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<font size=2><i>This is part of the state strategy to purge the academy
of any progressive politics and the teaching of critical thinking. After
all they have already neutralized the mass media. This same academy
rallied opposition when former political prisoner Laura Whitehorn has
been asked to speak and has recently fired former political prisoner
Susan Rosenberg as well. Clearly this is part of the larger picture. In
watching Fox News' attack last night, featuring extensive opinions of the
Governor of Colorado spearheading the move to fire Ward, they are also
trotting out the old Cointelpro attacks, using internal divisions within
the Native American movement to try to discredit Ward.<br>
Ugh!<br>
claude<br>
</i></font><font size=3> <br><br>
The Right has a License to Write Anything<br>
WARD CHURCHILL AND THE MAD DOGS<br>
____________________________________________________________________<br><br>
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN<br>
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn02052005.html" eudora="autourl">http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn02052005.html<br><br>
</a>When it comes to left and right, meaning the respective voices of
sanity<br>
and dementia, we're meant to keep two sets of books.<br><br>
Start with sanity, in the form of Ward Churchill, a tenured prof at
the<br>
University of Colorado. Churchill is known nationally as a fiery
historian<br>
and writer, particularly on Indian matters. Back in 2001, after
9/11,<br>
Churchill wrote an essay called "Some People Push Back", making
the simple<br>
point, in his words, that "if U.S. foreign policy results in
widespread<br>
death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of
that<br>
destruction is returned."<br><br>
That piece was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting
Chickens.<br>
On the matter of those killed in the 9/11 attacks, Churchill wrote<br>
recently, "It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military
target, or<br>
that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following
the<br>
logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have
consistently<br>
sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad 1991 this<br>
placement of an element of the American 'command and control<br>
infrastructure' in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the
Trade<br>
Center itself into a 'legitimate' target."<br><br>
At this point Churchill could have specifically mentioned the
infamous<br>
bombing of the Amariya civilian shelter in Baghdad in January, 1991,
with<br>
400 deaths, almost all women and children, all subsequently identified
and<br>
named by the Iraqis. To this day the US government says it was an
OK<br>
target.<br><br>
Churchill concludes, "If the U.S. public is prepared to accept
these<br>
'standards' when they are routinely applied to other people, they should
be<br>
not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them. ... It
should<br>
be emphasized that I applied the 'little Eichmanns' characterization
only<br>
to those [World Trade Center workers] described as 'technicians.' Thus,
it<br>
was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service
workers,<br>
firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack. According
to<br>
Pentagon logic, [they] were simply part of the collateral damage.
Ugly?<br>
Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's my point. It's no less ugly, painful
or<br>
dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or
anyone<br>
else." I'm glad he puts that gloss in about the targets of his<br>
characterization, thus clarifying what did read like a blanket<br>
stigmatization of the WTC inhabitants in his original paper.<br><br>
A storm has burst over Churchill's head, with protests by Governor
Pataki<br>
and others at his scheduled participation on a panel at Hamilton
College<br>
called "Limits of Dissent." In Colorado he's resigned his
chairmanship of<br>
the department of ethnic studies, and politicians, fired up by the mad
dogs<br>
on the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by Lord O'Reilly of
the<br>
Loofah on Fox, are howling for his eviction from his job.<br><br>
Why should Churchill apologize for anything? Is it a crime to say
that<br>
chickens can come home to roost and that the way to protect American
lives<br>
from terrorism is to respect international law? I don't think he
should<br>
have resigned as department chair. Let them drag him out by main
force.<br><br>
So much for the voice of sanity. Now for the dementia of the right. The
New<br>
Republic's Tom Frank (not the Frank, please note, who just wrote a
book<br>
about Kansas) describes in TNR how he recently sat in on an antiwar
panel<br>
in Washington.<br><br>
Frank listened to Stan Goff, a former Delta Force soldier and
current<br>
organizer for Military Families Speak Out, whose speech duly moved Frank
to<br>
write that "what I needed was a Republican like Arnold
[Schwarzenegger] who<br>
would walk up to [Goff] and punch him in the face."<br><br>
Then upon Frank's outraged ears fell the views of International
Socialist<br>
Review editorial board member Sherry Wolf, who asserted that Iraqis had
a<br>
"right" to rebel against occupation, prompting TNR's man to
confide to his<br>
readers that "these weren't harmless lefties. I didn't want Nancy
Pelosi<br>
talking sense to them; I wanted John Ashcroft to come busting through
the<br>
wall with a submachine gun to round everyone up for an immediate trip
to<br>
Gitmo, with Charles Graner on hand for interrogation."<br><br>
After Wolf quoted Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy's defense
of<br>
the right to resist, Frank confided to The New Republic's readers,
"Maybe<br>
sometimes you just want to be on the side of whoever is more likely to
take<br>
a bunker buster to Arundhati Roy."<br><br>
Now suppose Churchill had talked about Schwarzenegger's war on the poor
in<br>
California and called on someone to punch the guv in the face, or have
a<br>
jovial Graner force Pataki to masturbate what remain of
Schwarzenegger's<br>
steroid-shriveled genitals, or have Ann Coulter rub her knickers in
his<br>
face or get blown up by a bomb? He'd be out of his job in a
minute.<br><br>
Right-wing mad dogs are licensed to write anything, and in our<br>
Coulter-culture they do, just so they can burnish their profiles and
get<br>
invited on Fox talk shows. Why else would Tony Blankley call on the<br>
Washington Times editorial page for Hersh to be imprisoned or shot
for<br>
treason? But it's a PR game only right-wingers are allowed to
play.<br><br>
After savaging Churchill, the mad dogs of the right are now turning
their<br>
sights on Shahid Alam, a tenured professor of economics at
Northeastern<br>
University in Boston. Alam, author of the excellent Poverty From the
Wealth<br>
of Nations, wrote a column for the CounterPunch website in December
in<br>
which he argued that the 9/11 attacks were an Islamist insurgency,
the<br>
attackers believing that they are fighting-as the American
revolutionaries<br>
did, in the 1770s-for their freedom and dignity against foreign<br>
occupation/control of their lands. Second, he argued that these
attacks<br>
were the result of the political failure of Muslims to resist their<br>
tyrannies locally.<br><br>
It was a mistake, Alam said, to attack the Twin Towers and the
Pentagon.<br>
Now he has been labeled "an un-American" professor by O'Reilly
and Daniel<br>
Pipes, and there's an Internet campaign to have him stripped of his
faculty<br>
position. So write to all the appropriate names, defending Churchill
and<br>
Alam; and if you feel like a pleasant outing to execrate Frank and The
New<br>
Republic, there'll be a demonstration sponsored by the DC Anti-War
Network,<br>
the DC chapter of the ISO and others at 5 pm on Friday, February
11,<br>
outside TNR's DC editorial offices at 1331 H Street.<br><br>
Afterword: Latest word from Colorado since this column went to press
last<br>
Wednesday in the print edition of The Nation, is that the
university's<br>
Inquisition team has taken time out, for a month, so that they can
read<br>
everything Ward Churchill has ever written. A month? That's like saying
you<br>
need only a year to read the works of Alexander Dumas, which would
mean<br>
reading a couple of novels a day. This job will take those UC officials
a<br>
lot longer than that. Ward is a very prolific guy and he's been at it
for<br>
many years. And, yes, this is the same University of Colorado whose<br>
officials decided last year to take no firm disciplinary action after
Katie<br>
Hnida and two other women charged they had been raped or assaulted
by<br>
members of the UC football team, also that Coach Gary Barnett's staff
had<br>
staged porno movie showings for potential team recruits, also
promising<br>
them easy sex if they signed on. Once again, two sets of books. For
rapists<br>
and procurers a wink and a nod; for political commentary, a full
press<br>
persecution and threats of termination. Hnida told Katie Couric a few
days<br>
ago that her lawyers are actively pursuing legal sanctions.<br><br>
Copyright © 2005. All rights reserved. CounterPunch is a project of
the<br>
Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity.<br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
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