[News] A Ward Churchill Kind of Day

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Weekend Edition
February 5 / 6, 2005

Remember Sami al-Arian?
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day
By KURT NIMMO

In the midst of errands today, I made the mistake of turning on the car
radio twice. Both times somebody was ranting about Ward Churchill, the
University of Colorado professor about to lose his job for telling the
truth.

First, it was Sean Hannity on the radio. Hannity mentioned several
violent incidents, most notably the Florida couple accused of torturing
and starving five of their seven children, and then felt compelled to
throw Ward Churchill in there, calling him an "idiot," and then asked
"what the heck is going in this country?"

I cursed, snapped off the radio.

Second, later in the afternoon, it was a caller to Bill O'Reilly's radio
program. Close down all the ethnic studies programs, the caller snarled,
and study programs about women, labor, and the environment because
they're all infested with hate America types like Ward Churchill.
Once again, I punched the radio off.

As I moved through traffic, surrounded by cars, SUVS, and big fat pickup
trucks with "Support Our Troops" magnetic ribbons attached, I thought
about what happened to the last "hate America" prof who had the
misfortune of talking with Bill O'Reilly -- Sami al-Arian of the
University of South Florida.

Sami now wastes away in solitary confinement for the crime of defending
the Palestinians, a mortal sin punishable by life imprisonment in
America. He's not allowed phone calls, is allowed out of his cell but
for one hour a day, endures repeated strip searches, cannot talk with
his attorney in private, his case files have been seized, it is even
forbidden for him to hug his wife and kids when they visit the prison.
Sami al-Arian, thanks mostly to a hateful and self-aggrandizing TV and
radio host who likes to make dirty phone calls to conservative female
co-workers, is treated like a serial rapist or murderer, even though he
has yet to be convicted of a crime, let alone have his day in court.

It was much like this, I thought, when the Nazis purged the universities
in Germany.

As an American, I have this lame propensity to connect things to movies
I have seen. For instance, when I think of Sami and Ward, I am reminded
of a scene in Fred Zinnemann's Julia, a horrific scene where Nazi
brownshirts invade a university, beat up professors, and cheerily throw
them from high balconies, presumably to their deaths. Of course, we are
a long way from that sort of behavior in America ... or are we?

Ward Churchill has received numerous death threats.

Millions of people wanted to do harm to John Walker Lindh, the pathetic
and confused convert to Islam who made the mistake of going to
Afghanistan. Lindh, an obviously emotionally under-developed lad from a
broken home, was made-over, thanks to Fox News and the corporate media,
into an evil follower of the Taliban and potential killer of
kind-hearted American soldiers (who were at the time kind-heartedly
invading a sovereign nation).

For writing an article critical of Pat Tillman, the "all-American" NFL
football player who gave up his career to kill Afghans, and was
subsequently killed by his fellow soldiers, I received an email from a
person who expressed a strong desire to take a baseball bat to my head.

Of course, this sort of behavior is a long way from the organized
brutality of Hitler's brownshirts, but the mentality is there, waiting
to be groomed.
Four more years of Bush, and another war, this time in Iran, complete
with the now standard round of Orwellian hate sessions via Fox News and
"conservative" radio, complete with unrestrained xenophobia and
Muslim-bashing, and who knows, a new brand of brownshirts may emerge.

It can be argued -- considering the odious and violent articles now
appearing more and more frequently in neocon-infested venues such as the
New Republic and Horowitz's FrontPage web site -- it really wouldn't
take much for the "all-Americans" to hit the streets with shotguns and
pikes and go after the "America haters" who, we are incessantly told,
are in Osama's corner, salivating hungrily for the destruction of
America.

Later in the afternoon, since I am an incurable news junkie and devoted
blogger, I made the rounds on the web and found an article about Ward
Churchill that actually attempted a degree of objectivity. "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," Charlie Brennan writes for the Rocky Mountain News.

Although I am certain to receive the customary round of hate email,
maybe containing threats of bodily harm by way of Louisville slugger, I
must say that I agree with Churchill: the financial and government
institutions housed in the WTC, including the CIA, most certainly did
employ "technocrats" comparable to Adolf Eichmann, although I believe
Eichmann is an inappropriate comparison, mostly because the Nazi
metaphor does not fit when we are talking about neoliberal globalists
who are not necessarily racist or specifically genocidal, but rather
money-grubbing rich bastards who don't care what happens to millions of
people after water and hospitals are "privatized," that is to say stolen
for personal gain, or nations invaded to corner the market on precious
natural resources.

Eichmann and the Nazis are a somewhat better fit for the CIA and the
Pentagon, even though they, as well, do not embrace a specifically
racist ideology. More to the point, as General Smedley Butler once said,
the Pentagon (and the CIA) are nothing more than hit men "for big
business, for Wall Street and the bankers," in short, "racketeers for
Capitalism."

The Joint Chiefs and the DCI don't want to shove Jews in ovens, but
simply clear the way for the bottom line and stockholder profit, no
matter the cost in human life or, for that matter, the price exacted
from our shared biosphere. Or, as Robert Redford's character in Pieter
Jan Brugge's The Clearing said to the unemployed character played by
Willem Dafoe, unemployment and downsizing and its inevitable privation
is nothing personal, it's just business (and there I go with the lame
movie comparisons again).

Likewise, I'm sure, Osama bin Laden, if indeed Osama had anything to do
with those planes smacking into the WTC and the Pentagon, would also say
it was nothing personal, just a natural if knee-jerk reaction to decades
of the United States propping up Saudi, Iranian, Egyptian, and Jordanian
dictators and monarchs -- and let's not forget Reagan and Poppy Bush's
friendly relationship with Saddam Hussein -- and supporting Zionist
settlers, to the tune of billions of dollars over the years, who seem to
actually like murdering Palestinian school children. Nothing personal,
just a strike against the institutions and military-industrial-banking
infrastructure that not only makes such possible, but profits
plentifully from it as well.

For Roger Ailes and the Fox pundits, in fact for much of the corporate
media, this sort of reasoning does not compute. It's heretical, evil,
and demonstrates outright hatred for America. According to Bush and Fox,
Osama came out of nowhere -- no mention he was essentially a creation of
the CIA -- and is motivated entirely by an irrational hatred for America
of the sort shared by Ward Churchill. For history began on September 12,
2001, and all that came after -- the invasions, the mass murder, the
violations of international law and the Geneva Conventions, Bush's
torture and rape gulag, the occupations and stage-managed elections --
all of it is a noble and moral response to Islamic evil.

History, as Henry Ford averred, is bunk.

It will go on like this until the machine breaks down and the American
people are forced to squarely face reality -- for, as Ward Churchill
tells us, the American empire is built on the corpses of incalculable
victims over the span of several hundred years.

9/11, by way of comparison, is essentially an exercise in minor league
murder and mayhem, the clumsy stuff of amateurs.

No doubt tomorrow will be another Ward Churchill day.

As I make my rounds, I will invariably, as a news junkie looking for his
fix, hit that radio button once again. Since tomorrow is Saturday, the
morning radio here in southern New Mexico will be filled with the
malevolent shrieking Michael "Savage" Weiner, who will no doubt call for
Ward Churchill to be roasted alive.

As all of us co-existing together in this nation travel down our
collectively shared lunatic path, headed ultimately for disaster, it
appears, in lieu of actual roasting, the Ward Churchills of academe will
eventually share the fate of Sami al-Arian, as mandated by the Patriot
Act.

Having accomplished that mission, dear reader, the incipient brownshirts
may come for you.

http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo02052005.html

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/ .
Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's, The Politics of
Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day
in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.

He can be reached at: nimmo at zianet.com


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