”’Editor’s Note: Ward Churchill, the controversial Colorado University professor who attacked the victims of 9-11 comparing them to Nazis, while endorsing the terrorists who slammed into the World Trade Center towers as combat teams, is scheduled to speak at the University of Hawaii Manoa Campus on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005, at 7 p.m. in the Art Auditorium on the U.H. Manoa Campus. See more about the event “Ward Churchill Scheduled to Speak at University of Hawaii” His topic: “Speaking Truth to Power: Academic Freedom in the Age of Terror. Grant Crowell shares his 1994 experience as a student and cartoonist at the student newspaper Ka Leo O Hawaii with Churchill who attacked Crowell during his speech for being “racist.””’
As a former campus cartoonist and student of both the University of Hawaii-Manoa and the University of Colorado-Boulder, I was naturally interested in the national debate around Professor Ward Churchill, whose virulent condemnation of the 9/11 victims garnered national news coverage, has apparently interested some U.H. Professors into bringing him back to Hawaii for a “public symposium on civil liberties.”
For the uninitiated, the origin of the controversy and debate stems from Churchill’s 2001 essay and later book, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.”
In the essay, Churchill characterized the September 11th attacks as “rational military reaction” to a long history of U.S. abuses and exploitations abroad. He also asserted that World Trade Center workers weren’t innocent victims, but rather “technocrats of empire.” He described the white-collar, corporate workers killed in the attack as “Little Eichmanns,” an allusion to Nazi Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann — a soundbite that echoed throughout the country in recent weeks.
But it wasn