Blood Libel in Our Time

"Twin towers" of Birkenau crematorium (1943)

Immediately after our people were attacked and murdered on 9-11, Colorado's now-discredited ex-professor Ward Churchill wrote a screed called "Some People Push Back." He characterized the innocent people who were incinerated and went up the chimney on 9-11 as "little Eichmanns." He gloated about their deaths and said the victims deserved their horrifying fate.

Ward Churchill is a vicious, twisted person who often writes about who deserves to die. He even "jokes" that American children should be snuffed.

Ward Churchill is defended by a blog called Tryworks, which is hosted by another former University of Colorado teacher, Churchill apostle Ben Whitmer.

Now a Tryworks guest author who calls himself "Business Major" has characterized the blogger Mr. Paine of PirateBallerina as "Herr Eichmann" because Mr. Paine supposedly has an "utterly unearned country estate" and nice bathrooms.

But what if Mr. Paine were an Indian? Would "Business Major" still maintain that it is unjust for Mr. Paine to own an "utterly unearned country estate"?

For example, the ancestors of today's Osage purchased their own land in Oklahoma, and some of these oil-rich ancestors of today's Osage used to vacation in the summer on lands they also purchased in Colorado. If an Osage inherits the family's Colorado ranch, is that an "utterly unearned country estate"?

"Business Major's" ignorant post is very reminiscent of Ward Churchill's screed about 9-11, "Some People Push Back," which claimed that due to the UN sanctions on Iraq "vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide- eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable."

Adolf Eichmann was one of the architects of the Holocaust. He organized the extermination of millions of Jewish children and their parents; Eichmann wasn't just a rich person with "well-appointed bathrooms." Eichmann was a mass-murderer who gassed Jews in "showers."

When "Business Major" said that Mr. Paine's nice bathrooms are responsible for starving black and Indian children in Colorado, he reminded me of some medieval person making a blood libel against the Jews.

Blood libel was when supersitious medieval Christians would claim that the Jews kidnapped Christian children at Passover, tortured them, and used their blood to make matzo bread for Passover. Blood libel is a particularly vicious anti-Semitic canard, like saying that the Jews poison the wells of the Christians with plague.

Tryworks posters and Ward Churchill are always calling other people NAZIS, but to me they are the ones who sound like NAZIS.

Because Mr. Paine publicized Ward Churchill's plagiarism, literary hoaxes, and lies---lies that hurt Indians---"business Major" invokes the old blood libel and depicts Mr. Paine as a rich Jew who is killing babies.

The same blood libel can be seen in the communist depiction of the "greedy" Kulaks. Kulak, a pejorative term for a peasant, means "fist." The communists' libels about the Kulaks were really based on traditional anti-Semitism, only this time the persecution was also directed against Orthodox Russian peasants, not just against Jews. Blood libels are just rationalizations for killing and stealing.

Mr. Paine is so strong that he can take all this on himself and laugh at these twisted Tryworks freaks.