07-15-2009, 08:52 PM
Albert Hidel Wrote:There's free speech and then there's yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. I don't know where the line is exactly, but clearly (to me, and apparently, to the judge too) this Churchill asshole crossed it.
Ham Wrote:I disagree.
He didn't direct a Muslim mob to kill people.
As for 'big pictures', did YOU loose any sleep over Iraqi children dying as a result of the embargo? I didn't, but I cannot pretend they didn't exist...so much for the Twin Towers.
Churchill didn't cross the line legally or he would have found himself prosecuted in some jurisdiction. There were a number of prosecutions for aiding and abetting Al Qaida, and many of them seemed a stretch based on the facts reported. If a prosecutor somewhere thought that he had a decent shot at convicting Churchill, he would have taken it for the opportunity of hanging Churchill's scalp from his belt.
Churchill showed himself to be a complete asshole with his comments. Set aside the insensitivity of his comments for a moment. If an academic knows that he is basically a phony but has somehow scammed the system and obtained a tenured professorship, he shouldn't go out of his way to draw extra attention to himself. Churchill could have gotten away with continuing to be an anti-American extremist if he kept his comments confined to attacking American national policies. Instead he crossed the line (of public opinion, not the law) by seemingly trivializing a national tragedy with many true victims.
Churchill really didn't do his cause any good in the end, either. Regardless of how poorly Native Americans have been treated by the U.S. government, to link their cause with anything even remotely related to the Middle East is absurd. It is for certain that the one place where Native Americans would have been treated far worse than the U.S. would have been in the Middle East.