Scholar-activist Ward Churchill has just been handed the academic equivalent of a death sentence, when the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado voted to remove him from his professorial post.

Churchill has been the target of the rabid right since he published an essay shortly after 9/11, which likened Americans in their attitudes to Nazis.

From that point forward, academics at the University began sharpening their pencils to find the way to separate Churchill from his tenured position.

Indeed, his works, many of which are anti-imperialist in nature, has also made him an enemy of the right-wing nationalists and fascists in the corporate media.

Churchill has written strong, uncompromising books on U.S. history and social, political movements, like the Black freedom movement, and the Native American independence and rights movement.

His book, A Little Matter of Genocide, is a tour-de-force of American and British atrocities against Native people. It is so searing, so honest, that it is difficult and painful to read.

As for his post 9/11 essay, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” Churchill sought to engage the question posed by millions in the aftermath of the burning towers “Why do they hate us?”

It may sound rhetorical to compare Americans to “little Eichmanns,” but before World War II, Nazi and Fascist support groups were flourishing in America.

Nazi sympathizers filled Madison Square Garden for the U.S.- Nazi support group, the German-American Bund. Fascist groups were electing councilmen and mayors. They were feted by congressmen. Perhaps the only group with more clout was the Klan.

Plus, where do you think the Nazis learned much of their racially exclusive theories, and of concentration camps, but from the U.S.? That fact is documented.

The inspiration for Nazi and South African racial apartheid came from the U.S. segregation system, and so-called “reservations” for Indian people.

This may prove somewhat unpopular for Americans to hear, but it is the truth.

Ward Churchill is precisely the kind of scholar that Americans need to read and hear, especially in this hour of national and global crisis. He is a brave and brilliant man who has slain more than his share of sacred cows.

As America engages in a global war based on lies, they need him now—more than ever.

Dare to read his books.

—Prisonradio.org, August 4, 2007

 

Note: Mumia Abu-Jamal is incarcerated on Death Row in Pennsylvania. He has been on Death Row for 25 years, convicted of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981, a crime of which he is innocent. He is currently waiting decisions of appeals courts.