How the left really feel..............

[JHByers]

Controversy festers on Hamilton campus again (Prof likens 9/11 victims to Eichmann)
Syracuse Post-Standard ^ | 1/26/05 | Alaina Potrikus

Posted on 01/26/2005 6:30:47 AM PST by jalisco555

A professor who likened victims in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann will headline a discussion at Hamilton College, a campus that has been a lightning rod for controversy in recent months.

Ward Churchill, chairman of the ethnic studies program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will be on the Clinton campus Feb. 3 to discuss his essay "Some people push back," a treatise written the day after the terrorist attacks.

"True enough, they were civilians of a sort," he writes of the victims. "But innocent? Gimme a break."

In the piece, the Native American rights activist argues that the 3,000 people killed in the World Trade Center attacks worked for "the mighty engine of profit," calling them "little Eichmanns," a reference to the man who implemented Adolf Hitler's plan to exterminate Europe's Jews.

Art history professor Steven Goldberg said it is "morally outrageous" to bring Churchill to campus.

"What is it that they hope to accomplish by bringing him here?" he asked. "What is the investment in this negativity?" Added history professor Robert Paquette: "I regard bringing Ward Churchill here as an act of utter irresponsibility."

Churchill's panel discussion is part of a series sponsored by the Kirkland Project, a college-funded program that tried to bring 1960s radical Susan Rosenberg to Hamilton. Rosenberg, who was to teach a half-credit memoir-writing course, withdrew from the position in December, after weeks of debate and protest on and off campus.

Kirkland Project Director Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz said allowing discourse on a variety of positions is what academic institutions are supposed to do.

"There are people who are going to be very upset, and there are people who think they want to hear what he has to say," Rabinowitz said. "They are savvy enough to separate out what they agree with and what they don't."

Both sides emerged from their camps this week, with dueling posters plastering the campus, one denouncing the event, another advocating free speech.

Jessica Miraglia, 19, a sophomore from Reading, Pa., created the poster that reads: "You don't have to agree with them in order to learn from them."

"I'm excited at the opportunity to ask questions and ask him to clarify some things," the psychology major said. "He has alternative opinions; something you usually aren't exposed to."

But sophomore Matt Coppo, 21, lost his father, Joseph Coppo Jr., in the World Trade Center attacks. He said he might attend the speech to confront Churchill.

"Knowing thatI'm paying for a person to disrespect my father, it doesn't go over too well in my mind," the classical studies major said. "It's hard to claim that it's free speech when you're slandering people who have been dead for three years."

Hamilton College spokesman Michael DeBraggio said "to deny students the opportunity to encounter people outside the academic community is to fail to provide a LIBERAL education."