Finally, Ward Churchill’s lawsuit goes to court in 2009 (1.5)

Great news from How the university works that Ward Churchill’s very good case against the University of Colorado will go to court in early 2009, challenging the right wing witch hunt that unfairly targeted him and that stalks the 65% of faculty in the U.S. who are not tenured, or are not tenure-track. As laid out on that blog, and in many other writings, the charges against Churchill were nothing short of ludicrous and defamatory, and neither the investigating nor the appeal committees of UC felt that the extraordinarily minor items in question in Churchill’s writing merited dismissal. Hopefully this suit will teach the totalitarian hacks in charge of the University of Colorado a much needed lesson, not to mention the petty, pseudo-scholars that have tried to build their reputations by destroying Churchill’s. I encourage readers to visit the site of the Ward Churchill Solidarity Network as well, and to read the testimonies of the many internationally prominent scholars who have written in Churchill’s defense. To think that all of this began because of a mass mediated holy war in the U.S., fueled by outrage over Churchill’s piece, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens – still one of the most sober, best pieces of writing on “9/11″ to have been written by an American author. Unfortunately for Churchill, at that time any public writing that did not toe the line of authorized sanctimony and repeat the third-grade sentimentality of so many public commentaries would necessarily turn Churchill into a target. What few cared to understand was the way that Churchill turned U.S. military and nationalist logic on its head, so that in their outrage Americans could begin to sense a little of what it felt like to be on the receiving end for a change. The only other “public” figure to have gained such notoriety because of remarks about the attacks was Obama’s Rev. Wright, for making the same argument using the same metaphor, which Malcolm X used to frame the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Churchill, Wright, and Malcolm X were all, of course, disowned and ostracized in the land that speaks of “freedom” as if it had invented the idea and had special rights to its meanings. (Luckily for Oprah Winfrey, few remember that almost immediately after “9/11″ one of her shows was devoted to “root causes” and why the U.S. had provoked these attacks.)