Here is what Catholic League president William Donohue had to say today about University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill:
“Ward Churchill is infamous for his remark that those who died in the World Trade Center bombing were ‘little Eichmans’ who deserved it. Indeed, last year he said in an interview that his suggestion that ‘it may be that more 9/11s are necessary’ is ‘a no-brainer.’ Unfortunately, what is not being reported are his remarkable statements on Christians and Jews.
“Churchill accuses Christian colonists of committing ‘genocide’ against the American Indians that resulted in the loss of ‘100 million indigenous people’; he says that this ‘holocaust’ was ‘unparalleled in recorded history.’ This claim is astounding given that historians estimate there were anywhere between one and ten million Indians living in the present territory of the United States at the time of the European arrival. Moreover, according to political scientist Guenter Lewy, as many as 90 percent of the deaths were the direct result of disease: the Indians had no immunity from contagious diseases like smallpox. But this will not do for Churchill, and that is because he wants to ‘get the Christians.’
“Churchill also wants to ‘get the Jews,’ which is why he is so bent on trivializing the Holocaust. For example, he charges that Jewish writers are engaged in a conspiracy to suppress evidence of other historical examples of genocide; he calls them ‘Holocaust exclusivists.’ As for Israeli Jews, he says they are guilty of committing ‘genocide’ against the Arabs. And by equating Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the European treatment of Indians, he not only twice distorts history, he downplays what happened to Jews under Hitler.
“Some faculty are defending him on free speech grounds. But higher education does not exist so that all ideas can be exchanged freely—that can be done in a bar. It’s purpose is the pursuit of truth. Ergo, Ward Churchill should be fired not because his ideas are offensive, but because he is incompetent. This is a classic case of academic malpractice.”
