The Ward Churchill Essay

Here is the text of an essay written by one Ward Churchill (no relation to the House of Churchill, Dukes of Marlborough, which House also produced Sir Winston) and originally published Jumada t'Tania 23, 1422 AH, or September 12, 2001--the day after the Manhattan Incident. I missed this when it first appeared--and so did everyone else in the country. That we're hearing about it now is due in large measure to Andrew Sullivan and The Belgravia Dispatch--but also to the students at Hamilton College in New York, who manifestly do not want this man to speak on their campus. (Rush Limbaugh said that he should speak, and get himself into more hot water!)

Read this essay, and then try to picture this: Ward Churchill is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado. But then scroll to the bottom of the page, and you will finally know where this man is coming from: he's a Cherokee who once defended another "Native American" who led a modern-day uprising.

I won't bother analyzing this screed in detail. Gregory at Belgravia has already done a masterful job. I will, however, point out one thing that Rush Limbaugh noticed: Prof. Churchill alleges that the hashshasheen who knocked over the WTC towers were Iraqi combat teams, who carried out the strike in retaliation for an alleged bombing campaign that cost the lives of half a million Iraqi children. This is the first time that anyone on the left has even admitted the possibility that Iraq might have had a hand in the Manhattan Incident. Of course, Churchill's essay is badly flawed on the facts: fifteen of the nineteen were Saudi, not Iraqi--and that story about half a million Iraqi children has zero outside corroboration. His charge is that those Iraqi kids died because our Air Force and Navy bombed Iraqi water-treatment and sewage facilities--but why we haven't heard a peep about that during the intervening Clinton years, that screed doesn't say. And if Saddam Hussein was responsible, then why didn't he brag about it--and did he really think he'd get away with it?

To paraphrase Gregory Peck in Twelve O'Clock High, I don't have a lot of patience with this "it's all our fault" stuff. We're in a war--a shooting war--a war we didn't start. And the roots of that war are not in any fictitious bombing raid supposed to have cost the lives of half a million children. They are in the foundational documents of a religion born in warfare and dedicated to the hatred--and designation as sub-human--of all but the most fanatical followers of the pan-Arab nationalism that Islam actually is. We've got to fight it, and we've got to be clear-headed while we're doing it. And while we're at it, we need to think twice about the kinds of universities that we send our children to, the kinds of departments they create, and the kinds of people they hire.