Abstract

Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs of the Right

The article profiles Ward Churchill, a professor of history and a critic of U.S. foreign policy. Churchill is known as a fiery historian and writer, often on Indian topics.Back in 2001, after 9/11, Churchill wrote an essay called "Some People Push Back," making the simple point, in a later summary, that "if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned." A storm has burst over Churchill's head, with protests by Governor Pataki and others at his scheduled participation in a panel at Hamilton College called "Limits of Dissent?" In Colorado he's resigned his chairmanship of the department of ethnic studies, and politicians, fired up by the mad dogs on the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by Lord O'Reilly of the Loofah on Fox, are howling for his eviction from his job. After savaging Churchill, the mad dogs of the right turned their sights on Shahid Alam, a professor of economics at Northeastern University in Boston. Now he has been labeled "an un-American" professor by Fox News, and there's an Internet campaign to have him stripped of his faculty position.