On the Justice of Roosting Chickens - The Immolation of Ward Churchill

Ward Churchill is back in the news. Doesn't matter what for, it's just an ongoing public whipping. Ward Churchill, for those of you fortunate enough not to know, is a professor at the University of Colorado, and a pariah - reviled by pundits and politicians, a stench in the nostrils of God.

What was his crime? The trusty Denver Post sums it up:

Officials said they are committed to restoring public confidence in the university after months of questions about Ward Churchill, the tenured ethnic-studies professor whose 2001 essay about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 set off a scandal this year.

Though an internal investigation into Churchill absolved him of any wrongdoing in that essay, the public furor over one sentence - in which he compared some Sept. 11 victims to the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann - produced numerous questions about the integrity of Churchill's scholarship and academic credentials.

Churchill's ultimate fate awaits the outcome of an investigation by CU's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct.

In a 5000+ word essay on 9/11, one sentence started ten months of flogging. For the record, here's the offending sentence in context:

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.

That was tasteless venting, but not worth much attention in light of his major points:

1. 9/11 was a case of chickens coming home to roost.
2. The attacks were retaliation for sanctions causing the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, and the ongoing bombing of Iraq.
3. The bombers considered themselves soldiers taking out military targets.
4. Our lines of defense, the FBI and CIA, are incapable of defending us.
5. What Al Qaeda has done to us is small in comparison to our crimes of aggression in the Middle East.
6. The terrorists are humanely giving us a chance to see the error of our ways.
7. We are too ignorant and full of hubris to learn the lesson.

So why have Churchill's chickens come home to roost over the "little Eichmanns" crack when he put forth such a provocative rant? Why indeed, when stunned Americans asked why someone would do such a thing? In the hundreds of thousands of words put forth over this, I haven't seen any discussion of Churchill's thesis.

Why isn't this news?

Perhaps it's the Nazi-phobia that has hold on public discourse. Have you noticed? Senators Byrd and Durbin, as well as Focus on the Family's Dr. Dobson have caught big flak for making Nazi comparisons. Did we fixate on that?

Clearly, but that's not a cause. It's a symptom.

In my opinion there is a cowardice stalking the conversation of our democracy. Any self examination is suspect, dismissed as "blaming America first" by jeering demagogues who equate patriotism with blind support of our government.

Losers! As if the government is America. We are America.

This crap is so September 10th. A determined enemy is demonizing our country to provoke 800 billion Muslims to attack it. Why does bin Laden's message resonate with so many of them? Why do people follow this freak? Now is no time to flinch away from any hard truths we may find.

If Churchill wants to argue that we brought this on ourselves, let him bring it on. Let's give him a public hearing, examine his case in the media, and tear it apart if it's bogus. And if he's right, let's put our fear aside, and profit from the knowledge.

And if we're too chicken to do that, where's the next roosting gonna be?