Ward Churchill as seen in his interview with Megyn Kelly
Last night, on her nightly news show The Kelly File, Megyn Kelly interviewed Ward Churchill about his controversial statements after 9/11, the anniversary of which is coming up soon. Megyn said on her show, in her introduction of Ward Churchill, that he had compared the victims of 9/11 to “Nazis” or “little Eichmanns,” referring to Adolf Eichhmann.
You can see two videos of Megyn’s interview with Churchill here. You can also see the interview on Megyn’s Facebook page.
As I watched the interview, it seemed to me that Megyn was having a hard time understanding what Ward Churchill was talking about. One problem was that Megyn didn’t seem to understand the role of Adolf Eichmann in the Holocaust, so she couldn’t understand why Churchill called the people who worked in the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns.”
In her interview with Churchill, Megyn brought up a quote, which she claimed that Eichmann had said while he was in Argentina. Megan said “I read his own words. He [Eichmann] said : “I will leap into my grave laughing knowing that I have the deaths of 5 million Jews on my hands…”
As far as I know, Eichmann did not say this. A witness at Nuremberg claimed that he had heard Eichmann say this.
In her interview with Churchill, Megan said that “Nuremberg found him [Eichmann] in charge of the extermination program…he was in charge of the Final Solution.” To this, Churchill answered that “Reinhard Heydrich was in charge of the Final Solution.”
Then Megyn mentioned that “he [Eichmann] recommended Zyklon-B for the gas used in the gas chambers.”
You can read about Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust in this blog post, which I previously wrote: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/mossad-opens-its-archive-on-the-capture-of-adolf-eichmann/
On my scrapbookpages website, I wrote about the Ward Churchill controversy way back in 2005, and I am quoting what I wrote below:
As I write this on February 12, 2005, America is embroiled in a controversy about the comments of Ward Churchill, a professor at Colorado University who wrote an article in September 2001, entitled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” in which he said that the people who were killed in the 9/11 tragedy were not innocent victims.
The similarities between Ward Churchill and Vincent Reynouard are uncanny. Reynouard is a former math teacher and Churchill is a professor of ethnic studies. Both blamed innocent victims for a barbaric attack.
It was over three years before Churchill was called upon to defend his writing, and six years elapsed before Reynouard was brought to justice. In both cases, it was the victims or their families who started the ball rolling. If Vincent Reynouard lost his teaching job in a French school because of what he wrote, can Ward Churchill be far behind?
Reynouard was convicted of a crime for writing essentially the same thing that Churchill did. Will Churchill eventually be put on trial for expressing an unpopular opinion, the same way that Reynouard was prosecuted in a French court? Will our First Amendment rights in America survive this latest controversy?
Churchill wrote his comments about 9/11 at a time when many people were expressing the same opinion, so his essay did not attract the attention of the mainstream media. There were far more important people, for example, Noam Chomsky, who were writing about the reasons for the 9/11 attack.
I had never heard of Ward Churchill at that time, and I am sure that most Americans had never heard of him either.
Churchill’s controversial essay can be found at this web site:http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html
The official story of the 9/11 attack is that “terrorists” toppled the Twin Towers because they “hate our freedom.” At that time, Americans were reluctant to challenge the most important freedom in America: our Freedom of Speech. So Ward Churchill’s essay did not cause an uproar back then, and he eventually expanded it into a book, entitled On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.
The reason that Churchill’s essay finally came to the attention of the media, so many years after he wrote it, is because he was invited to speak on February 3, 2005 at Hamilton College, a small school in upstate New York. He was initially invited to speak on a subject unrelated to 9/11. But one of the Hamilton College students was appalled that his college was bringing to his campus a speaker who had insulted the victims of 9/11, which included the student’s father.
The college then decided to confront Churchill with his views on 9/11 and asked Churchill to change the subject of his speech.
The student’s objection to Ward Churchill’s views came to the attention of Bill O’Reilly, a very popular news analyst on the Fox News TV channel. The student was a guest on O’Reilly’s show, and for days after this first TV show about Churchill’s opinions, the story continued, as other people, including Bill Owens, the governor of Colorado, got into the act.
Hamilton College withdrew its invitation for Churchill to speak, and Churchill then resigned his position as the Chairman of Ethnic Studies at Colorado University.
The thing that angered Bill O’Reilly and so many other Americans was that Churchill compared the 9/11 victims to Nazis, which was O’Reilly’s interpretation of Churchill’s statement that the victims were “little Eichmanns.”
Churchill did not use the full name of Adolf Eichmann. He just assumed that everyone knew who Eichmann was.
The name Eichmann became a household word in 1961 when he was put on trial in Israel for Crimes Against Humanity for his part in the genocide of 6 million Jews during World War II.
What Churchill didn’t realize is that most people don’t know that Eichmann was not the Mastermind of the Holocaust, but rather a low-level technocrat whose job was to make sure that the trains to the camps ran on time.
Comparing the victims of 9/11 to Eichmann, Churchill wrote that the people working in the Twin Towers were the “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.”
In other words, the victims were mere cogs in a big machine, the unimportant little guys behind the scene, just like Adolf Eichmann who had no authority in Nazi Germany and was not a decision maker.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was 6 levels above Eichmann in the Reich Security Main Office, was put on trial at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal and specifically charged with gassing the Jews.
Eichmann was the head of the Jewish Department in the Reich Security Main Office, but he was not important enough to make the cut. Eichmann got his job because he and Kaltenbrunner had been friends from their school days in Linz, Austria, the city that was also the boyhood home of Adolf Hitler.
So unimportant was Eichmann that he did not even leave Germany to escape prosecution until 1950.
So if Eichmann was such “small potatoes,” how did he rate a trial in Israel?
Eichmann was kidnapped in 1960 from Argentina, where he was a citizen, by the Israeli Mossad; he was sneaked out of the country on a plane, disguised as an unconscious patient on a stretcher.
There were hundreds of bureaucrats and technicians who were at the same level in the Nazi hierarchy as Eichmann. The reason that Eichmann was put on trial was because he was the man who had typed up the minutes of the Wannseee Conference, the meeting where the Final Solution was planned on January 20, 1942.
In the minutes of this meeting, a copy of which was discovered in 1947, the participants had used euphemisms such as “transportation to the East” when what the men at the Conference had really meant was the extermination of the Jews in gas chambers.
It was of utmost importance to hunt down Eichmann, put him on trial, and establish that he had falsified this key document.
After 11 months in custody in Israel, Eichmann was finally put on trial and he confessed the truth, which was that the Conference was held for the purpose of planning the genocide of the Jews. Up to that time, there had been no documentation found which showed that Hitler had ordered the killing of all the Jews. The Eichmann trial finally provided the proof of the systematic plan to exterminate the Jews; that is why Eichmann is considered by many people to be the second most important Nazi, next to Adolf Hitler.
Ward Churchill denies that the Nazis had an official policy to kill all the Jews. To Bill O’Reilly, this is like saying that 2 plus 2 does not equal 4. German law states that it is “manifestly obvious” that the Nazis had a systematic plan to genocide the Jews; this is a fact that does not have to be proved, thanks to the Eichmann trial.
Churchill assumed that everyone is familiar with “Holocaust denial” and that everyone knows that Eichmann was a low-level technocrat who never personally killed anyone and never ordered the death of anyone. This mistake on his part got him into trouble, and when he tried to explain what he meant by “little Eichmanns” his explanation fell upon deaf ears.
O’Reilly and others in the media continued to call for Churchill’s head because he had compared the 9/11 victims to Nazis.
Calling an innocent victim a Nazi is the worst thing that anyone can do. But calling someone a “little Eichmann” is not the same thing.
Eichmann implemented the transportation of the Jews to the death camps, but he also arranged the transportation of German Jews to Palestine before the war.
Churchill wrote in his essay that all Americans are to blame for not stopping the policies of their government which caused the “terrorists” to “push back.”
Vincent Reynouard got into trouble because he wrote that the victims of Oradour-sur-Glane were connected to the French Resistance, and that this was the cause of the destruction of their village.
Most people believe that both the 9/11 attack and the Oradour massacre were atrocities that were perpetrated for no legitimate reason. The German Waffen-SS Army and the “terrorists” both targeted innocent civilians, simply because both the Nazis and the “terrorists” were “evil-doers,” and anyone who says otherwise is guilty of “hate speech” in the opinion of most people.
In France, hate speech is a crime, even though French citizens technically have freedom of speech. Will the controversy about Ward Churchill and his opinions about 9/11 finally end American Freedom of Speech, as we know it?
Could Ward Churhill’s essay, some day, be called “approval of a war crime” in a court of law, just like the writings of Vincent Reynouard?
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Megyn Kelly will have Ward Churchill on her show again tonight to continue her interview with him. I will write more about this tomorrow.
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