Joshua Frank, writing in Counterpunch, has indicted Marc Cooper for the high crime of criticizing Ward Churchill. In case you’ve forgotten, Churchill is the widely vilified Colorado academic who penned the 9/11 essay “Some People Push Back” and used the term “Little Eichmanns” to describe employees of the World Trade Center. Churchill’s essay is here.
Before I respond, a reminder that during the Israel/Lebanon war last summer, Counterpunch reprinted a fraudulent interview with Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah. Alexander Cockburn, publisher of Counterpunch, noted the inauthenticity of the interview but failed to retract or apologize, insisting that the text still contained “interesting and important observations.”
Joshua Frank is the co-editor of Dissident Voice, which last year published a piece by Daniel A. McGowan, professor of economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. McGowan argued that Ernst Zundel, the Holocaust denier, “is neither a monster nor a heretic. He is a man with strong convictions and the courage to express them.” Dissident Voice also published a piece by Gilad Atzmon objecting to the movie “Borat” on the grounds that it “gives a bad name to anti-Semitism.” (Atzmon has also argued that Israel is worse than Nazi Germany, because “[c]arpet bombing and total erasure of populated areas … has never been a Nazi tactic or strategy.” Counterpunch continues to publish this man’s work.)
When one engages the likes of Cockburn and Frank, it’s helpful to be aware of the debased intellectual and moral standards they represent.
Anyhow, Frank tears into Marc Cooper for condemning Ward Churchill’s analysis of 9/11. Cooper, we’re told, took Churchill out of context:
Prior to his Eichmann comment, Churchill used the following precursor to set up his case: “[The 9/11 terrorists] did not license themselves to ‘target innocent civilians.'”
There you have it. Churchill was trying to make the argument that the 9/11 terrorists did not target the WTC simply to kill innocent Americans. According to him, the 9/11 attackers went after the WTC because it was a legitimate military target in an act of war. Plain and simple.
Plain and simply wrong. The following is from the founding statement of al-Qaeda, February 23, 1998, as presented in Appendix 1 of Fred Halliday’s Two Hours That Shook the World (Saqi Books):
The ruling to kill Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it….
Not only does the statement authorize the killing of civilians — it mentions civilians first. Churchill didn’t have the slightest familiarity with the relevant primary documents. Frank is defending a clear-cut intellectual error.
[Update: Also note that the statement authorizes killing not by a military force, but by “every Muslim,” and not just in the evil imperialist USA but in “any country.”]
Frank goes on to insist that Churchill never claimed the 9/11 attacks were justified, but rather, that they mirrored the cold logic of the Pentagon. In a follow-up essay, Churchill wrote:
It should be emphasized that I applied the ‘little Eichmanns’ characterization only to those described as ‘technicians.’ Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-11 attack. According to Pentagon logic, was [sic] simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that’s my point.
And that point, again, is entirely wrong. The al-Qaeda document says nothing about children, janitors, food service workers and so forth. It says “civilians.” The firemen and the others were not collateral damage.
The distinction between “technicians” and everyone else is Churchill’s and his alone, and it is what makes his argument so repellent. Let’s grant for a moment that he did not justify the attacks — even though his very title was “Some People Push Back,” implying that a push-back was in some sense welcome. His view seems to be that if someone had only managed to evacuate the children and janitors and food-service workers, then slaughtering the “technicians” and demolishing the WTC would be justified:
If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.
Frank quotes this passage and even admits that on its own, it seems like a justification. Look at the words: “some penalty befitting their participation.” It is a justification.
As for Frank’s overarching premise, that it was somehow repugnant for liberals to join in the calumny against Churchill: pretty hard to swallow from a guy who publishes antisemitic cranks and calls it progressive.
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