Kurt Nimmo.com
February 05, 2005
Is the Attack on Ward Churchill Orchestrated by Neocon Fellow Travelers?
In regard to my piece (A Ward Churchill Kind of Day) appearing in Counterpunch today, Ron Jacobs, also a Counterpunch contributor, sent the following email:
Nice work. Just a note regarding how organized this campaign against university faculty who vocally oppose US imperial wars, etc. The campaign against Churchill (with whom I have problems—political and otherwise—but do consider an ally) was organized by the Campus Republicans at CU and also at Hamilton (I think).
When Churchill spoke at an environment and indigenous rights conference at the Univ. of Vermont in late October/early November of 200—soon after 911 and the attack on Afghanistan, the local Campus Republicans—a bunch of self-righteous mostly wealthy young men and women who had already punched out an ISO member and encouraged attacks various antiwar activists in town—led a campaign to get Churchill’s engagement cancelled.
They organized call-ins to the university administration, local news organizations, and the local Gannett rag, all with the intention of banning Churchill. Fortunately, the university admin refused to cave in to the pressure and defended the first amendment rights and academic freedom. Through conversations with one of the Campus GOP members—a young military vet from a middle class background (unlike the wealthier backgrounds of his cohorts)—I learned that the local group had received coaching from folks connected to CampusWatch, AIA, and other neocon organizations.
Indeed, this young man even went to a conference later that school year where he attended workshops that laid out methods local campus GOP clubs could use to chase antiwar and leftist groups off campus. Later that same academic year, the UVM Campus GOP tried to get the local ISO group “unrecognized” as an official student group. They failed, thanks to support from a variety of individual students and groups stepping up to defend ISO’s right to be on campus. In short, it is more organized than it appears.
Not surprising, in fact something I have long suspected, considering the agenda of Campus Watch and AVOT (Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, or more appropriately victory over the Bill of Rights as it applies to those they disagree with). Campus Watch claims to be “Keeping an Eye on Professors Who Teach About the Middle East,” but obviously their anti-democratic, proto-fascist agenda (making sure all academics agree with their right-wing politics—or lose their jobs) is directed against not only Middle Eastern scholars and academics, but all academics who they consider “anti-American,” that is to say it is directed against those who disagree with the Strausscon view of foreign policy (in a nutshell: Islam is evil, Zionism is good, and the United States, against its better interests, needs to wage “World War IV” against Israel’s Arab and Muslim enemies).
“AVOT will encourage scholarly research into various aspects of Islamic theology, history, and culture,” reads the AVOT Statement of Principles. “AVOT will hold such scholarship to a serious and rigorous standard,” in other words, those who hold a contrary standard will be purged. “To expose the internal ‘threats,’ AVOT has compiled a sample list of statements by professors, legislators, authors, and columnists that it finds objectionable,” writes the New York Library Association. “The strategy appears similar to an earlier, much-criticized effort to monitor war dissidents by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a group founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and neo-conservative Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman.”
“Bill Bennett, this nation’s self-appointed moral cop and founder of Empower America, is AVOT’s chairman,” explains Sheila Samples. “Bennett and his right-wing, neo-conservative henchmen vow to ‘resist’ dissention both here and abroad. In simpler terms, Bennett’s mission is to seek out American citizens who dare to question Bush. Then, by using the far-ranging tentacles of AVOT and ACTA—to smoke ‘em out, git ‘em on the run—and bring ‘em to justice…” ACTA (American Council of Trustees and Alumni) is “referred to as ‘a conservative nonprofit group devoted to curbing liberal tendencies in academia’ by The New York Times in a Nov. 24 [2001],” according to John Troyer.
“Rarely did professors publicly mention heroism, rarely did they discuss the difference between good and evil, the nature of Western political order or the virtue of a free society. Indeed, the message of much of academe was clear: BLAME AMERICA FIRST,” states an ACTA report, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About it, authored by Lynne Cheney.
Obviously, as Jacobs notes in his email, “what can be done about it” is simple: college GOP groups, with help from Campus Watch and AVOT, will hound professors deemed “anti-American” until they either give up their positions (as in the case of Churchill, under death threats) or are removed by university administrations for their “equivocation to explicit condemnations of America,” as described by Cheney (note the use of the word “equivocation,” in other words they are not cheerleading mass murder and waving their little plastic flags strenuously enough).
“The fact remains that academe is the only sector of American society that is distinctly divided in its response,” Cheney continues. “Indeed, expressions of pervasive moral relativism are a staple of academic life in this country and an apparent symptom of an educational system which has increasingly suggested that Western civilization is the primary source of the world’s ills—even though it gave us the ideals of democracy, human rights, individual liberty, and mutual tolerance.”
Ward Churchill, however, did not engage in “moral relativism,” in fact the historical truth and moral values he described—the United States has slaughtered millions of people, both directly and indirectly, in the name of its immoral foreign policy objectives, from Vietnam to Iraq and Latin America—are anything but relative and are certainly absolute.
Cheney is correct—the tenets of Western civilization, in particular the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, “gave us the ideals of democracy, human rights, individual liberty, and mutual tolerance,” and Cheney are her crew of Strausscon fellow travelers and right-wing Christian Zionists are systematically destroying these values, beginning with the Patriot Act and the destruction of habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
As for “tolerance,” ask Ward Churchill.
Campus Watch, the brainchild of right-wing Zionist Daniel Pipes, “publishes dossiers on professors, as well as some examples of their writings,” explains Will Youmans. “While the website dresses their monitoring as a purely academic exercise, it generates hostile phone calls and e-mails to listed professors and their families, as a profiled academic told me. Not only is this website inflammatory, but it clearly seeks to bring political pressure to bear on the professors and institutions. Under the guise of keeping the public informed, they are trying to force professors who do not share their unquestioning support for Israel to be silent.” Again, in Churchill’s case, it has generated death threats as well.
AVOT, Campus Watch, and their college GOP activists—more accurately described as stalkers and harassers—will not stop until “equivocation” is purged from the academic landscape. However, as AVOT’s principles clearly state, they will not rest until all “internal threats” are neutralized, including “legislators, authors, and columnists.” In other words, they will continue their right-wing, anti-democratic, unconstitutional jihad until all voices of dissent are stifled or locked up as “enemy combatants.”
February 04, 2005
The Murder of Mahmoud Mudhar al-Dhari: Engineering Sunni Rebellion
AFP reports:
The nephew of the head of an influential Sunni Muslim clerics’ association was shot dead by US soldiers Thursday on a road west of the Iraqi capital, a spokesman for the group said.
The US military said it unaware of the incident but would investigate.
“The US army opened fire and killed the nephew of Sheikh Hareth al-Dhari, who was driving in a car with a friend Thursday morning on a flyover,” said Omar Ragheb, a spokesman for the Committee of Muslim Scholars.
“Mahmoud Mudhar al-Dhari, 40, was coming from Khandari to Baghdad … when his car was shot up. His friend is safe and in good health.”
The Committee of Muslim Scholars called for a boycott of last Sunday’s national election and has warned that the incoming government would lack legitimacy.
The association has been the leading Sunni religious voice in Iraq since the fall of the old regime and has demanded a timeline for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.
We have one of two explanations here:
1) al-Dhari was a random victim of U.S. violence, as ordinary as oil wells and pipelines (even the burning ones) in Iraq. Since the corporate media reports from hotel rooms in the Green Zone, we have no idea, outside of reports filed by Dahr Jamail, Robert Fisk, and a few other brave souls, how many innocent civilians are butchered in Iraq by trigger happy yahoo soldiers.
2) al-Dhari was deliberately targeted, as the nephew of an influential Sunni cleric, because the Committee of Muslim Scholars boycotted the stage-managed elections and insists the United States get out of Iraq. Naturally, Sheikh Hareth al-Dhari is not going to be very happy now that his nephew was assassinated (or killed randomly) and this is will likely increase, at least incrementally, the anger and intransigence of the Sunnis.
It’s all part of a plan to increase the level of violence in Iraq to the point where the Shi’ites, who will obviously win the “election,” and the Kurds, who hate the Sunnis because they were connected to Saddam and Saddam repeatedly used brutality against the Kurds, who are not Arabs, will team up with the United States to “defeat” the resistance. Of course, this will ultimately result in civil war, precisely what the Strausscons want in Iraq (and everywhere else in the Muslim Middle East).
If I was a betting man, I’d go with the second scenario because it makes sense, although the level of random violence in Iraq is at a fever pitch (and this is part of the Strausscon plan as well) and al-Dhari may simply be another victim.
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