The Nutty Professor.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Academia: While our universities and colleges routinely shun rational and right-of-center speakers, professors and thought, the likes of Ward Churchill make the rounds comparing 9-11 victims to Nazis.

In 2001, Churchill, then chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado, wrote an essay titled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens." As off-the-wall as its title, the tome echoed a theme embraced by many on the loony left that America invited the 9-11 attack through a long history of violent domination of other cultures. In other words, we had it coming.

His views as expressed in the essay might have remained beneath the public radar had not Churchill been invited to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., near Syracuse. Some of the students there are the sons and daughters of 9-11 victims. They and their families were not amused that the man who wrote that the deaths of their loved ones in the attack on the World Trade Center was a "penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmans inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers." They were stunned he was invited to speak so close to Ground Zero.

Churchill wrote: "Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire -- the "mighty engine of profit' to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved." As such, they deserved to die.

Churchill went beyond blaming 9-11 victims and America for their fate. They perished, he added, thanks to the "gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that struck America. The Pentagon was a military target "pure and simple," he said, and if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death ...