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Ward Churchill is a rabble-rousing polemicist, but his main points are pretty good: The U.S. foreign policy is responsible for death and destruction abroad. This has created hatred against the U.S. and those they hate us have long felt they are at war with the U.S.

The media coverage edited out Churchill's topic of the U.S. military interventions and U.S. violations of international law. His point was that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.

Churchill made some inflammatory and controversial comments in his book, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens." Some of them made the rounds on the Internet, then were picked up by the major media. That's when the trouble began.

The mainstream media coverage of Churchill's comments are as bad as Michael Moore's biased propaganda technique. They deliberately remove the proper context and leave out important, pertinent information!

Read Ward Churchill's statement

Churchill said that he is not a "defender" of the September 11 attacks, but he simply points out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. He never said that people "should" engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy.

Ward Churchill said that the "technocrats of empire" working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns." Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with "ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled" the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.

It should be emphasized that Churchill applied the "little Eichmanns" characterization ONLY to those described as "technicians." Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 911 attack. According to Pentagon logic, they would simply be part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's his point. It's no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.

In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. secretary of state, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that "we" had decided it was "worth the cost." Ward Churchill said that he mourns the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as he mourns the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.

posted by Hal 3:34 PM