"Free Speech Champions" want Ward Churchill to resign

This article appeared in today's edition of the Rocky Mountain News.

CU prof's essay sparks dispute
Ward Churchill says 9/11 victims were not innocent people

By John C. Ensslin, Rocky Mountain News
January 27, 2005

A University of Colorado professor has sparked controversy in New York over an essay he wrote that maintains that people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were not innocent victims.

Students and faculty members at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., have been protesting a speaking appearance on Feb. 3 by Ward L. Churchill, chairman of the CU Ethnic Studies Department.

They are upset over an essay Churchill wrote titled, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens."

The essay takes its title from a remark that black activist Malcolm X made in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
full article

It's obvious that this column-and today's self righteous indignation by the usual reactionary suspects- was motivated by the acquittal of Ward as one of the 8 defenders in last weeks trial.

Colorado State Representative, Bob Beauprez, saw an opportunity to score political points with his conservative base and demanind that Ward not only apologize, but resign as well.

CU Distances Itself From Controversial Prof.

Jan 27, 2005 5:03 pm US/Mountain
BOULDER, Colo. (AP) The University of Colorado said Thursday a professor who compared the victims of the World Trade Center attacks to Nazis doesn't reflect the views of the school but that he has a right to express his opinion.

Also Thursday, a Colorado congressman called the comments "outrageous" and urged the professor, Ward Churchill, to resign.

Churchill, chairman of the ethnic studies program at CU, has been invited to speak next month at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., where news of his visit ignited protests. full article

Really, if apologies are to be issued, Bob Beauprez should issue an apology to the Indgenous Peopls who were massacred and driven out of the State of Colorado so that he could sit around and hypocritcally condemn an American Indian. I suggest that people call Beauprez's office, at 303-940-5821, and urge him to issue a formal statement, apologizing for benefitting off the murder of Indigenous Peoples.

Also, 2 radio talk show jocks have been urging that people sign an online petition calling for the termination of Ward from the University of Colorado. They say that his essay is inciteful and is not protected as free speech. They also claim that, as taxpayers, they do not want their tax dollars going towards a person who's speech they don't agree with.

And yet, last week, these 2 same guys were arguing that celebrating an indian killer and African slave trader was not inciteful(to them, of course) and that we should just accept it. They also said it didn't matter that taxpayer money(over a million as estimated by the RMNJ) be spent sanctioning the Columbus Day Convoy because you couldn't put a price tag on free speech. Now they are arguing that taxpayers money should't be put towards Ward, via CU, because they don't like his criticism of U.S foreign and domestic policy.

What happened to Freedom of Speech and the lectures about tolerating the views of someone that you did not agree with? What happened to the admonishments about accepting unpopular views and battling ideas and speech with opposing ideas and speech. Could it be that these people are merely hypocrites who are even more intolerant than the people they criticize? I think we all know the answer to those questions.

Here is the first few paragraphs to WArd's article The Ghosts of 9-1-1-Reflections on History, Justice and Roosting Chickens.

The Ghosts of 9-1-1
by Ward Churchill

Reflections on History, Justice and Roosting Chickens

As ye sow, so shall ye reap
Galations,6:7

September 11, 2001, will now and forever be emblazoned in the shorthand of popular consciousness as a correlation to the emergency dialing sequence, "9-1-1." On that date, a rapid but tremendous series of assaults were carried out against the paramount symbols of America's global military/economic dominance, the Pentagon and the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center (WTC), leaving about one-fifth of the former in ruins and the latter in a state of utter obliteration. Initially, it was claimed that as many as 5,000 U.S. citizens were killed, along with 78 British nationals, come to do business in the WTC, and perhaps 300 other "aliens," the majority of them undocumented, assigned to scrub the Boors and wash the windows of empire.

Even before the first of the Trade Center's towers had collapsed, the "news" media, as yet possessed of no hint as to who may have carried out the attacks, much less why they might have done so, were already and repeatedly proclaiming the whole thing "unprovoked" and "senseless." Within a week, the assailants having meanwhile been presumably identified, Newsweek had recast the initial assertions of its colleagues in the form of a query bespeaking the aura of wide-eyed innocence in which the country was by then, as always, seeking to cloak itself. "Why, the magazine's cover whined from every newsstand, "do they hate us so much?"

The question was and remains boggling in its temerity, so much so that after a lifetime of spelling out the reasons, one is tempted to respond with a certain weary cynicism, perhaps repeating Malcolm X's penetrating observation about chickens coming home to roost and leaving it at that. Still, mindful of the hideous human costs attending the propensity of Good Americans, like Good Germans, to dodge responsibility by anchoring professions of innocence in claims of near-total ignorance concerning the crimes of their corporate state, one feels obliged to try and deny them the option of such pretense. It is thus necessary that at least a few of those whose ravaged souls settled in upon the WTC and the Pentagon be named.

At the front of the queue were the wraiths of a half-million Iraqi children, all of them under twelve, all starved to death or forced to die for lack of basic sanitation and/or medical treatment during the past ten years. These youngsters suffered and died because the U.S. first systematically bombed their country's water purification, sewage treatment and pharmaceutical plants out of existence, then imposed a decade-long--and presently ongoing--embargo to ensure that Iraq would be unable to repair or replace most of what had been destroyed.4 The point of this carefully calculated mass murder, as was explained at the outset by then-President George Herbert Walker Bush, father of the current Oval Office occupant, has been to impress upon the Iraqi government--and the rest of the world as well--that "what we say, goes."5

In other words, though no less bluntly: "Do as you're told or we'll kill your babies."Full essay