http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=437Adios Ward Churchill, 9/11 Official Version Guardian
Tuesday June 27th 2006, 1:04 pm
It was obvious from the start the University of Colorado intended to fire professor Ward Churchill. Colorado governor Bill Owens, state lawmakers, and the neocon choir in the corporate media, most notably Fox News attack dog Bill O’Reilly, leaned unrelentingly on CU to fire the professor.
“Today, I issued to Professor Churchill a notice of intent to dismiss him from his faculty position at the University of Colorado Boulder,” declared CU Interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano, according to Denver’s ABC 7 News. “A committee last year began to look at his writings including his essay on 9/11,” DiStefano continues. “We determined his writings were protected under the First Amendment. However, during that process there were allegations of research misconduct.”
Of course, thousands of professors and academic staff at universities and colleges across the country, if investigated with the fine tooth comb used on Churchill, would also face termination for various infractions and violations of the rules. In short, regardless of DiStefano’s assertion, the University of Colorado is firing Ward Churchill for his political views under the cover of academic misconduct. In America, circa 2006, the First Amendment is in a coma as a result of neocon thugs, engaged in drive-by attacks on political opponents.
However, in a very significant way, in regard to the events of nine eleven, there is no difference between Ward Churchill and the neocons. Both embrace the official version of events: a medieval Wahabbi fanatic, hooked up to a kidney dialysis machine in an Afghan cave, commanded nineteen hijackers who managed to not only make NORAD stand down, but defied the laws of physics.
Churchill buys into this absurd fairy tale because he likes the idea of Arabs and Muslims, admittedly long term victims of Western imperialism, striking back against the Dark Empire and its “little Eichmanns” on site at the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
As for the neocons, they only deviate from Churchill’s take in their belief Osama and crew attacked the United States due to an irrational adherence to an “unforgiving Islam,” as Mona Eltahawy characterized Wahhabism for the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post. For neocons, radical Islam has replaced Marxism, so-called “leftist” ideologies, and Arab nationalism as the most ominous threat to Western civilization, that is to say oligarchic mercantilism, i.e., multinational corporate globalism (neocons call this “democracy”). For Churchill, it is the cutting edge of a force capable of taking down the imperialistic hegemony of the United States.
Unfortunately, far too may folks on the left side of the political paradigm buy into Churchill’s nonsensical and flawed critique of nine eleven, joining the likes of Noam Chomsky and the gatekeeper Amy Goodman, to name but two.
“Churchill has stated that if you don’t believe the official version of 911, you are a racist, for you are denying the capacity of Arabs to execute such a maneuver. This line of reasoning merely props up the official story with ‘we deserved it’ rhetoric,” writes Judy Andreas, paraphrasing Webster Griffin Tarpley.
In other words, employing racist stigmatization and his penchant for bombastic delivery, Ward Churchill serves as the attack dog for and guardian of the official version on the so-called “left,” where political correctness rules triumphant. For neocons, no such trickery and threats are required, since the vast majority of neocons and their camp followers and cheerleaders are motivated by a xenophobic hatred of Arabs and Islam.
Now that Ward Churchill has been relieved of his duties at the University of Colorado, he may think seriously about going on the road with his supposed nemesis, the neocon David Horowitz (a former Marxist; Churchill flirted with Marxism, more specifically Trotskyism, as noted by Louis Proyect). Churchill and Horowitz, not unlike the LSD dizzy Timothy Leary and Watergate criminal G. Gordon Liddy before them, “debated” at George Washington University.
Otherwise, chances are good Ward Churchill will slip into obscurity, as Horowitz would have if he had not jumped on the neocon bandwagon, trading in his Marxism for a refashioned version of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution,” as strident in attacking Islam and the enemies of Israel as Churchill is in attacking those of us who know the official version of nine eleven is nothing short of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.