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<font size=3>Weekend Edition<br>
February 5 / 6, 2005<br><br>
Remember Sami al-Arian?<br>
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day<br>
By KURT NIMMO<br><br>
In the midst of errands today, I made the mistake of turning on the
car<br>
radio twice. Both times somebody was ranting about Ward Churchill,
the<br>
University of Colorado professor about to lose his job for telling
the<br>
truth. <br><br>
First, it was Sean Hannity on the radio. Hannity mentioned several<br>
violent incidents, most notably the Florida couple accused of
torturing<br>
and starving five of their seven children, and then felt compelled
to<br>
throw Ward Churchill in there, calling him an "idiot," and then
asked<br>
"what the heck is going in this country?" <br><br>
I cursed, snapped off the radio. <br><br>
Second, later in the afternoon, it was a caller to Bill O'Reilly's
radio<br>
program. Close down all the ethnic studies programs, the caller
snarled,<br>
and study programs about women, labor, and the environment because<br>
they're all infested with hate America types like Ward Churchill. <br>
Once again, I punched the radio off. <br><br>
As I moved through traffic, surrounded by cars, SUVS, and big fat
pickup<br>
trucks with "Support Our Troops" magnetic ribbons attached, I
thought<br>
about what happened to the last "hate America" prof who had
the<br>
misfortune of talking with Bill O'Reilly -- Sami al-Arian of the<br>
University of South Florida. <br><br>
Sami now wastes away in solitary confinement for the crime of
defending<br>
the Palestinians, a mortal sin punishable by life imprisonment in<br>
America. He's not allowed phone calls, is allowed out of his cell
but<br>
for one hour a day, endures repeated strip searches, cannot talk
with<br>
his attorney in private, his case files have been seized, it is
even<br>
forbidden for him to hug his wife and kids when they visit the
prison.<br>
Sami al-Arian, thanks mostly to a hateful and self-aggrandizing TV
and<br>
radio host who likes to make dirty phone calls to conservative
female<br>
co-workers, is treated like a serial rapist or murderer, even though
he<br>
has yet to be convicted of a crime, let alone have his day in court.
<br><br>
It was much like this, I thought, when the Nazis purged the
universities<br>
in Germany. <br><br>
As an American, I have this lame propensity to connect things to
movies<br>
I have seen. For instance, when I think of Sami and Ward, I am
reminded<br>
of a scene in Fred Zinnemann's Julia, a horrific scene where Nazi<br>
brownshirts invade a university, beat up professors, and cheerily
throw<br>
them from high balconies, presumably to their deaths. Of course, we
are<br>
a long way from that sort of behavior in America ... or are we?
<br><br>
Ward Churchill has received numerous death threats. <br><br>
Millions of people wanted to do harm to John Walker Lindh, the
pathetic<br>
and confused convert to Islam who made the mistake of going to<br>
Afghanistan. Lindh, an obviously emotionally under-developed lad from
a<br>
broken home, was made-over, thanks to Fox News and the corporate
media,<br>
into an evil follower of the Taliban and potential killer of<br>
kind-hearted American soldiers (who were at the time kind-heartedly<br>
invading a sovereign nation). <br><br>
For writing an article critical of Pat Tillman, the
"all-American" NFL<br>
football player who gave up his career to kill Afghans, and was<br>
subsequently killed by his fellow soldiers, I received an email from
a<br>
person who expressed a strong desire to take a baseball bat to my head.
<br><br>
Of course, this sort of behavior is a long way from the organized<br>
brutality of Hitler's brownshirts, but the mentality is there,
waiting<br>
to be groomed. <br>
Four more years of Bush, and another war, this time in Iran,
complete<br>
with the now standard round of Orwellian hate sessions via Fox News
and<br>
"conservative" radio, complete with unrestrained xenophobia
and<br>
Muslim-bashing, and who knows, a new brand of brownshirts may emerge.
<br><br>
It can be argued -- considering the odious and violent articles now<br>
appearing more and more frequently in neocon-infested venues such as
the<br>
New Republic and Horowitz's FrontPage web site -- it really
wouldn't<br>
take much for the "all-Americans" to hit the streets with
shotguns and<br>
pikes and go after the "America haters" who, we are incessantly
told,<br>
are in Osama's corner, salivating hungrily for the destruction of<br>
America. <br><br>
Later in the afternoon, since I am an incurable news junkie and
devoted<br>
blogger, I made the rounds on the web and found an article about
Ward<br>
Churchill that actually attempted a degree of objectivity.
"Churchill<br>
has been the subject of a firestorm of controversy since concerns
were<br>
raised last week about an essay he wrote on Sept. 11, 2001, in which
he<br>
compared 'technocrats' working in the World Trade Center to
notorious<br>
Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann and said the United States invited
the<br>
terrorist attacks through a long history of violent domination of
other<br>
cultures," Charlie Brennan writes for the Rocky Mountain News.
<br><br>
Although I am certain to receive the customary round of hate email,<br>
maybe containing threats of bodily harm by way of Louisville slugger,
I<br>
must say that I agree with Churchill: the financial and government<br>
institutions housed in the WTC, including the CIA, most certainly
did<br>
employ "technocrats" comparable to Adolf Eichmann, although I
believe<br>
Eichmann is an inappropriate comparison, mostly because the Nazi<br>
metaphor does not fit when we are talking about neoliberal
globalists<br>
who are not necessarily racist or specifically genocidal, but
rather<br>
money-grubbing rich bastards who don't care what happens to millions
of<br>
people after water and hospitals are "privatized," that is to
say stolen<br>
for personal gain, or nations invaded to corner the market on
precious<br>
natural resources. <br><br>
Eichmann and the Nazis are a somewhat better fit for the CIA and
the<br>
Pentagon, even though they, as well, do not embrace a specifically<br>
racist ideology. More to the point, as General Smedley Butler once
said,<br>
the Pentagon (and the CIA) are nothing more than hit men "for
big<br>
business, for Wall Street and the bankers," in short,
"racketeers for<br>
Capitalism." <br><br>
The Joint Chiefs and the DCI don't want to shove Jews in ovens, but<br>
simply clear the way for the bottom line and stockholder profit, no<br>
matter the cost in human life or, for that matter, the price
exacted<br>
from our shared biosphere. Or, as Robert Redford's character in
Pieter<br>
Jan Brugge's The Clearing said to the unemployed character played
by<br>
Willem Dafoe, unemployment and downsizing and its inevitable
privation<br>
is nothing personal, it's just business (and there I go with the
lame<br>
movie comparisons again). <br><br>
Likewise, I'm sure, Osama bin Laden, if indeed Osama had anything to
do<br>
with those planes smacking into the WTC and the Pentagon, would also
say<br>
it was nothing personal, just a natural if knee-jerk reaction to
decades<br>
of the United States propping up Saudi, Iranian, Egyptian, and
Jordanian<br>
dictators and monarchs -- and let's not forget Reagan and Poppy
Bush's<br>
friendly relationship with Saddam Hussein -- and supporting Zionist<br>
settlers, to the tune of billions of dollars over the years, who seem
to<br>
actually like murdering Palestinian school children. Nothing
personal,<br>
just a strike against the institutions and
military-industrial-banking<br>
infrastructure that not only makes such possible, but profits<br>
plentifully from it as well. <br><br>
For Roger Ailes and the Fox pundits, in fact for much of the
corporate<br>
media, this sort of reasoning does not compute. It's heretical,
evil,<br>
and demonstrates outright hatred for America. According to Bush and
Fox,<br>
Osama came out of nowhere -- no mention he was essentially a creation
of<br>
the CIA -- and is motivated entirely by an irrational hatred for
America<br>
of the sort shared by Ward Churchill. For history began on September
12,<br>
2001, and all that came after -- the invasions, the mass murder,
the<br>
violations of international law and the Geneva Conventions, Bush's<br>
torture and rape gulag, the occupations and stage-managed elections
--<br>
all of it is a noble and moral response to Islamic evil. <br><br>
History, as Henry Ford averred, is bunk. <br><br>
It will go on like this until the machine breaks down and the
American<br>
people are forced to squarely face reality -- for, as Ward
Churchill<br>
tells us, the American empire is built on the corpses of
incalculable<br>
victims over the span of several hundred years. <br><br>
9/11, by way of comparison, is essentially an exercise in minor
league<br>
murder and mayhem, the clumsy stuff of amateurs. <br><br>
No doubt tomorrow will be another Ward Churchill day. <br><br>
As I make my rounds, I will invariably, as a news junkie looking for
his<br>
fix, hit that radio button once again. Since tomorrow is Saturday,
the<br>
morning radio here in southern New Mexico will be filled with the<br>
malevolent shrieking Michael "Savage" Weiner, who will no doubt
call for<br>
Ward Churchill to be roasted alive. <br><br>
As all of us co-existing together in this nation travel down our<br>
collectively shared lunatic path, headed ultimately for disaster,
it<br>
appears, in lieu of actual roasting, the Ward Churchills of academe
will<br>
eventually share the fate of Sami al-Arian, as mandated by the
Patriot<br>
Act. <br><br>
Having accomplished that mission, dear reader, the incipient
brownshirts<br>
may come for you.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo02052005.html" eudora="autourl">http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo02052005.html<br><br>
</a>Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces,
New<br>
Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at
<a href="http://www.kurtnimmo.com/" eudora="autourl">www.kurtnimmo.com/</a>
.<br>
Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's, The Politics of<br>
Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day<br>
in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.<br><br>
He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com<br><br>
<br>
----------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
"...any journalist who writes a positive article about anything this<br>
administration does should be suspect..."<br>
<a href="http://users.rcn.com/beecee.interport/" eudora="autourl">http://users.rcn.com/beecee.interport/<br>
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