Matthew Abraham
4/28/07; Boulder, CO
Statement at the EMERGENCY FORUM IN SUPPORT OF WARD
CHURCHILL
To whom and what is Ward
Churchill such a dangerous and formidable threat, a threat
that must be eradicated from the very anodyne and sterile
confines of this fine university, which has been targeted
by the most reactionary right-wing forces in the country
over the last two and a half years? Ward Churchill is a
threat to the military-industrial complex, the
Neo-Conservative movement, the Bush White House, and the
cultural smugness that does not allow us to look into the
faces of the victims of U.S. imperial violence. To
recognize the gross wrongdoing of one’s nation and its
leadership, as well as one’s individual complicity in
condoning—through silence—military actions contributing to
such much misery around the world, is quite painful. Who is
that person who looks back at us when we look into the
mirror? We are not Adolph Eichmann, Julius Streicher, or
Joseph Mengele, but decent people who seek to live
harmoniously in the world with others of different races,
ethnicities, and cultures, right? Indeed, how does one
explain the relative silence within the academic community
to defend Ward Churchill, who has forced us to think about
the implications of silence and passivity and what those
things suggest morally, ethically, and spiritually?
Churchill declared in his “Some People Push Back: On the
Justice of Roosting Chickens,” in a subsection entitled
“The Politics of a Perpetrator Population,” “As a whole,
the American public greeted the revelations [of the
systematic, deliberate genocide in Iraq due to the U.S.
post-war embargo] with yawns.. There were, after all, far
more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a
few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with.
Getting "Jeremy" and "Ellington" to their weekly soccer
game, for instance, or seeing to it that little "Tiffany"
and "Ashley" had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go
with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie
holy war against ashtrays – for "our kids," no less – as an
all-absorbing point of political focus.” While some might
grimace at Churchill’s sarcasm and insensitivity toward
American citizens, I think the point of his message should
not get lost in his rhetoric: U.S. citizens need to wake up
and take note of what is happening to this country, the
perverse ways in which patriotism has been hijacked by a
group of radical nationalists in the Bush administrations
to further the expansion of the military-defense base
producing ever larger war profits for the War Hawks in the
Pentagon. Ward simply provided a wake-up call.
Let’s answer it!
Ward Churchill has forced us to look into the mirror and to
assess the human costs that have been endured throughout
the world due to U.S. militarism and neo-colonial violence.
As Noam Chomsky has repeatedly warned, “Outlaw states can
only be stopped from within, by the citizens who give the
government its power and its veneer of respectability as a
democracy.” Churchill’s “crime” if you will is that he has
indicted the citizens of this country for our apathy, our
inaction, our fear of speaking out, and our unwillingness
to pay the material price that comes with dissent, critical
thinking, and radical protest. That Churchill has been
denounced from Denver to Washington, from the New York
Times to Fox News, from the liberal left to the far right,
from Bill O’Reilly to Todd Gitlin, suggests that the
potency of his message—the prescience of his
vision—provides a prophetic challenge to those seeking to
reverse the disastrous consequences of the U.S.’s illegal
invasions and wars throughout the world. Resisting Ward
Churchill for these parties is a matter of the utmost
importance: If Churchill’s views were to gain mainstream
salience, the philosophical basis for U.S. Empire would be
in serious jeopardy. From Iraq to Palestine, from
Afghanistan to Iran, and from Sudan to Lebanon, U.S.
militarism has shown to be based on a tragically flawed
conception of the world and the countries with which all of
us global citizens share the planet.
Let me talk briefly how the report produced by the
investigative committee is a smokescreen for carrying out a
political assassination in respectable academic garb. I
will do so by providing an example of how the academic
world reacts when far more serious academic misconduct
takes place in the service of empire, instead of resistance
to it, as Churchill’s large political corpus has done. In
September of 2003, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz
published his The Case for Israel, which in Dershowitz’s
words, was supposed to make the liberal case for Israel and
to rebut the allegations made by Israel’s fiercest critics
(Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Norman Finkelstein) that
Israel is an apartheid state because of its disparate use
of legal structures to separate Jews from non-Jews in a
repressive theocracy, enforces an illegal military
operation to seize Palestinian land, and commits war crimes
in its repeated violations of international law, basic
human rights—seeking to enforce a separation between the
Israeli and the indigenous Palestinian population by any
means necessary. As an example, consider the illegality and
size of the separation barrier that winds throughout the
West Bank, which was built on the pretext of serving
Israeli security needs, but actually contributes to
Israel’s illegal seizure of land; it is higher and longer
than the Berlin wall, although the U.S. media never informs
us of this fact, much less showing us pictures of the
effects the construction of this wall has had on daily
Palestinian life. The Case for Israel climbed the heights
of the New York Times’ bestseller list, receiving praise
from luminaries such as Henry Louis Gates and Elie Wiesel,
who claimed that Dershowitz had done the American public a
great service in so strongly and convincingly rebuking
Israel’s critics. A copy of The Case for Israel was sent to
every member of Congress and to a number of pro-Israel
advocacy organizations in an apparent indication of its
value for (quote) “proving Israel’s critics wrong.” In
comparison to the supposed academic integrity violations
that have been lodged against Ward Churchill, Dershowitz’s
academic derelictions in The Case for Israel are far more
serious in that he cites long-ago refuted sources as
legitimate authority, attempting to paint Israel as a
tolerant, liberal democracy that has better handled threats
to its security than any other nation in modern history. In
composing The Case for Israel, Dershowitz, the Felix
Frankfurter chair at Harvard University, borrowed source
material without proper attribution from Joan Peters’ From
Time Immemorial: The Origins of Arab-Israeli Conflict, a
book that claimed to prove that Palestine was empty on the
eve of Zionist colonization; in essence, giving credence to
Israel Zangwill’s famous statement “A land without a people
for a people with a land,” justifying Israel’s creation
while undermining the Palestinians moral claim that, as a
people, they were dispossessed.
Luminaries in the American Arts and Letters such as Saul
Bellow, Elie Wiesel, and Martin Peretz lined up to praise
Peters’ book as a significant contribution to the endless
debate about the Israel-Palestine conflict, which would
provide the definite rebuttal to those who attacked
Israel’s founding and “fight for survival” as “the only
democracy” the Middle East. If as Peters’ book suggested,
the Palestinians were recent in-migrants to Palestine, and
not part of the land “from time immemorial,” there could be
no moral basis from which to argue that Palestinian land
was stolen or that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in
1948. Finally, a relative unknown such as Joan Peters had
provided the scholarly proof that had eluded scholars of
the Middle East for centuries: demographic data that showed
that the British during the mandate period had expanded the
concept of “refugee” to allow migrant workers, who had been
in Palestine for only a few years, to claim indigenous
status. There was only one problem: Peters’ demographic
data was deeply flawed. Norman Finkelstein, a graduate
student at Princeton at the time, stumbled upon From Time
Immemorial in a bookstore and read it with great interest.
He read the text and footnotes very carefully and was
surprised at what he read. More importantly, he was
surprised by the famous names who had attached their
reputations to the book. After examining From Time
Immemorial’s arguments, its demographic data, and
footnotes, Finkelstein concluded that Peters had concocted
a fraud. Although Finkelstein initially had trouble get his
research on the topic published, he is twenty years later
universally acknowledged as the person who exposed the
fraud. You might imagine Finkelstein’s surprise in
September 2003 when he found many of the same arguments and
source material, contained in Peters From Time Immemorial,
in Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. The Case for Israel,
thoroughly demolished by Norman Finkelstein in his Beyond
Chutzpah: The Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of
History, is a fraud concocted from another fraud, but it
hasn’t mattered because Dershowitz labels the right people
as the terrorists while keeping the faces of Palestinian
victims behind the “terrorist” label. One of the most
significant aspects of Beyond Chutzpah, is the clear and
thorough documentation of Dershowitz’s avoidance of the
finding of human right’s organizations such as B’tselem,
HRW, and Amnesty International. What does it mean that a
Harvard law professor can write such a ridiculous book,
relying upon discredited research to advance a wholly
untenable thesis, receive praise from the inner corridors
of power in Washington and the U.S. academic community, and
not even receive a slap on the wrist from Harvard’s
administration, which was presented with Finkelstein’s
evidence documenting that Dershowitz had borrowed material
from Peters without proper attribution? As Finkelstein
points out: “When you’re striking a blow for the cause,
anything goes.” In other words, Dershowitz can say whatever
he likes, as loud as a he likes, as frequently as he likes,
as long as he services the propaganda needs of U.S. and
Israeli military adventurism. Ward Churchill, of course, is
not so lucky since he is interested in the actual
historical record and the history of those people who lost
their lives, their culture, and their land. That is
Churchill’s crime: he is writing the history of the victims
and not defending the genocidal policies of the conquerors.
This isn’t a particularly difficult point to grasp—any
commissar understands it. Intellectuals have historically
served the interests of the powerful, rationalizing
disgraceful military policies in service of empire. As
Finkelstein writes:
The point, of course, is not that [someone like] Dershowitz
is a charlatan. Rather, it’s the systematic institutional
bias that allow
for books like The
Case for Israel to become national best sellers. Were it
not for Dershowitz’s Harvard pedigree, the praise heaped on
this book by Mario Cuomo, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Elie
Wiesel, and Floyd Abrams, the favorable notice in media
outlets like the New York Times and Boston Globe, and so
on, The Case for
Israel would have
had the same shelf life of a publication of the Flat-Earth
society (17; emphasis in original).
So, why is it that a senior Harvard law professor can write
a preposterous book on the Israel-Palestine conflict, which
draws upon discredited source for some of its conclusions
and not face any serious employment consequences within his
home institution for misleading and misinforming the
public, while Ward Churchill can be placed on the verge of
losing his job? Bringing the faces of the victims of U.S.
imperial violence into the living rooms of American
citizens will not make one popular, it has made Churchill
into a loathed political target, not because what he claims
about the 9/11 attacks is untrue, but because the truth he
seeks to make us understand is troubling, disturbing,
forces a recognition of our individual places in the world,
and asks us to assess how our very standard of living
depends upon humiliating, maiming, and depriving others;
can one really rationalize excessive wealth, while others
live in deplorable conditions in the Third World?
While we often smirk when we hear the phrases “intellectual
honesty” and “intellectual integrity,” because the powerful
don’t have to subscribe to these norms, Ward Churchill has
exemplified these frequently invoked, but rarely lived-up
to, clichés in his rejection of academic decorum and
couth, preferring the stridency of the polemicist who seeks
to awaken those who have fallen into a anesthetizing
slumber. As Tom Mayer has recognized in Churchill’s
writings, Ward knows there’s not much time left to reverse
the tide of lunacy that currently drives U.S. foreign
policy in the Middle East, a policy that has set the region
on the brink of civil war and political and economic
collapse. Churchill’s “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens”
simply sought to articulate what any honest student of
history should surely be able to recognize: a criminal
foreign policy animating the actions of the world’s only
superpower will unleash generations of violence by those
who are forced to swallow the wrath of a military Spartan.
Were 500,000 dead Iraqi children returning home to roost on
the morning of September 11th, 2001, when 3,000 American
citizens were killed at the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon in the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil? The
question, albeit painful, is necessary and crucial for
stopping genocidal policies in the Middle East and
elsewhere. That’s precisely what Churchill has sought to
do.
1
How many of Churchill’s accuser’s have taken the time to
actually read Churchill’s many books and to truly compare
the representations of Churchill’s work in the
investigative report? Shouldn’t Churchill’s accusers face
allegations of academic misconduct for not taking the time
to read Ward’s many important books? Churchill’s academic
work, of course, isn’t the focus of this two and a half
year witch hunt to have War fired from CU. We are told that
Churchill is a liar, a fraud, and a plagiarist. When one
speaks truth to power with a clarity and strength of
conviction with which Churchill has, these labels are only
to be expected; after all, the messenger must be denounced
when he announces that, not only does the Emperor have no
clothes, but the citizens who condone the naked emperor’s
actions are guilty for not calling a spade a
spade.”
