee released last year:

• Historical facts: Churchill manufactured events in which European Americans intentionally spread smallpox to kill Indians. In one such event, the Army is said to have distributed tainted blankets to Mandan Indians. But no evidence backs the claim.

Elsewhere, Churchill claimed the United States adopted a formal racial code to identify Indians, similar to the code used by the Nazis to identify Jews. U.S. law includes no such code, legal scholars say.

• Plagiarism: Churchill published an essay on water issues in Canada that closely resembles a pamphlet by a Canadian environmental group. He also borrowed a work on fishing rights originally published by Canadian scholar Fay Cohen.

• Falsifying sources: Churchill wrote essays under the names of other people, which he then cited as independent sources in his footnotes.

The investigative panel described the charges as serious.

Timeline

• 1978: Hired as an administrative assistant in CU's American Indian Equal Opportunities Program, which counseled American Indian students. During the next 10 years, he also lectured on campus and published essays on Indian topics.

• 1991: Hired with tenure in the communications department, bypassing the usual six-year review that precedes tenure. Faculty members in the department later say they were pressured by administrators to hire an Indian.

• Early 1990s: Churchill's ethnicity questioned by some Indians. CU declines to investigate.

• Early 1990s: Churchill's work comes under criticism in small academic journals for inaccuracies. CU ignores the criticism.

• 1997: Churchill transfers to newly formed ethnic-studies department and becomes chairman in 2002.

• Sept. 12, 2001: One day after the terrorist attacks, Churchill describes victims at New York's World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns," a reference to a notorious Nazi.

• January 2005: Americans are outraged when Churchill's previously ignored "little Eichmanns" comment is revealed by a student journalist at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Churchill speaking engagements are canceled at Hamilton and several other colleges.

• Jan. 31, 2005: Churchill steps down as chairman of CU ethnic-studies department but keeps his job as professor.

• Feb. 1, 2005: Gov. Bill Owens calls on CU to fire Churchill.

• March 24, 2005: An administrative committee determines that Churchill's "little Eichmanns" remark is protected speech but orders an investigation of plagiarism and other academic misconduct charges.

• May 2006: A five-member faculty committee finds the charges are warranted. Acting Chancellor Phil DiStefano recommends dismissal.

• July 2006: Churchill appeals to CU's Privilege and Tenure Committee. The panel's investigation is delayed for months by a court dispute with Churchill over whether CU is obligated to pay his legal bills.

• May 2007: Privilege and Tenure Committee upholds findings of the investigative committee but splits on whether to fire Churchill.

• May 25: CU President Hank Brown recommends dismissal.

• Today: Regents scheduled to conduct closed-door hearing then deliberate.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DRMN_957_5642486,00.html

This case illustrates that our Universities have gone off the deep end. This guy has had over 3 years of investigations and hearings that should have been decided in less than a week.

He defrauded the university by saying he was an Indian to get hired under affirmative action policies when he was not even related to any Indian Tribe. Case closed, your fired in any other business. He lied on his application.

Churchill’s loony-left politics aside, he’s an academic fabulist, for God’s sake. There’s no way the university can retain him and hope to maintain any measure of academic seriousness. If he’s retained, they’ll have to change their student code of conduct to: “Don’t plagiarize…you know, unless you really need to.”

Can you imagine the first student who’s dismissed or denied a degree due to plagiarism? It’ll be the lawsuit from hell: “You have established a standard that such conduct is acceptable at the highest academic levels of this institution, blah, blah, blah. Therefore, you cannot hold this student to a higher standard than you hold for your tenured faculty.”

Only at Universities do they allow this kind of nonsense to protect Liberal Professors with tenure rules.

If he was a conservative, he would have been fired long ago for some trumped up violation like tripping on his shoe laces or by offending some minority group.

Jolie Rouge
07-24-2007, 12:01 PM
The vigilant bloggers at Pirate Ballerina will be liveblogging the proceedings and protests all day. http://www.pirateballerina.com/index.php They’ve dubbed it “Dismissapalooza.” Also check out Colorado blog Slapsticks Politics, which frames the day this way: “Chickens roosting or chicken regents?” http://slapstickpolitics.blogspot.com/2007/07/chickens-roosting-or-chicken-regents.html

Whatever happens, you can bet we haven’t seen the last of the king of the moonbats. Tenured radicals never die, they just bloviate away.

Jolie Rouge
07-24-2007, 12:11 PM
Fire Churchill for dishonest practices
The CU professor has a right to make inflammatory statements, but his academic conduct is inexcusable. He should lose his job.
By The Denver Post Editorial Board
Article Last Updated: 07/23/2007 10:38:45 PM MDT

The Ward Churchill fiasco has dragged on long enough.

While it has been cast by some as an argument about academic freedom, with the University of Colorado professor painted as a man persecuted for his unpopular opinions, that's not the central issue at all.

Churchill may have drawn initial attention with his inflammatory opinions about Sept. 11 victims, but his real problem is the plagiarism and research misconduct he committed, as determined by several panels that examined his work.

When the CU regents meet today to consider Churchill's fate, they should fire him.

The Churchill affair ignited in early 2005, when the ethnic studies professor was to give a speech at an upstate New York college campus. He had written an essay in which he called World Trade Center terrorism victims "little Eichmanns," a reference to high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann. The essay had sparked protests from those who didn't want him to speak at the college.

At the time, we defended his First Amendment right to make those absurd comments. We still do.

But neither the First Amendment nor principles of academic freedom are an inoculation against academic misconduct.

Soon the Churchill debate turned to his work. A CU research misconduct committee found Churchill betrayed the basic tenets of his profession. A year ago, the committee said Churchill should be fired for engaging in a "pattern of repeated, intentional misrepresentation."

The panel produced a 20-page report that said Churchill intentionally falsified his work and copied work done by others. He also, the panel concluded, engaged in ghostwriting pieces that he then cited in an effort to bolster his writings.

After the panel's revelations, it was hard to believe that Churchill was ever hired to begin with. A closer look exposed questions about that process as well.

Churchill was hired as an ethnic studies professor on a fast-track basis in 1991. But instead of teaching as an assistant or associate professor for a seven-year probationary practice, as is typical, he was hired almost immediately as a tenured professor because he supposedly had a competing offer from California State University at Northridge. Cal State officials later denied Churchill had been extended a formal job offer.

As a result of the Churchill debacle, CU set up a committee to re-examine the school's procedures for awarding tenure and its post-tenure accountability. Earlier this year, the university's Board of Regents dramatically reduced the amount of time it takes to fire a tenured professor, creating a 100-day process.

In light of the findings of academic misconduct, last month CU president Hank Brown formally asked the regents to fire Churchill. "Professor Churchill's conduct has clearly violated the University's policies on academic freedom and is inimical to the University's core academic mission," Brown wrote in a 10-page letter to the university's governing Board of Regents.

The time has come to end the spectacle that is the Ward Churchill affair. His work has made a mockery of thoughtful academic research and on that basis the regents ought to fire him.


http://test.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_6444994

Jolie Rouge
07-24-2007, 08:47 PM
Note the AP headline to this story....

:rolleyes:

Colorado prof fired after 9-11 remarks
By DAN ELLIOTT, Associated Press Writer
29 minutes ago

BOULDER, Colo. - The University of Colorado's governing board on Tuesday fired a professor whose essay likening some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi leader provoked national outrage and led to an investigation of research misconduct.

Ward Churchill, who had vowed to sue if the Board of Regents took action against him, said immediately after the 8-1 vote was announced: "New game, new game."

Three faculty committees had accused Churchill of plagiarism, falsification and other misconduct. The research allegations stem from some of Churchill's other writings, although the investigation began after the controversy over his Sept. 11 essay. "The decision was really pretty basic," said university President Hank Brown, adding that the school had little choice but to fire Churchill to protect the integrity of the university's research.

"The individual did not express regret, did not apologize, did not indicate a willingness to refrain from this type of falsification in the future," Brown said.

Churchill's essay mentioning Sept. 11 victims and Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann prompted a chorus of demands for his firing, but university officials concluded it was protected speech under the First Amendment.

Brown had recommended in May that the regents fire Churchill after faculty committees accused him of misconduct in some of his academic writing. The allegations included misrepresenting the effects of federal laws on American Indians, fabricating evidence that the Army deliberately spread smallpox to Mandan Indians in 1837, and claiming the work of a Canadian environmental group as his own.

But the essay that thrust Churchill into the national spotlight, titled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," was not part of the investigation.

That essay and a follow-up book argued that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were a response to a long history of U.S. abuses. Churchill said those killed in the World Trade Center collapse were "a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire" and called them "little Eichmanns."

Churchill has said Eichmann was a bureaucrat who carried out policies like the Holocaust that were planned by others but was still responsible for his own actions. Churchill wrote the piece shortly after the attacks, but it drew little notice until 2005, when a professor at Hamilton College in upstate New York called attention to it when Churchill was invited to speak there.

In the uproar that followed, the regents apologized to "all Americans" for the essay, and the Colorado Legislature labeled Churchill's remarks "evil and inflammatory."

Bill Owens, then governor of Colorado, said Churchill should be fired, and George Pataki, then governor of New York, called Churchill a "bigoted terrorist supporter."

School officials concluded Churchill couldn't be dismissed because he was exercising his First Amendment rights. But they launched the investigation into his research in other work.

A faculty committee and an interim chancellor recommended Churchill be fired. When a second committee reviewed the case, three of its five members recommended a suspension. The other two said he should be fired.

Churchill remained on the university payroll but had been out of the classroom since spring 2006, first because he was on leave and later because the school relieved him of teaching duties after the interim chancellor recommended he be fired.

The lone no vote on Tuesday came from Regent Cindy Carlisle, who was not immediately available for comment.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070725/ap_on_re_us/embattled_professor;_ylt=Ak45FKp2T6GM8ftTMvzAznas0 NUE

Jolie Rouge
07-24-2007, 08:54 PM
The scene earlier outside the hearing. He’s pretty snappy with those comebacks, eh?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2GdMqYPwF4&eurl=

( According to NBC Denver, those poles he’s carrying in the heckling video are a “Native American symbol.” )

Here’s the moment of truth, for posterity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs9FupCmWko&eurl=

Jolie Rouge
07-24-2007, 09:11 PM
'I'm going nowhere' says Churchill after firing
written by: Jeffrey Wolf , Web Producer
and Nicole Vap , Executive Producer Investigative
7/24/2007 9:35:02 PM

BOULDER – The University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to fire controversial professor Ward Churchill on Tuesday evening.

The Board of Regents passed a motion to accept the recommendation from CU President Hank Brown to fire Churchill from his position in the Ethnic Studies department.

The measure passed with an 8 to 1 vote. The vote was made just after 5:30 p.m. and Cindy Carlisle was the dissenting vote. The move came after academic committees found in 2006 that Churchill was guilty of academic misconduct, including plagiarism.

The board's decision came more than an hour after it was initially expected. It is unclear what caused the delay.

Immediately after the decision was announced people in the crowd booed and some swore at the board members.

Churchill and his supporters then participated in a Native American ceremony outside of the building. "I am going nowhere," said Churchill. "This is not about break, this is not about bend, this is not about compromise."

Also after the board made its decision, Brown and Board Chair Patricia Hayes spoke with the media. "It's been a long hard day," said Hayes. "Not an easy decision for the board."

"One of the most difficult decisions a university has to face happened today and I don't think we had a choice," said Brown.

Hayes disputed the claim by Churchill that the decision to fire him was pre-determined. "The university has, over the last two and a half years, orchestrated an amazing performance, in some ways, of creating the illusion of scholarly review," said Churchill during a news conference with his attorney, David Lane. "We will be going into court to expose the nature of that fraud."

"The only surprise today was that it took as long as it took and we got one vote. I'm always surprised when somebody stands up and does the right thing," said Lane.

"(The other day) somebody asked me, 'What do you think the board is going to do?' And I didn't know," said Hayes. "I really didn't know where my fellow board members were coming from until we had the discussion today."

"This case was an example not of mistakes, but an effort to falsify history and fabricate history and in the final analysis, this individual did not express regret or apologize," said Brown. "This is a faculty that has an outstanding reputation and this move today protects that reputation."

"At the end of the day we had to look at what these three committees had presented to us and what 25 tenured faculty had said and that was really important to all the board members," said Hayes.

CU released a statement on Tuesday evening saying, "The board's decision to dismiss is final. Professor Churchill will receive one year's salary as a tenured professor, but will be immediately relieved of his faculty post and responsibilities."

When Churchill arrived for the vote, he was carrying two very long poles, which are a Native American symbol. People with Churchill also brought drums.

About 20 Churchill supporters gathered outside of the building where the meeting took place. Among them was Russell Means, a Native American activist and actor.

Churchill initially arrived around 8 a.m. on Tuesday when the meeting began. He was wearing his signature dark glasses with jeans and a black blazer, and arrived shortly before the meeting. He was surrounded by members of the media as he walked into the University Memorial Center and hoisted himself onto a side counter. As he began cracking jokes his supporters could be seen wearing T-shirts which read "It's not about scholarship it's about politics."

Not everyone around him was a supporter however as one man, a self-described blogger, began a heated exchange with Churchill which eventually forced campus security to monitor the situation.

Churchill and Lane went before the regents in the closed door session just after 10:30 a.m.

Lane says he will file a lawsuit in Denver District Court on Wednesday claiming the regents violated Churchill's First Amendment rights. He wants the case heard by a state jury. "We are now on offense. That's one good aspect of today. We are finally going on offense," said Lane.

Churchill touched off a firestorm in 2005 after an essay surfaced which he wrote shortly after 9/11 likening some victims in the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann, who helped carry out the Holocaust.

University officials concluded he could not be fired for his comments because they were protected by the First Amendment, but they launched an investigation into allegations that he fabricated or falsified his research and plagiarized the work of others.

In 2006, a university committee found Churchill guilty of academic misconduct, including plagiarism and a faculty panel recommended he be demoted and suspended for a year without pay. In May, CU President Hank Brown recommended Churchill be fired.

Both Brown and Hayes said on Tuesday the board's discussion on Tuesday did not touch on Churchill's comments on 9/11. "What he said about 9/11 in his essay was not part of our discussion," said Hayes.

Both also said they were not swayed by the threat of legal action. "I don't think a great university can be intimidated by legal action," said Brown.

"We (the regents) did not discuss any possibility of a lawsuit," said Hayes. "This was an issue of what's best for the university and we had to step up to the plate and do what's best for the university,"

Hayes also said they do not believe the decision will have a chilling effect on other professors. "True academics will say this is a place they want to be," said Hayes.

"The message this sends is that the university faces up to problems and deals with them and that we are a reliable institution," said Brown.

"It sends absolutely an atrocious message to the academic community all over the country, which is: if you stick your neck out and make politically inflammatory comments, your reputation will be destroyed by the university bent on destroying you and ultimately your tenured position will be forfeited," said Lane. "To the public at large the message is: there will be a payback for free speech."

When asked what would happen if Churchill won his lawsuit he said, "Will I come back here? Yeah. Will I stay very long? I am not of retirement age now. You figure it out from there."

When asked what his emotions were, Churchill raised his fist in the air and shouted "Victory!" Many of his supporters then applauded.

http://www.9news.com/rss/article.aspx?storyid=74224

Jolie Rouge
10-03-2007, 09:02 PM
Ward Churchill returns to CU for unsanctioned class
Controversial ex-professor bars press from classroom
By Heath Urie
Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill tells a Camera reporter that media outlets are not allowed in an unsanctioned class called "ReVisioning American History" on the Boulder campus Tuesday night. Churchill is speaking at the weekly classes, organized by students.
Former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill on Tuesday began what he told students would become a series of classes held at the school despite being fired from his position in July.

???????

Churchill elicited applause and handshakes from the majority of the 30 or so CU students and area residents who came to hear his lecture, which he titled "ReVisioning American History: Colonization, Genocide and Formation of the U.S. Settler State."

Churchill, who did not allow the Camera to attend the class, said the group would come up with various topics to discuss. "I've been invited by people who are concerned with content of the mind," Churchill said.

Churchill sparked a national furor in 2005 after his essay on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks called some victims "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who helped carry out Hitler's plan to exterminate Europe's Jews during World War II.

The controversial former professor was invited to speak in a classroom at CU's Eaton Humanities Building by a group of student supporters who rented out the space. Churchill handed out a class syllabus, which includes scheduled classes to be held Oct. 9 about colonialism, Oct. 23 on genocide and Oct. 30 about racism.

A written introduction to the class states that it "carries no credit, fulfills no institutional requirements, involves payment of no tuition, entails no paycheck to its instructor. ... It is therefore in no sense bound by the rules supposedly governing courses offered in the university catalogue."

Aaron Smith, a 24-year-old senior political science and ethnic studiesmajor, said he helped organize the class because he and other students wanted to hear what Churchill had to say. "We were deprived of his teaching," Smith said of the university's decision to fire Churchill, who taught American Indian studies. "He was one of the most valuable professors we've had on this campus."

CU regents voted 8-1 to fire Churchill because of academic-misconduct violations. Churchill has not been allowed to hold official classes on the campus since May 2006, when a panel of scholars found patterns of deliberate academic-misconduct violations, including plagiarism and fabrication.

Tuesday's class, which student organizers said would likely continue for three weeks and then reconvene in the spring for a "second semester," is not sanctioned by the university. University spokesman Bronson Hilliard on Tuesday emphasized that Churchill was speaking at a "private event."

The event drew the attendance of former Churchill students and those who had only heard his name before through media reports of his controversial tenure at CU.

Tracking Churchill

Last we knew: University of Colorado regents voted 8-1 to fire controversial professor Ward Churchill on July 26 amid accusations of academic misconduct.

Churchill said after the vote: "I am going nowhere."

Latest: Churchill appeared Tuesday night at CU's Eaton Humanities Building for what he said was the first of a series of classes, titled "ReVisioning American History: Colonization, Genocide and Formation of the U.S. Settler State." The class is not sanctioned by the university.

Next: Churchill plans to convene his class on Oct. 9, 23 and 30. A student organizer said Churchill will also return for a "spring semester."

"I'm coming into this very skeptical," said Russell Hedman, a 21-year-old senior political science major at CU. "I'm skeptical that there's something here that I'm missing — but I'm also coming into this with an open mind."

Kelly Tryba, a CU journalism instructor who was holding class next door to Churchill's lecture, was critical of Churchill for not allowing the Camera inside the classroom. "I think any student group should be able to rent out a room and have someone speak; but anyone should be able to go," she said. "The freedom of speech goes both ways."

Two men who identified themselves as event organizers turned away three male CU students at the door, calling them "agitators."

One of the men watching the door, who did not give his name, became physical with a Camera reporter who tried to enter the room — grabbing his arm and pushing him — prompting a report to police.

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2007/oct/03/churchill-returns-for-unsanctioned-class-prof/

Jolie Rouge
10-03-2007, 09:06 PM
You can find a story on the event here..

http://media.www.thecampuspress.com/media/storage/paper1098/news/2007/10/03/News/One-More.Class.Churchill.Returns-3007730.shtml

The Campus Press article says almost everything we need to know. The story on the other link(tryworks.org)is very funny and makes Churchill, his crew, and his 'class' come off like something Al Sharpton would cook up.

From the Campus Press:
'Churchill plans to teach the class his own way, which, he says, doesn't always include the truth.

"Truth is something you aspire to," said Churchill. "It's not something that can be simply taught."'

If Ward had said this two years ago we could have saved our time and money investigating him.

See also : "Two men who identified themselves as event organizers turned away three male CU students at the door, calling them 'agitators'" and to find out what really "prompted a report to police" check this out:

http://tryworks.org/blog/2007/10/03/heath-urie-is-a-flat-out-liar/

Jolie Rouge
04-02-2009, 08:50 PM
In Denver, the verdict in the Ward Churchill trial was just read.

The jury found that University of Colorado terminated him based on his speech, but awarded him $0 for past economic harm and $1 for current damages.

Caplis and Silverman, lawyers who have followed the case closely and host a top talk show on 630KHOW, say it should be seen as victory for CU. Interpretation: Jury found him to be an academic fraud undeserving of restitution.

Denver blog Slapstick Politics has liveblogging. http://slapstickpolitics.blogspot.com/2009/04/jury-reaches-verdict-in-ward-churchill.html

More coverage at Complete Colorado. http://completecolorado.com/

And from fraud-busting blog Pirate Ballerina, a definitive analysis blasting CU’s botched defense: http://www.pirateballerina.com/blog/entry.php?id=920


Since we’ve made no effort to hide our contempt for CU attorney Patrick O’Rourke’s mishandling of his defense of CU, it should come as no surprise to our readers that we now lay CU’s defeat directly at O’Rourke’s clown shoes. Churchill did not win this case; O’Rourke lost it. And since all problems can be traced back to management, CU is the

CU’s Achilles’ heel has always been its own sloth and incompetence, in the hiring process, the investigatory process, and finally, in the legal defense process. CU administrators were aware that Churchill’s scholarship qualifications consisted of a few mostly co-authored screeds on the usual leftist memes, and a masters degree in a bonehead major from an experimental college, yet they hired him as an Ethnic Studies professor with tenure. And CU administrators were made aware of serious problems with Churchill’s version(s) of history long before the “Little Eichmanns” essay re-emerged from obscurity back in January 2005, yet they did nothing.

It took the public outrage surrounding that essay to finally goad CU into action, putting into motion a process that lasted four years. Churchill had every opportunity to present his case, and in every instance he failed. His termination back in 2007 was the result, as was his inevitable suit against CU, the conclusion of which we have before us today.

Once the initial public outrage faded, unfortunately, CU returned, to its happy place: sloth and incompetence. During the trial, David Lane used CU’s own witnesses to illustrate those qualities, and CU’s attorney, Patrick O’Rourke was unable to counter Lane’s sallies simply because O’Rourke exemplifies CU’s commitment to sloth and incompetence. Perhaps he is a shark feared by medical litigants worldwide, but in a civil rights case with a very obvious villain (and admittedly a less-than-sympathetic good guy), O’Rourke was hopelessly outmatched.

And so, of course, Churchill won. It is a sad commentary that CU was unable to defeat a documented plagiarist and historical fraud, but we consider it the inevitable result of decades of sloth and incompetence. As others have noted with elegant simplicity, CU deserves Churchill. The question Colorado voters (and CU alumni) must now ask themselves is equally simple: Does CU deserve their support?

Did I skim this correctly?

The jury confirmed that CU damaged him, but determined that he’s only worth $1?

That’s the best possible outcome.


The verdict is right in a sense. You want don’t universities to be able to fire based purely on political/historical opinion. Even if it should apply to somebody as batcrap crazy as Ward, you don’t want to allow a precedent that could be later twisted to endanger the few remaining conservative professors out there.

He should be paid his $1 in counterfeit money, to symbolize the fraud that he is. But here’s the kicker: the jury gave him a buck, but what you don’t read is that the school will, in all likelihood, have to cough up hundreds of thousands for his attorney fees. Sometimes juries don’t realize that a tiny win for a plaintiff is a huge windfall for his or her attorney, and oftentimes plaintiffs have a back-door deal with their attorney to split those fees 50/50. Churchill will get six figures out of this, mark my words.
Damn fraud.

Jolie Rouge
09-08-2014, 05:13 AM
Megyn Kelly Grills Former Prof Who Believes Americans Killed in Terrorist Attacks Deserve to Die
By Kevin Boyd 1 day ago

Next week, Fox News will be airing an interview Megyn Kelly did with former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill.

The University of Colorado fired Churchill in 2007, when school administrators found that Churchill committed academic misconduct including plagiarism. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/25/churchill

In additionl, he infamously campared World Trade Center victims on 9/11 to “little Eichmanns.” Kelly teased a small part of her interview with Churchill. In a very tense segment, she asked him why he had to be so “glib” in his remarks about 9/11 victims. The Blaze had his remarks: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/09/05/megyn-kelly-takes-on-controversial-former-prof-in-tense-interview-hear-his-response-when-asked-if-america-deserves-to-be-bombed/


“My responsibility is to do exactly what I did, which is show you what it feels like. If you are too dense to get it — OK,” Churchill said.

Later, Kelly grilled Churchill on whether he believes America deserves to get bombed again. She was only able to get an evasive response.

“I think the United States, by its own rules, is subject to being bombed,” he replied.

Churchill, if you recall, called the victims who died in the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 “little Eichmanns” in a reference to Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, who was one of the organizers of the Holocaust.

Kelly then had filmmaker and author Dinesh D’Souza on to help tease the interview. D’Souza will debate Churchill towards the end of the interview when it airs in multiple parts next week.

D’Souza says that Churchill and others like him have influence on progressives because of their dominance of academia. Their views become an echo chamber that’s reinforced because there isn’t any pushback from opposing views.

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/09/175203-megyn-kelly-grills-former-professor-whether-america-bombed/