There They Go Again
Hamilton College welcomes a cheerleader for the 9/11 attackers.
Friday, January 28, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
It's déjà vu all over again. Less than two months after Hamilton College tried to hire a former Weather Underground activist who was indicted in the 1981 Brinks murders, the Clinton, N.Y., liberal-arts college plans to showcase a cheerleader for the 9/11 attacks. Just the sort of thing parents pay nearly $40,000 a year in tuition and board to have their children hear.
At issue now is a panel set for Feb. 3 on "Limits of Dissent?" to be hosted by the college's Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture. Among the invited panelists is Indian activist Ward Churchill, who teaches ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While Mr. Churchill has caused controversy in the past--founders of the American Indian Movement denounced him as a "white" and a "fraud"--his screeds usually attract little notice outside obscure Marxist Web sites and the like.
On Sept. 12, 2001, however, Mr. Churchill performed an act of extraordinary crepitation, even for him. In "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," he saluted the "gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that struck the Pentagon and World Trade Center, asserting that the people who worked there ("braying . . . into their cell phones") and died that day deserved what they got.
Here's part of a key passage (full version available at darknightpress.org):
The [Pentagon] and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center: Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire--the 'mighty engine of profit' to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved--and they did so both willingly and knowingly. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."
Reached by phone Wednesday by Debra Burlingame--whose brother Charles was the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which terrorists crashed into the Pentagon--Hamilton President Joan Hinde Stewart said she wasn't aware of Mr. Churchill's odious remarks about 9/11 until recently. But academic freedom is at stake, she added. The chairman of Hamilton's board of trustees, Stuart Scott, e-mailed Ms. Burlingame to say that the decision to invite Mr. Churchill was "a bad one" that made him "angry." However, "many who despise him feel he must be allowed to speak as a matter of principle. We have insisted that a person who opposes his rantings be on stage and empanelled with him."
Now that sounds like an edifying debate: 9/11 was good vs. 9/11 was bad. In a way, it's almost pathetic to see little Hamilton, with its at least 77% Caucasian student body, pretend to teach students about "diversity" and the real world by carting in rent-a-radicals to indoctrinate them in the theater of outrage. Except that it goes on all the time, at campuses everywhere, and the perpetrators are counting on normal people not to have the energy to constantly push back.
What Hamilton alums, now the targets of a $175 million capital campaign, will make of the latest stunt is anybody's guess. But this is a case where pushing back would be an effortless matter of not writing a check.
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