Families Want College to Cancel Speaker

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-speaker-protest,0,685776.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

By WILLIAM KATES
Associated Press Writer

January 28, 2005, 6:12 PM EST


SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Families of victims of the World Trade Center attacks want an upstate New York college to cancel the speaking appearance of a professor who has compared the victims to Nazis and said they got what they deserved.

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The families are angry that Hamilton College invited Ward Churchill to speak on campus next month as part of a panel discussion.

Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Churchill wrote an essay that hailed the "gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that struck America. He said the World Trade Center victims deserved to die because they were a willing part of "the mighty engine of profit."

"True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break," Churchill wrote.

and again... :wtf:

I kind of follow his reasoning, but these were every day people doing every day jobs and they died because of pure evil. Period. They did not deserve to die and as a person who believes in a capitalist society, I have to disagree with this guy. Not sure if he should be banned but there certainly should be a counterpoint to his points. And no matter what he or any other communists(or whatever he is) believe, they were innocent civilians.

yes they were.

WTC was the target. And the innocent people therein paid the price.

The man is wrong.

180

he wrote how columbus was in effect a nazi, with the same nazi idea of taking from whomever whatever they wanted, w/out any moral consideration...i doubt that churchill would call the wtc victims 'nazis' especially when you consider 100 or so were illegal aliens and denied any compensation, and most of the rest were wage slaves....the liars rule people, please don't forget that.

friends went to see President Clinton on November 9, 2004..It was jammed to the rafters.

This guy sounds off his rocker!

Damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

If they cancel the speech, they'll be rightly be criticised for suppressing speech.

If they go forward with it, the alumni will rightly complain that their college was brought into a publicity disaster, IMO.

This professor's writing may well be extreme, but I'll bet the news reports have taken whatever he said and torqued it up by several notches.

that a lot of people who weren't part of the machine died, like file clerks, dishwashers, waiters, maintenance men, children, old people on those planes to visit family, and sightseers.

Nobody deserved to be murdered on 9/11, no matter what they did for a living. Mr. Churchill may not like financiers, but he fails to realize that the top brass rarely get to work that early, so the targets he thinks were there were still in their limos, coming in from the far suburbs out in Suffolk County.

Mr Churchill is entitled to his opinion, of course. However, he's not automatically entitled to a large captive audience being forced by circumstance to listen to it.

His opinion would be more appropriate to a class discussion on ethics, and I doubt the discussion would much favor him.

On Edit: You'll find a better description of his article at http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DRMN_957_3501617,00.html

The article he wrote on 9/12/01 is at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/WC091201.html

Mr. Churchill appears to be the darling of that segment of the far left that embraces the idea of violent revolution and denies the power of Gandhian pacifism.

current discussion here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=30995&mesg_id=30995