Hate Speech at Hamilton

On Thursday, Ward Churchill, the chairman of the ethnic studies department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will come to speak at Hamilton College in upstate New York. The invitation has ruffled more than a few feathers because of an essay penned by Churchill in the days after the attacks of September 11. Titled "Some People Shove Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," the rant applauds the attacks and viciously attacks the victims.

I have rarely come across such a barrage of unhinged hateful psychosis masquerading as an academic treatise. I'll share the lowlights with you - but prepare to be outraged by this caricature of far-left ideological insanity.

He begins his essay by referencing Malcom X and then saying that on September 11, chickens "came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well." That word "nestling" is a really cute way to describe a hijacked airplane full of passengers - including children - being slammed into the side of a building. In a small irony of history, Mr. Churchill immediately connects the attacks with retribution for sanctions and bombings against Iraq. He subsequently praises the terrorists' "patience and restraint."

"They did not license themselves to 'target innocent civilians,' " he writes of the terrorists. "There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center ... Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? 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."

Not content merely to dismiss the dead, Mr. Churchill goes on to mock them, saying, "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."

Then comes the ultimate insult, a breathtaking callous reversal of history: "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."

After reading the likening of the workers in the World Trade Center to Nazi Holocaust Commandant Adolph Eichmann, I thought my blood was boiling sufficiently so that nothing could shock me. I'd underestimated the wretchedness of this human being. "In sum one can discern a certain optimism - it might even be call humanitarianism - imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11," he writes. Mr. Churchill then goes on to vividly fantasize about the possibility of future escalated terrorist attacks bringing America to its knees.

I suppose it is appropriate that the panel Mr. Churchill is participating in at Hamilton concerns the limits of free speech. He certainly hides under its cover.

There is an absolute right to free speech - even hate speech - that is protected by the First Amendment. I'm less convinced, however, that there is an absolute right to the public subsidy of hate speech.

As a tenured professor of a public university - chairman of a department, no less - this individual has all his living expenses paid by the citizens of the nation he hopes will be wiped from the earth.

Decency is apparently too much to ask from Mr. Churchill, but how about the avoidance of hypocrisy? Mr. Churchill can hate all he wants, but not on our dime.

How this hatemonger came to be invited to speak in the state most hurt by the attacks of September 11 is an interesting look at far-left faculty activists run amok. If David Duke or his inheritors had been invited to speak at Hamilton College, the professors and students would be roundly and rightly protesting the presence of hate speech on campus. But somehow when hate speech comes from the far left it is supposed to be dutifully digested as an exercise in tolerance and respecting alternative points of view.

Mr. Churchill was invited to Hamilton's campus to help kick off the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture's spring lecture series. The 8-year-old campus funded Kirkland Project was in the news last fall for inviting Susan Rosenberg - a recently released member of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization - to come on campus as an "activist and artist in residence." What is consistent about this second-semester lapse of judgment by the Kirkland Project is an apparent determination to lionize figures who have advocated the violent overthrow of the American government.

In the wake of the latest controversy, the efficacy of the Kirkland Project is now being reviewed by a special panel of Hamilton faculty. At the same time, the University of Colorado's regents have convened a special meeting to review their professor's essay. Apparently the fact that he is tenured immunizes him from any legal recourse short of requesting an apology.

I used to think the phrase "love it or leave it" was a thuggish threat - but there are exceptions. Demanding that someone love a country is stupid and counterproductive. Many our finest patriots have been skeptics and nonconformists. But it doesn't seem too much to ask that if someone devotes their life to actively hating a place then perhaps they can seek comfort and understanding somewhere else.

During Mr. Churchill's all-expenses paid jaunt to New York, I hope he takes the time to visit ground zero, meet with some victims' families, and perhaps spend a few hours sealed off in a firehouse full of righteously angry guys. Then he might begin to appreciate that the pain and suffering endured on September 11 was not abstract. After all, some people shove back.