Ward Churchill is a raving lunatic

Ward Churchill is a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. Until a few weeks ago, nobody outside the radical left academic community had heard of Churchill. But somebody tipped off Bill O’Reilly that Churchill was invited to speak at a small college in New York.

When O’Reilly checked into Churchill’s background, he was stunned. That’s been the reaction of just about everybody who researches the kind of hate-filled, anti-American propaganda Churchill has been spewing for years in the guise of teaching "ethnic studies."

Churchill hates the United States. He hates everything about us. Our government. Our people. Our education system. Our foreign policy. Our economy. Our faith. Our social institutions. Everything. He hates you and me.

Churchill blames the United States for everything wrong in the world. He claims the United States has murdered millions of innocent children throughout the world. Americans deserve to die for their sins against the "dark" people of the world, according to Churchill. By dark, he refers to anyone other than Caucasian.

Churchill likes to pretend that he's a Native American from an unspecified tribe, but there’s no evidence that he has an ounce of Native American blood in him. It’s one of the delusions that this screwball harbors so he can blame everyone else in the U.S. except for the Native Americans.

I watched a televised speech Churchill gave on the campus of the University of Colorado. He surrounded himself with Native Americans and he even had somebody beating a tom-tom drum every time he made a major point. Talk about demeaning an ethnic group. I fully expected Churchill to strap on a feather headdress and do a raindance in the middle of the auditorium. He’s about as Native American as I am.

Churchill was happy in his psychotic little world until Bill O’Reilly put him in "The No Spin Zone." What caught O’Reilly’s attention was an essay that Churchill published shortly after Sept. 11 that said the 3,000 American men and women who were killed by the terrorist attacks deserved what they got. He also compared the victims of 9/11 to "Little Eichmans," a reference to the infamous Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust.

There’s a movement in Colorado to fire Churchill. He’s already stepped down as chairman of the ethnic studies department, but because he has tenure, Churchill has no intention of giving up his $100,000-a-year job.

The American Civil Liberties Union has already come to Churchill’s defense, saying this a freedom of speech case. Would it surprise anyone that the ACLU would support such a radical anti-American? Is there a more anti-American organization than the ACLU?

This is not a free speech issue. No one is infringing Churchill’s rights. His essay is readily available on the Internet. He lectures daily to a captive audience of students. He can stand on any street corner in America and spew his venom. Nobody is denying him the right to free speech.

What this case boils down to is competency. Should a teacher distort the truth to indoctrinate young students to his radical views? Should a person who is paid by the taxpayers of Colorado use classroom time to advocate the overthrow of the United States government?

The Supreme Court has ruled there is no "absolute right" to free speech. You can’t run into a movie theater and scream "Fire!" at the top of your lungs to create a panic because you feel you’re exercising free speech. The KKK can't march through a black neighborhood.

So what is Professor Churchill teaching in his class? He says the victims of 9/11 had it coming because 400 years ago, the Dutch cheated the Native Americans out of Manhattan island. Yes, he actually said that.

Churchill is virulently anti-Semitic. He doesn’t believe the Holocaust took place. He says it’s all a big conspiracy by the Jews to gain sympathy. He blames Israel for many of the problems in the Middle East.

He has said the United States was the aggressor in World War II. We had no right to bomb the Japanese home islands, populated by civilians. That's probably because the Japanese Army was occupying other nations at the time. (I’m also guessing Professor Churchill never heard of Pearl Harbor.)

He says the United States is an outlaw nation because it used "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (atomic bombs) on Japan to end World War II.

It might be wiser to ignore Churchill until his 15 minutes of fame expire, but he is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to radical leftists who populate college campus. Where are communists hiding out these days? In the faculty lounge of many of our institutions of higher learning. More on that in a future column.

In the meantime, size up Ward Churchill for a straitjacket. It's for his own protection.

E-mail Tony Phyrillas at tphyrillas@pottsmerc.com