"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. "
--Indeed, and he has also written most recently in response to the attacks from the O'Reilly gangsters:
* I am not a "defender"of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people "should" engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable."
It seems that it ought to be clear that there is a context here and an argument, namely that if you are complicit in awful actions of your government or profit from them, it is only natural to expect that there will be a price to pay inevitably. The language is bitter that he uses, no doubt influenced by much of the sanctimony in the US media in the aftermath of 911 as it prepared the ideological groundwork to bomb the holy moses outta Afghanistan and Iraq. However, *if* his argument is as he explains it in the second paragraph, it's philosophically one that has been made for ages by many a progressive thinker. In fact, one could argue that what is amazing, given the level of violence that the US gov't is involved in abroad, is that not *more* terrorism is directed at the US.
Now, a liberal, say, might hear me say that and say, "AHA! Gotcha! you want even more 911s to happen!!" Yet, I would say that not only is that plainly not my wish, it is also plainly what will happen if we don't think more seriously about complicity in state led terror in the world. THe analogy domestically would be 'we should not ask, 'why are there riots? but why do riots occur so rarely given how much our government enacts policies that seem to encourage their occurence?' Aha!! Now I can be condemned for wanting more riots!!
Thus I come back to my belief that generally speaking the outrage expressed at Churchill is either ill-informed or feigned. The real problem with his argument is not that it is 'hateful' or 'supportive of terrorists', but that it sticks at the moral/philosophical level without any real clarity as to the class relations of power that explain far more about 911 and what can be done to prevent a 911.