Controversial CU prof resigns as department chair (over 9-11 essay)

[intheflow]

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2684392,00.html

Controversial CU prof resigns as department chair
By Howard Pankratz
Denver Post Staff Writer

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, under fire for comparing victims of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attack to Nazis, resigned today as chairman of CU's ethnic studies department but will continue on as a teacher.

(snip)

"I have never characterized all the Sept. 11 victims as Nazis. What I said was that the 'technocrats of empire' working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of 'little Eichmanns.' 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," Churchill said.

Churchill said he isn't a "defender" of the Sept. 11 attacks, but meant to point out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, "we cannot feign innocence when some of the destruction is returned."

In Churchill's essay, he said the Pentagon was a military target, "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."

(snip)

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External links/more information

Churchill's essay in question: "Some People Push Back" On the Justice of Roosting Chickens

Churchill, a Native American, has compared the oppression, enslavement, torture, relocation and extermination of Native Americans in America to the genocide Jews experienced at the hands of the Nazi's in his book "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present."

Churchill's ZNet HomePage