Radical professor, lawyer speak to packed room on Iraq, civil liberties
This entry was posted on 4/6/2007 12:37 PM and is filed under US Activist News.
NEW YORK CITY -- A controversial leftist professor and a civil rights attorney who is appealing a conviction for abetting a terrorist spoke at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on March 31.
The event, a lecture and discussion entitled "Parallels: The Coming War at Home," featuring Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and attorney Lynne Stewart, was a fund raiser for the non-commercial New York City radio station WBAI 99.5 FM. WBAI is one of the country's five stations in the left-of-center Pacifica network.
"There is a coming war at home," Churchill told a sizable crowd. "And there (also) is a war at home, and there's been one for a very, very long time." Churchill was referring mainly to the brutal oppression of African Americans, Native Americans, and other groups in the United States.
Churchill's post and tenure at the University of Colorado are in jeopardy. He told the audience that, to his surprise, his hearing appealing the administration's move toward revoking his tenure and firing him went well.
"I expect the (review board) to come back with a favorable decision," he said. However, then, "in good democratic fashion," Churchill added, the university chancellor would be free to disregard this recommendation and dismiss him anyway. The university chancellor announced his intent to fire Churchill after a panel unanimously determined that Churchill is guilty of seven counts of academic misconduct, including plagiarism and fabrication. Churchill and his defenders contend, however that the university's administration has trumped up these charges because it objects to his controversial activities and statements; his possible dismissal has been criticized by proponents of academic freedom. The professor's defenders point out that while some of the allegations of research misconduct first surfaced in the early 1990s, he was not investigated until 2005, at the height of controversy surrounding his activism. Others have accused the professor of copyright infringement in his art works and have charged that his self-identification as a Keetowah Band Cherokee is false; they claim that he is actually white, not Native American. Churchill and his supporters also deny these allegations.
Churchill, a member of the American Indian Movement, opened his remarks with a Cherokee greeting and spoke about Native American history, in particular to the "Indian wars" of the nineteenth century and the US government's "genocide" of indigenous people.
"These weren't Indian wars," he said. "They were settlers' war...colonial wars."
Churchill implicitly blamed white US soldiers and government officials for Native Americans' practice of scalping their enemies and these soldiers' presentation of killed Native Americans' severed heads and, later, their noses alone, as trophies proving to the government that they had killed their human quarry. Churchill said that the oppression of Native Americans continues today, citing the example of Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who has been in prison for the past three decades, on a murder conviction that many consider to be dubious.
Peltier is in prison because of his activities and statements within and regarding the "claimed boundaries" of the United States, Churchill said. "There's a difference between claimed boundaries and real boundaries, but...this is the land of Bill O'Reilly." O'Reilly is the host of "The O'Reilly Factor," a political talk show on the right-wing Fox News Channel.
Many left-of-center activists, including Native American actor Val Kilmer, criticized President Clinton for failing to pardon Peltier, who has been in poor health, during his (Clinton's) final days in office in January 2001.
Churchill discussed the suffering of Filipino freedom fighters and civilians during the US occupation of the Philippines during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The Philippines remained a US colony until after World War II. The professor compared these and other historical human rights violations, including the enslavement and, later, the often violent Jim Crow oppression of African Americans, to more recent tragedies involving the US government. He mentioned former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- "remember, she was the one who thought the deaths of half a million Iraqi children" were an acceptable price of the US and United Nations sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s and the early 2000s -- and now retired General Norman Schwartzkopf, who led US forces against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
The professor criticized prayer vigils, petitions, and letter-writing to government officials and even voting for ostensibly progressive candidates as being far from sufficient to combat US involvement in the Iraq War and what he characterized as other actions as US imperialism.
"I don't have anything against prayer or even against churches, and I certainly don't have anything against spirituality," he said, but prayer is not enough.
He also dismissed looking to any politicians for real support.
"What are you going to do, vote for the Demican alternative?" he said.
"You can't vote it out, you can't pray it out," the professor concluded. Instead, he extorted the audience and other progressives to more radical and forceful "resistance."
The professor also challenged the US's claim to being a great democracy.
"I've been to every demon state -- every (so-called) totalitarian regime, meaning oppositional" to US interests, he said. "In not one of them is jaywalking a number one crime." He was referring to the penalties for jaywalking imposed in some US cities, including the penalties implemented by Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2002 and now a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
Asked about the buffalo soldiers, who were African American men, many of them former slaves, who fought alongside white soldiers against Native Americans in the West, Churchill said that it was a common tactic of ruling classes in a colonial situation to pit different groups of oppressed people against each other.
"They were fighting on the wrong side," the professor said. "I can hardly condemn them myself. I fought in a goddamned colonial army against the people of Southeast Asia."
Churchill was referring to his military service during the Vietnam War.
Civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart spoke before Churchill and talked about the criminal case against her. Stewart was convicted, in 2005, of abetting one of her clients, a Muslim cleric, in making a terrorist communication. Her case is under appeal; she faces a sentence of up to 30 years in prison if her conviction is upheld.
"They paraded Osama bin Laden over all the courtroom," Stewart said. She noted that two very large photographs were displayed on the wall behind the judge, who insisted that they had nothing to do with the case against her but, as the prosecution argued, reflected only her client's "state of mind." Bin Laden is the fundamentalist Muslim leader of Al Quaeda, the group that perpetrated the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and, due to a fatal crash, a field in Pennsylvania. These attacks cost almost 3,000 lives and led to the US's war in Afghanistan and indirectly, through Bush Administration rhetoric, to the war in Iraq. The US toppled Afghanistan's ultra-fundamentalist Taliban regime in late 2001, but is now battling a resurgence of the Taliban.
Stewart said that she encouraged her clients, some of whom remain in prison on a variety of criminal charges, to write to the appeals court judges on her behalf. She said that one of her clients questioned whether he would be a good person to write for her, given his criminal record.
"No, you are" exactly the people I want to write letters for me, because they represent her life's work, Stewart said that she responded. One client who wrote on her behalf had, she said, gotten out of a life of crime and pursued higher education. She spent a week consoling him following the death of his mother on September 11. She said that he wrote that the person who had comforted him could not be guilty of the charges. She added that her grandson had also written a letter pleading for a reversal for her conviction, telling a judge, "Please don't put my grandmother in jail because she's too old and she's too good."
Stewart explained what she considered to be her political significance.
"Intro the putrid mine fields" of US government oppression, she said, "the powers that be sent two canaries. One was Ward Churchill and the other one was me. (They sent) Ward to test the waters of academia, and me to test the waters of the legal system. Well, the canaries didn't die."
The attorney went on to describe her political philosophy while extolling the audience to the mantra "Resist, organize, organize, resist."
"As I told the court, I'm not in the tradition of Martin Luther King," she said, "but rather I'm in the Nelson Mandela tradition" of armed self-defense and armed struggle if necessary.
Ralph Shoenman, co-host of the WBAI radio show "Taking Aim," took the podium before Stewart and Churchill spoke, addressing the audience as "brothers and sisters" and also exhorting those gathered to "resistance" to the government's violations of the Bill Rights and its imperialistic foreign policy.
"In breaking news, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to planning the assassination of Julius Caesar," Schoenman joked, referring to the captured Al Queda operative who has reportedly confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts against US civilians and military personnel.
The radio host characterized the current state of civil liberties under the controversial PATRIOT Act as dire.
WBAI program director Bernard White introduced each of the speakers. White criticized Congressional Democrats for their timidity in opposing President Bush and the Iraq War.
"All they're doing is prolonging the war" and ensuring that there are more lives will be lost, White said, referring to a Democrat-backed resolution calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq beginning in March 2008, with their withdrawal to be completed by September 2008. The House of Representatives has passed the resolution, which is now before the Senate. Bush has announced that he will veto the measure if the Senate passes it. Recently, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has announced that Congressional Democrats are considering cutting off funding for the war.
The lectures were followed by a question-and-answer session with Churchill and Stewart. The event was preceded by a reception. After the Q&A, audience members went downstairs, where Churchill signed copies of his books, including On the Justice of Roosting Chickens and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and the Denial in the Americas, which were sold at the event.
Churchill stepped down as head of the University of Colorado's Ethnic Studies Department in 2005 in response to the furore surrounding his essay "'Some People Push Back:' On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," which concerned the 9/11 attacks. In this essay, Churchill characterized the attacks as a response to the Crusades of the Middle Ages, the US's support, since the 1960s, for Israel's actions in the occupied Palestinian areas, the Persian Gulf War and the US and UN sanctions against Iraq, and both Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton's policies on Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.
"The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course," Churchill wrote. He claimed that neither those killed in the Pentagon or the World Trade Center were "innocent civilians." The World Trade Center employees killed "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. Recourse to 'ignorance' -- a derivative, after all, of the word 'ignore' _-- counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite...[they were ignorant] because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. 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."
Churchill subsequently clarified his stance: "It should be emphasized that I applied the 'little Eichmanns' characterization only to those [World Trade Center workers] described as 'technicians.' Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack." He added that he did not advocate the attack, but was simply attempting to "make sense of it."
The event, a lecture and discussion entitled "Parallels: The Coming War at Home," featuring Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and attorney Lynne Stewart, was a fund raiser for the non-commercial New York City radio station WBAI 99.5 FM. WBAI is one of the country's five stations in the left-of-center Pacifica network.
"There is a coming war at home," Churchill told a sizable crowd. "And there (also) is a war at home, and there's been one for a very, very long time." Churchill was referring mainly to the brutal oppression of African Americans, Native Americans, and other groups in the United States.
Churchill's post and tenure at the University of Colorado are in jeopardy. He told the audience that, to his surprise, his hearing appealing the administration's move toward revoking his tenure and firing him went well.
"I expect the (review board) to come back with a favorable decision," he said. However, then, "in good democratic fashion," Churchill added, the university chancellor would be free to disregard this recommendation and dismiss him anyway. The university chancellor announced his intent to fire Churchill after a panel unanimously determined that Churchill is guilty of seven counts of academic misconduct, including plagiarism and fabrication. Churchill and his defenders contend, however that the university's administration has trumped up these charges because it objects to his controversial activities and statements; his possible dismissal has been criticized by proponents of academic freedom. The professor's defenders point out that while some of the allegations of research misconduct first surfaced in the early 1990s, he was not investigated until 2005, at the height of controversy surrounding his activism. Others have accused the professor of copyright infringement in his art works and have charged that his self-identification as a Keetowah Band Cherokee is false; they claim that he is actually white, not Native American. Churchill and his supporters also deny these allegations.
Churchill, a member of the American Indian Movement, opened his remarks with a Cherokee greeting and spoke about Native American history, in particular to the "Indian wars" of the nineteenth century and the US government's "genocide" of indigenous people.
"These weren't Indian wars," he said. "They were settlers' war...colonial wars."
Churchill implicitly blamed white US soldiers and government officials for Native Americans' practice of scalping their enemies and these soldiers' presentation of killed Native Americans' severed heads and, later, their noses alone, as trophies proving to the government that they had killed their human quarry. Churchill said that the oppression of Native Americans continues today, citing the example of Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who has been in prison for the past three decades, on a murder conviction that many consider to be dubious.
Peltier is in prison because of his activities and statements within and regarding the "claimed boundaries" of the United States, Churchill said. "There's a difference between claimed boundaries and real boundaries, but...this is the land of Bill O'Reilly." O'Reilly is the host of "The O'Reilly Factor," a political talk show on the right-wing Fox News Channel.
Many left-of-center activists, including Native American actor Val Kilmer, criticized President Clinton for failing to pardon Peltier, who has been in poor health, during his (Clinton's) final days in office in January 2001.
Churchill discussed the suffering of Filipino freedom fighters and civilians during the US occupation of the Philippines during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The Philippines remained a US colony until after World War II. The professor compared these and other historical human rights violations, including the enslavement and, later, the often violent Jim Crow oppression of African Americans, to more recent tragedies involving the US government. He mentioned former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- "remember, she was the one who thought the deaths of half a million Iraqi children" were an acceptable price of the US and United Nations sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s and the early 2000s -- and now retired General Norman Schwartzkopf, who led US forces against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
The professor criticized prayer vigils, petitions, and letter-writing to government officials and even voting for ostensibly progressive candidates as being far from sufficient to combat US involvement in the Iraq War and what he characterized as other actions as US imperialism.
"I don't have anything against prayer or even against churches, and I certainly don't have anything against spirituality," he said, but prayer is not enough.
He also dismissed looking to any politicians for real support.
"What are you going to do, vote for the Demican alternative?" he said.
"You can't vote it out, you can't pray it out," the professor concluded. Instead, he extorted the audience and other progressives to more radical and forceful "resistance."
The professor also challenged the US's claim to being a great democracy.
"I've been to every demon state -- every (so-called) totalitarian regime, meaning oppositional" to US interests, he said. "In not one of them is jaywalking a number one crime." He was referring to the penalties for jaywalking imposed in some US cities, including the penalties implemented by Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2002 and now a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
Asked about the buffalo soldiers, who were African American men, many of them former slaves, who fought alongside white soldiers against Native Americans in the West, Churchill said that it was a common tactic of ruling classes in a colonial situation to pit different groups of oppressed people against each other.
"They were fighting on the wrong side," the professor said. "I can hardly condemn them myself. I fought in a goddamned colonial army against the people of Southeast Asia."
Churchill was referring to his military service during the Vietnam War.
Civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart spoke before Churchill and talked about the criminal case against her. Stewart was convicted, in 2005, of abetting one of her clients, a Muslim cleric, in making a terrorist communication. Her case is under appeal; she faces a sentence of up to 30 years in prison if her conviction is upheld.
"They paraded Osama bin Laden over all the courtroom," Stewart said. She noted that two very large photographs were displayed on the wall behind the judge, who insisted that they had nothing to do with the case against her but, as the prosecution argued, reflected only her client's "state of mind." Bin Laden is the fundamentalist Muslim leader of Al Quaeda, the group that perpetrated the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and, due to a fatal crash, a field in Pennsylvania. These attacks cost almost 3,000 lives and led to the US's war in Afghanistan and indirectly, through Bush Administration rhetoric, to the war in Iraq. The US toppled Afghanistan's ultra-fundamentalist Taliban regime in late 2001, but is now battling a resurgence of the Taliban.
Stewart said that she encouraged her clients, some of whom remain in prison on a variety of criminal charges, to write to the appeals court judges on her behalf. She said that one of her clients questioned whether he would be a good person to write for her, given his criminal record.
"No, you are" exactly the people I want to write letters for me, because they represent her life's work, Stewart said that she responded. One client who wrote on her behalf had, she said, gotten out of a life of crime and pursued higher education. She spent a week consoling him following the death of his mother on September 11. She said that he wrote that the person who had comforted him could not be guilty of the charges. She added that her grandson had also written a letter pleading for a reversal for her conviction, telling a judge, "Please don't put my grandmother in jail because she's too old and she's too good."
Stewart explained what she considered to be her political significance.
"Intro the putrid mine fields" of US government oppression, she said, "the powers that be sent two canaries. One was Ward Churchill and the other one was me. (They sent) Ward to test the waters of academia, and me to test the waters of the legal system. Well, the canaries didn't die."
The attorney went on to describe her political philosophy while extolling the audience to the mantra "Resist, organize, organize, resist."
"As I told the court, I'm not in the tradition of Martin Luther King," she said, "but rather I'm in the Nelson Mandela tradition" of armed self-defense and armed struggle if necessary.
Ralph Shoenman, co-host of the WBAI radio show "Taking Aim," took the podium before Stewart and Churchill spoke, addressing the audience as "brothers and sisters" and also exhorting those gathered to "resistance" to the government's violations of the Bill Rights and its imperialistic foreign policy.
"In breaking news, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to planning the assassination of Julius Caesar," Schoenman joked, referring to the captured Al Queda operative who has reportedly confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts against US civilians and military personnel.
The radio host characterized the current state of civil liberties under the controversial PATRIOT Act as dire.
WBAI program director Bernard White introduced each of the speakers. White criticized Congressional Democrats for their timidity in opposing President Bush and the Iraq War.
"All they're doing is prolonging the war" and ensuring that there are more lives will be lost, White said, referring to a Democrat-backed resolution calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq beginning in March 2008, with their withdrawal to be completed by September 2008. The House of Representatives has passed the resolution, which is now before the Senate. Bush has announced that he will veto the measure if the Senate passes it. Recently, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has announced that Congressional Democrats are considering cutting off funding for the war.
The lectures were followed by a question-and-answer session with Churchill and Stewart. The event was preceded by a reception. After the Q&A, audience members went downstairs, where Churchill signed copies of his books, including On the Justice of Roosting Chickens and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and the Denial in the Americas, which were sold at the event.
Churchill stepped down as head of the University of Colorado's Ethnic Studies Department in 2005 in response to the furore surrounding his essay "'Some People Push Back:' On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," which concerned the 9/11 attacks. In this essay, Churchill characterized the attacks as a response to the Crusades of the Middle Ages, the US's support, since the 1960s, for Israel's actions in the occupied Palestinian areas, the Persian Gulf War and the US and UN sanctions against Iraq, and both Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton's policies on Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.
"The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course," Churchill wrote. He claimed that neither those killed in the Pentagon or the World Trade Center were "innocent civilians." The World Trade Center employees killed "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. Recourse to 'ignorance' -- a derivative, after all, of the word 'ignore' _-- counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite...[they were ignorant] because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. 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."
Churchill subsequently clarified his stance: "It should be emphasized that I applied the 'little Eichmanns' characterization only to those [World Trade Center workers] described as 'technicians.' Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack." He added that he did not advocate the attack, but was simply attempting to "make sense of it."