Benjamin Whitmer Says I Should Be Thrown Off a Building or Down a Flight of Stairs

Picture and trailer from Fritz Lang's film M.

Tell ’em you’ll put the butt out when [American moms] snuff the kid and not a moment before. Better yet, tell ’em they should snuff themselves, as well as the kid, and do the planet a real favor. Just "kidding" (heh-heh)."---Ward Churchill

Today is the eighth anniversary of the death of Ward Churchill's late wife, the Canadian Indian Leah Kelly.

According to the Denver Post:

Churchill's third wife, 25-year-old Leah Kelly, was killed May 31, 2000, when hit by a car outside Boulder, and Churchill's biography of her continues to stir bad feelings with her family. Kelly had a blood-alcohol content of 0.35 percent when a motorist came upon her outside of town. He said she was lying in the road and he had no time to stop. Churchill later wrote that her death "left a crater in my soul," but he blamed her alcoholism, and her demise, on the colonial treatment Indians received from white people. [UPDATE--The Rocky Mountain News (3-16-2005) gives the date of Leah Kelly's death as a day later, June 1, 2000.]

For decades, the anti-American propagandist Ward Churchill has been selecting out Americans who he thinks deserve to be "snuffed." For example, he claimed that two FBI agents who were protecting Indians from criminals deserved to be murdered in cold blood.

Ward Churchill has even claimed that he was on Pine Ridge when these murders happened [see also here]. The two agents were murdered on June 26, 1975, in a symbolic reenactment of "Custer's Last Stand" (June 25-26, 1876).

According to this 2004 article, Ward Churchill told Canadian college students that he was "a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) security team at the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota in the early 1970's."

Ward Churchill has boasted that he taught the Weathermen how to make bombs.

Ward Churchill reportedly once told a crowd of people that it would be a "good thing" if a college student named Grant Crowell were executed, dismembered, and cremated like some NAZI cartoonist. Grant Crowell had lampooned Ward Churchill in a political cartoon.

Ward Churchill finally became infamous outside of academia when he wrote that the 9-11 victims were "little Eichmanns" who deserved to be suffocated by poisonous fumes or burned alive.

On May 21, 2008, Ben Whitmer, an instructor at the University of Colorado and of of the last followers of the disgraced ex-professor Ward Churchill, commented after a post on his blog:

They ought to give a medal for throwing Snapple over a fence. Or off a building. Or down a flight of stairs. [5-21-08]

Why not over a cliff, Ben? Isn't that the way of your people?

I suppose Ben would like someone to throw me off a building because I criticize Ward Churchill for his public terroristic threats against other people. Mr. Whitmer's old blog once posted that I deserve to slip on a pencil and break my neck.

Ben Whitmer's mentor Ward Churchill is nothing but a pathetic totalitarian thug who tries to silence other people with terroristic threats because his pitiful views can't withstand debate.

The same is true of Churchill's acolyte, the CU Boulder instructor Ben Whitmer, who once wrote that two Colorado journalists should be disemboweled or "fucked with a wood rasp."

Benjamin Whitmer also claims he "heard" these threats about throwing people off bridges at a demonstration against Newmont Mining:

How’s about we throw Wayne Murdy off a bridge?

How’s about we throw Madeleine Albright off an even bigger bridge?

How’s about we feed a cyanide cocktail to your kids?
[See also here.]

A competent English teacher would be able to defend his views without resorting to profanity or terroristic threats, such as threatening to use cyanide to murder children.

Ward Churchill does not just gloat over the murders of FBI agents and New York business people; he has also threatened young women, mothers, and children. He admits he abused his young Indian wife Leah Kelly and once wrote:

I broke and slammed [Leah] back against our bedroom wall, telling her that if she kept it up, she’d be apt to land in a hospital.

Leah died eight years ago today on May 31, 2000.

Ward Churchill has "joked" that yuppy mothers should snuff their children and kill themselves to reduce the population and save the Earth:

Every yuppie born counts as much as another seventy Chinese.

Lay that one on the next soccer mom who approaches you with a baby stroller and an outraged look, demanding that you to put your cigarette out, eh? It is plainly absurd for any American to complain about smoking when you consider the context of the damage done by overall U.S. consumption patterns. Tell ’em you’ll put the butt out when they snuff the kid and not a moment before. Better yet, tell ’em they should snuff themselves, as well as the kid, and do the planet a real favor. Just 'kidding' (heh-heh)."---Ward Churchill [Cache (heh-heh!); see also a slightly different version of this essay which appears as Chapter 13 in Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader, especially page 296.]:

Ward Churchill assaulted a T.V. reporter who was asking him questions about a plagiarized piece of art that he misrepresented and sold as his own [story and video here].

Professor Thomas Brown writes:

In 1998, Churchill published Pacifism as Pathology, a manifesto justifying the use of political violence. Churchill claims to have taught bomb-making to the Weather Underground. Churchill called for breaking the kneecaps of tourists headed for Hawaii, as a political statement in support of Hawaiian nationalism. He repeatedly called for the destruction of the United States. Churchill gave speeches in which he offered justifications and explicit strategies for successful terrorist actions against the US.

I also read that Churchill, a white radical who pretends to be an Indian, gave a public speech in Canada where he reportedly told college students:

The colonized can over-come their situation through slitting the throat of their colonizer.

Ward Churchill claims he is for free speech, but how can we have free speech if Wardo or one of his minions cuts our throats? It is pretty obvious that Wardo advocates free speech only for himself and likeminded cohorts.

Ward Churchill has long sought media celebrity for his views. He once even compared the media circus surrounding his person to the media spectacle that followed the JonBenet Ramsey murder.

JonBenet Ramsey was the Boulder child who was found "snuffed" in her parents' basement on 12-26-1996, Mao's birthday. The little kindergartener had been strangled, and her head was bashed in. Some people believe she died on 12-25-96, but the exact time of her murder is not known. I think the killer would have waited until after midnight to make sure the parents were asleep.

As The Rocky Mountain News reported:

After Churchill told students that one national broadcaster had advertised the e-mail addresses for members of the CU Board of Regents, encouraging people to sound off against Churchill, one of Churchill's students asked if he might put the addresses on the classroom blackboard, so that Churchill's students could also write the regents. Churchill allowed him to do so.

He also told his class he has received nearly 200 media interview requests in recent days.

"If there were five of me, I couldn't possibly keep up with it," Churchill said. "And I'm not even JonBenet Ramsey."

I always think of Audrey Hepburn and her bitter-sweet song "Moon River" when I see pictures of JonBenet Ramsey singing and dancing.

Audrey Hepburn was in the Dutch Resistance as a child and raised money for the Resistance by secretly dancing for groups of people. Because of the suffering she witnessed and experienced during WWII, Hepburn became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF and was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work.

Hepburn's Wikipedia notes:

In 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands. During the Nazi occupation, Hepburn adopted the pseudonym Edda van Heemstra, modifying her mother's documents because an 'English sounding' name was considered dangerous. This was never her legal name. The name Edda was a version of her mother's name Ella.[9]

By 1944, Hepburn had become a proficient ballerina. She secretly danced for groups of people to collect money for the Dutch resistance. She later said, "the best audience I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performance."[10]

After the Allied landing on D-Day, living conditions grew worse. During the Dutch famine over the winter of 1944, the Germans confiscated the Dutch people's limited food and fuel supply for themselves. People starved and froze to death in the streets.

Hepburn and many others resorted to making flour out of tulip bulbs to bake cakes and biscuits.[5][11]

Arnhem was devastated by Allied artillery fire that was part of Operation Market Garden. Hepburn's uncle and her mother's cousin were shot in front of Hepburn for being part of the Resistance.

Hepburn's half-brother Ian van Ufford spent time in a German labour camp. Suffering from malnutrition, Hepburn developed acute anemia, respiratory problems, and oedema.[12]

In 1991, Hepburn said "I have memories. More than once I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him, and he stepped on to the train. I was a child observing a child."

Hepburn also noted the similarities between herself and Anne Frank: "I was exactly the same age as Anne Frank. We were both ten when war broke out and fifteen when the war finished. I was given the book in Dutch, in galley form, in 1946 by a friend. I read it – and it destroyed me. It does this to many people when they first read it but I was not reading it as a book, as printed pages. This was my life. I didn't know what I was going to read. I've never been the same again, it affected me so deeply."

"We saw reprisals. We saw young men put against the wall and shot and they'd close the street and then open it and you could pass by again. If you read the diary, I've marked one place where she says 'five hostages shot today'. That was the day my uncle was shot. And in this child's words I was reading about what was inside me and is still there. It was a catharsis for me. This child who was locked up in four walls had written a full report of everything I'd experienced and felt."

These times were not all bad and she was able to enjoy some of her childhood. Again drawing parallels to Anne Frank's life, Hepburn said "This spirit of survival is so strong in Anne Frank's words. One minute she says 'I'm so depressed'. The next she is longing to ride a bicycle. She is certainly a symbol of the child in very difficult circumstances, which is what I devote all my time to. She transcends her death."