DENVER, 6 February 2005 — A professor who likened World Trade Center victims to a notorious Nazi refused to apologize to the victims’ families in his first public comments since the University of Colorado began a review that could lead to his dismissal.
“I don’t believe I owe an apology,” Ward Churchill said Friday on CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now” program.
He defended his essay written on Sept. 11, 2001, that said those killed in the trade center were “little Eichmanns,” a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who organized Nazi plans to exterminate European Jews. He said the victims were akin to US military operations’ collateral damage — or innocent civilians mistakenly killed by soldiers.
“I don’t know if the people of 9/11 specifically wanted to kill everybody that was killed,” he told Zahn. “It was just worth it to them in order to do whatever it was they decided it was necessary to do that bystanders be killed. And that essentially is the same mentality, the same rubric.”
The university’s Board of Regents apologized to all Americans on Thursday, especially those targeted by the attacks.
The furor over Churchill’s essay erupted last month after he was invited to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. Campus officials discovered that an essay and follow-up book by Churchill characterized the Sept. 11 attacks as a response to a long history of US abuses abroad, particularly against indigenous peoples.
Churchill said he would sue if he were dismissed.
