The ethnic studies professor should not have been fired for speaking out about 9/11. The problem remains his slanted work on Native American history.
By Gary Kamiya
Churchill was sticking his neck out to go that far. Now that 9/11 hysteria and its attendant myth of American innocence has faded, many commentators have belatedly acknowledged that the terrorist attacks did not emerge out of thin air, that America's Mideast policies were in part responsible for them. (Even PBS travel guide Rick Steves has made this point.) But in the days after the attacks, anyone who dared to suggest U.S. actions might have fomented Arab/Muslim rage against America was virtually excommunicated. Susan Sontag was called a traitor for saying the same thing in the New Yorker. Bill Maher's ABC show "Politically Incorrect" was canceled after he mockingly compared the bravery of Americans firing missiles from a distance to that of people flying planes into buildings.
The Iraq sanctions system allowed for importing of food. The deaths by starvation were really Saddam's fault... and a useful propaganda tool he was only so glad to encourage. He did flagrantly violate trade restrictions. But do do what? Build palaces and amass personal riches.
ReplyDeleteBesides, can anyone seriously claim that if not for the situation in Iraq in the 1990s, bin Laden would have called off his plot? Every minor point in bin Laden's nutty grievance list takes a back seat to the "Affront" of the US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia not worshipping bin Laden's preferred god.
Except by Churchill's own logic (or lack thereof) those dead Arab kids are 'payback' for Islamic genocide campaigns, the suffering of 'dhimmis' and so on. All of that make US actions in the middle east look tame by comparison. And dmarks is right, Bin Laden would have still attacked the world trade center.
ReplyDeleteAlso that terrible article makes it sound as if poor ward was fired for 'speaking out' which is myth. And as for this:
ReplyDelete"But in the days after the attacks, anyone who dared to suggest U.S. actions might have fomented Arab/Muslim rage against America was virtually excommunicated."
Check out the stats below.
http://people-press.org/report/165/what-the-world-thinks-in-2002
Note some of the conclusions from Muslim countries:
* The majority of Lebanese support suicide bombing.
* The majority of Nigerians who expressed an opinion support suicide bombing.
* The majority of Bangladeshis who expressed an opinion support suicide bombing.
* 47 percent of Jordanians who expressed an opinion support suicide bombing.
* 43 percent of Pakistanis who expressed an opinion support suicide bombing.
You might wonder why I use a poll from 2002? Because that was before the Iraq War, the event that is supposedly responsible for radicalizing Muslims against the Western world (and the U.S. in particular) like no other.
Also the author of this miserable article spouts this myth:
ReplyDelete"Churchill argued that the 9/11 attacks were payback for America's ongoing "crusade" against the Arab-Muslim world, an onslaught manifested in such actions as the decade-long sanctions against Iraq that are estimated to have cost the lives of 500,000 Iraqi children."
First, it is important to emphasize that nearly all of the civilians who are being deliberately killed in Iraq are dying at the hands of Islamic terrorists, the same demographic responsible for 9/11. For this reason, the percentage of civilians killed by collateral damage from US weapons is extremely small.
During all of 2006, one of the worst years in Iraq, less than 200 Iraqi civilians were killed by American bombs and bullets. All but a tiny handful occurred in action that involved the terrorists, and many (if not most) of these civilians may have been killed by the terrorists themselves in firefights with the Americans.
This actual number comes from news reports which are meticulously collected and tabulated by the anti-war web site IraqBodyCount.net. TheReligionofPeace carefully sifted through each incident to determine responsibility for 2006. (By contrast, about 16,000 Iraqi civilians were killed that year by Islamic terrorists).
2006 represents one of the more violent periods of the conflict, and it was intentionally set off by al-Qaeda when it destroyed the holy Shiite shrine in Karbala by Sunni terrorists. Additional research ( from 11/28/05) shows that the number of civilians killed prior to this by collateral damage from coalition troops during the most intense period of conflict is probably about 1,000.
IraqBodyCount.net believes the total number of civilians killed from "the effects of war" during the first four months to be around 7,000. Even this statistic is highly exaggerated, since the enemy there is not known to fight in uniform. In all probability, the immense effort of coalition forces to avoid civilian casualties was quite successful and the true number is between 2,000 and 3,000, perhaps lower.
The ridiculous figure of 650,000 (which has since been upped to 1.5 million or more) was published by the same people who lumped victims of terror together with casualties of war to come up with the claim that 100,000 had been killed about halfway through the war (during the heaviest of combat operations). Apparently this didn't generate the sort of shock they were hoping for, so they went back to pull an even larger number out of their ass for a new Lancet article in October of 2006.
Iraq is not an inaccessible backwater. It has a modern communications infrastructure, as well as hospitals and morgues. It is simply unfeasible that 600 civilians could die everyday from violence without the morgues, news media, or the police knowing about it. One might also wonder why millions of others would decline to seek medical treatment for the serious injuries that they are alleged to have suffered (according to another part of the same report), since they never showed up in hospitals. Taken at face value, this would be about 1 in 4 residents of the Sunni triangle.
These published studies are not based on real numbers, however, but rather extrapolated from an extremely small statistical sampling in the most violent areas of Iraq. So woefully unreliable was the methodology of the first one that it actually begrudged a 92% margin of error - meaning that its conclusions could be closer to 8,000 deaths, which would have put it in line with reliable news sources. Again, however, the vast majority of casualties would have been at the hands of Islamic terrorists. Cluster bomb mishaps, for example, are both rare and highly publicized.
The figure of 1.5 million civilian deaths is not employed out of accuracy, but rather expediency. Public sympathy can be manipulated by arbitrarily inflating the number of civilians killed in the conflict. It also attempts to obscure the fact that nearly all of the deaths of innocents are occurring at the hands of the very people that coalition forces are trying to stop, as well as the fact that the actual civilian death rate was far higher under Saddam, and would be much worse in a future without a stable security force to support the democratic government.
Ultimate responsibility for the carnage in Iraq lies with the supremacist ideology that inspires young Muslims to throw bombs into marketplaces, neighborhoods and rival mosques - and not with the Western values that impel good men to lay down their lives in defense of the victims.
Also check this out:
http://www.logictimes.com/civilian.htm
Not to mention there's the fact that the crusades look tame compared to the Jihad against sicily, the armenian genocide and so on. So this guy doesn't jack.
I've seen the Iraq death figures inflated to 3 million somewhere. It's all faked, and the only reliable numbers appear to come from Iraq Body Count.
ReplyDeleteTo have anything like the wild 500,000 totals you'd have charnel stench clouds hanging over the cities the the rivers choked in bodies.
"To have anything like the wild 500,000 totals you'd have charnel stench clouds hanging over the cities the the rivers choked in bodies."
ReplyDeleteExactly.
Re "Except by Churchill's own logic (or lack thereof) those dead Arab kids are 'payback' for Islamic genocide campaigns": You could trace the conflict back to beginning of the "clash of civilizations" 1,000 years ago. It's ridiculous to pick one recent moment and claim that was the starting point.
ReplyDeleteAny speculation about what Bin Laden would've done in other circumstances is worthless. Fact is, we wouldn't be having this discussion if the Bush administration had heeded the warning signs and stopped 9/11. No invasion of Iraq, no war on terrorism, and no Islamophobic rants by Stephen.
As for the suicide bombings, we're talking about Muslims who support them in a time of perceived warfare. In the abstract or when others are doing the bombing. That doesn't prove the people holding the beliefs are themselves violent. It proves they countenance violence in some limited circumstances, such as when Israel refuses to stop oppressing Muslims.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, support for suicide bombings has diminished recently:
http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=257
The percentage of Muslims saying that suicide bombing is justified in the defense of Islam has declined dramatically over the past five years in five of eight countries where trends are available. In Lebanon, for example, just 34% of Muslims say suicide bombings in the defense of Islam are often or sometimes justified; in 2002, 74% expressed this view.
Among the most striking trends in predominantly Muslim nations is the continuing decline in the number saying that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilians are justifiable in the defense of Islam. In Lebanon, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia, the proportion of Muslims who view suicide bombing and other attacks against civilians as being often or sometimes justified has declined by half or more over the past five years.
Wide majorities say such attacks are, at most, rarely acceptable.
I don't know why you wasted our time cherry-picking the year 2006 from the six-year war. But let's look at the overall death toll according to various sources:
ReplyDeletehttp://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/itsonlyfair/dstar02.html
There is no agreement when it comes to civilian casualties, particularly as many deaths are never reported in the media.
In January, a joint UN World Health Organization and the Iraqi government study concluded that between 104,000 and 223,000 Iraqis had died violently since the invasion.
As of March 24, the independent Iraq Body Count Web site, based solely on incidents reported by the media, suggested close to 90,000 deaths, of which over a quarter died in 2007.
At the high end of the scale, British polling institute Opinion Research Business in a report published on January 30 estimated the total number of civilian deaths at between 946,000 and 1.12 million.
The Lancet, a respected British medical review, quoted a statistical survey which found that as of July 2006 some 655,000 more civilians had died than would have been the case if there had been no war.
http://www.reuters.com/article/middleeastCrisis/idUSLK136150
IRAQIS:
Military Between 4,900 and 6,375#
Civilians Between 92,489 and 100,971*
# = Think-tank estimates for military under Saddam Hussein killed during the 2003 war. No reliable official figures have been issued since new security forces were set up in late 2003.
* = From www.iraqbodycount.net (IBC), run by academics and peace activists, based on reports from at least two media sources. The IBC says on its website the figure underestimates the true number of casualties.
So a rough minimum of 100,000 Iraqi civilian casualties compared to 3,000 US civilian casualties on 9/11. Yet you two are attacking people like Churchill for pointing out the discrepancy. The amorality of some white Christian Americans never ceases to amaze me.
ReplyDeleteAs for this:
"Ultimate responsibility for the carnage in Iraq lies with the supremacist ideology that inspires young Muslims to throw bombs into marketplaces, neighborhoods and rival mosques."
Stupid is the only word for it. Apparently you're such a zealot that you can't process objective information. There were no bomb-throwers in Iraq before our invasion. No organized terrorists plotting to strike the US. No imminent threat of any kind to our national security.
The asinine statement above might apply if we'd invaded Palestine or somewhere where bombings actually occurred. Unfortunately for you, it doesn't apply to Iraq. Better luck next time, fanatic.