NEWS: Professor May be Fired for Incendiary Comments

POLITICS: Professor May be Fired for Incendiary Comments

Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado may be fired for comparing the victims of the World Trade Center attacks to Nazi war criminals.

Firing him probably isn’t the right call. People have the right to say stupid and offensive things, including professors.

What he said sure was offensive, though. If everyone murdered by Al Qaeda terrorists in the World Trade Center is the moral equivalent of a Nazi war criminal - including corporate CEOs, janitors, firemen, and foreign tourists who sought out a nice view of Manhattan - then everyone who sets foot on American soil is the moral equivalent of a Nazi war criminal. Any of us could have been in those buildings. Lots of us were.

Hmm, poor wording on his part, but what he said was ultimately true. People don't kill other people randomly or without reason, 9/11 was a comeuppance. I'm not saying it was justified in any way at all, though, but in the attackers' minds this was in retaliation for everything bad we ever did in the middle-east.

Might this be blown a little out of proportion?

this was discussed at length here.

And you know, looking at the whole thing... this Churchill guy, because he works for a state university (and technically works for the government), he's far more complicit than most anyone killed. GNN asks if the secretaries deserved death because they kept the evil machine caffinated

"are you now, or have you ever been, a terrorist sympathiser"

It disgusts me that this is such a huge deal, and that people are trying to fire him over it. His RIGHT to say whatever the hell he wants is guaranteed in the constitution. Its the same right that allows abortion protests, or picketing AIDS victim's funerals. Its the same right that allows O'Reilly and Hannity to spout off on this subject. but a lot of people just don't get that.
So maybe his comments were a little over the top/out of line/inappropriate. he still has the right to say it, just like any one of us.

it probably wasn't meant to be as offensive as everyone made it out to be...most of al quaeda sees any american as a war criminal. it isn't much better than the way our own governtment sees us either in all reality. those attacks were very preventable..planes don't veer that far off course without ringing some alarms and they had caught wind of the attacks well before they happened. they let it go without a hitch..and the people end up no more than casualities of war. americas forign policies defintely need to be worked on...we shouldn't be a scolding father standing over "our children" with a belt waiting for a mistake. Now we've got our heads shoved farther up everyones ass moreso than ever..
i'm not saying it was deserved...by no means should that many people have their lives stripped from them.
i'm saying that this guy has a good idea of what is going on...but noone has probably even begun to put a scratch on what really happened. we'll be kept in the dark as long as possible.

The more we purge Nazi analogies from discussion, the more focused these discussions will become. They bring in too much superfluous context and unnecessarily poke at old wounds. I don't necessarily think he should be fired for it, but he should definitely catch plenty of organizational heat. This is like Godwin's Law taken to the real world, and I can't say I'm too mad about it.

I completely agree.

Unfortunately the people who died at the World Trade Center (God rest their souls) were indeed killed because of American abuses abroad. What Churchill was trying to say is absolutely true. He had no right whatsoever to liken them to Nazi war criminals, though. Even if the attacks on September 11 were "deserved" or "instigated" on our part , it doesn't excuse them at all. To talk about this subject demands following a very fine line, but the University of Colorado should take steps to punish Churchill. I don't know if firing him is necessary. Perhaps a suspension is in order.

bleeah bleeah bleeah. you don't yell 'fire!' in a crowded movie theater, and you don't say what he said. sometimes some tiny little black part of my soul hates free speech.

A comeuppance? Maybe the Pentagon, yes.
The attack on the WTC was mass murder. Those cowards killed innocent people who had nothing to do with what goes on in the middle-east. The reasons they did it was 1. They follow a twisted offshoot of a basically peaceful religion. 2. They wanted to make a statement 3. They wanted to cripple the American economy 4. They wanted to kill as many people as possible.
You didn't have the cloud of ashes over your house and the smell of the dead in your nostrils for weeks afterward.
How dare he sully the memory of thousands of people who were only in the wrong place at the wrong time by comparing them to a Nazi?
It needs to be blown out of proportion.

as an american, i can say i never had me hometown occupied by another military force other than our own. If i were these people i would me mad too, but that does not justify the terrorist attacks. but like the nazis persocuted the jew so we persocute the terrorist, in our counrty and their own. whos religion conflicts with our own, kinda like the nazis and jews. cept this time, the opressed struck back. churchill kinda has a point

What a dumb comparison. Yelling 'fire' in a theater could get people killed. Who is physically threatened by his statements?

what i meant was, you don't yell 'fire!' in a crowded movie theater without suffering the consequences, and you don't say what he said without suffering the consequences. he shit in his bed and now the board of regents at CU is making him eat it. i love it.

Sometimes some tiny little black part of my soul hates free speech in the hands of idiots.

Let's all reflect on that, shall we?

you and me both. which is why i started the 1st thread about ward churchill to begin with

That was a test.

Hmmm.

i failed

No. Consequences follow any statements you make. What you love is that he is getting shit on for saying something you disagree with. I love it.

Yes you did.

It is NOT the job of te CU Regents to "police" the utterances of the professors of their universities.

None of this is me endorsing what he's said. He's got egg on his face now.

Let me be clear about this. I love the world of academia, and I accept that part of what academia is about is that a lot of ostensibly smart people will, along the way, say some very very very stupid things. They should be allowed to, and they should be expected to.

Academics for the most part don't brainwash their students -- firstly, students have lots of teachers during their degree, not just one. More importantly, students tend to be either capable of being critical of what they are being told, or else they're too apathetic to care very much. Memorising some shit to pass the exam is all they care about.

I should stop blathering about this and go to bed.

Anyway -- the dude should be criticised and debated with if his ideas suck. Firing him is a really bad overreaction.

i've made my own views on churchill's comments clear in the other thread, but i would find all this right-wing outrage much more convincing if i saw a similar level of distress over richard clarke's revelations about the pre-9/11 behavior of the bush administration.

but i guess this obscure professor dude from colorado has to be smacked down in lieu of actually addressing the realities of 9/11--and the continuing sham known as "the department of homeland security."

how conveeeeeeenient!

yeah, but there is a loooooooooooooot of this rampant, chomsky-esque anti americanism that goes on in the halls of our colleges here. i mean, ok, do what you want, it's still a free country. but i think it is about time that somebody was made an example of.

that was for TFOK, btw; too lazy to quote

[Edited on Feb 04, 2005 by Koenigsegg]

What scares me more and more about these kinds of topics is the growing trend I continue to witness that implies certain things should not be allowed to be said.

I find it fascinating that people continually liken using certain terms to yelling fire in a crowded area. The reason this is illegal is because it results in a sudden and disasterous panic that almost always results in physical harm as a mob tries to exit a contained area through a tiny aperature. While one can claim that any inflammatory statement can eventually lead to physical harm, if we used that as the entire basis for how we determine what can be said we would quickly find ourselves left with a set number of topics for open discussion that would severly limit our ability to communicate on anything. What I always find interesting is that these things work both ways: talking about the evils of apartheid or slavery is an equally quick way to incite people to anger, however, should we stop talking about these things simply because people disagree over how they should be approached? After all, if it is going to upset people and cause possible physical harm we shouldn't talk about anything controversial...

Further, the Nazi meme fascinates me. I find it works in exactly the same manner these days as the word nigger does: i.e. - a term that has been branded as only usable by a certain portion of the populace in very constrained and implied manners. The joke is, the more you claim about how the word should not be used, the more power it gains. Do you think he would have incited one third of the furor (heh) he caused if had called them all little Pol Pots? Likened them to Rwanda Death Squads? Implied they had performed activities to give pause even to Stalin? We use these terms because we know that the words Nazi and nigger will always get a certain reaction... and because no one knows or cares that Eichmann and Himmler were the rank amateurs of the twentieth century when it came to genocide.

This man has essentially done nothing wrong except make a comment using two of the new taboos: we do not speak of Sept. 11 with anything but the most profound sense reverance and heroism (witness the immediate firing of the NYC civil engineer who told a news company just two days after the event that under official policy taught to all police and fire officers in NY that no one outside of an engineer is supposed to go anywhere within four blocks of a building whose structural integrity has been compromised, and therefore all those officers who died did so because they forgot to follow their training), and that there has been no greater evil in human history than the Nazi War Crimes.

Language: it doesn't have power because of the speaker, it has power because the listener allows it too.

. . . which is rather ironic, because what the "screaming 'fire!' in a crowded theatre" example really says is that the types of speech that are not protected by the constitution are extremely unusual and highly circumscribed.

the reason churchill's speech is protected (even if sorely misguided) is precisely because it has no resemblance whatsoever to the "crowded theatre" criterion. not even close.

i notice that there's no mass uprising calling for the court-marshal of the marine commander who said publicly that "it's fun to shoot some people," even though his words were also ill-considered. hell, that probably won't even make the newswire.


[Edited on Feb 04, 2005 by in_a_blue_state]