Ward Churchill is little more than a "useful idiot." In a press release from last week, he said " "The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country." Well, I don't know how anyone could grossly distort the pretty "gross" statement in his screed :
A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less continuously by the "Christian West" – now proudly emblematized by the United States – against the "Islamic East" since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago.
This is my first issue with Ward; his mentioning of the Crusades. Certainly the Crusades were the pinnacle of Christian Imperialism? Or, that was what I was taught. Imagine how shocked I was to learn that the Crusades were originally launched to "get back" what was previously taken by Muslims. Here is Bernard Lewis in The Crises of Islam.
The Crusade is a late development in Christian history and, in a sense, marks a radical departure from basic Christian values as expressed in the Gospels. Christendom had been under attack since the seventh century, and had lost vast territories to Muslim rule; the concept of a holy war, more commonly, a just war, was familiar since antiquity. Yet in the long struggle between Islam and Christendom, the Crusade was late, limited, and of relatively brief duration. Jihad is present from the beginning of Islamic history - in scripture, in the life of the Prophet, and in the actions of his companions and immediate successors. (p.37)
So, really - pick a side here. You are either on the side of Christians or Muslim, which side do you support? The Muslim "House of War" was /is intent on world conquest. It was in the seventh century, and it is (in some quarters) still today. Personally, I'd look fat in a Burqa, so I know which side I'm rooting for.
As for where Ward really loses it, here he talks about the victims of the WTC being "innocent":
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 – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.
The man's got some anger issues. Who do you think he is more angry with? The 19 terrorists, or the men and women who went to work on 9/11?
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