University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who sat down the day after September 11, 2001 and wrote an article condemning the victims of the attacks as “little Eichmanns,” will be a headlined guest of New York’s Hamilton College: Controversy festers on Hamilton campus again. (Hat tip: Marvin.)

A professor who likened victims in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann will headline a discussion at Hamilton College, a campus that has been a lightning rod for controversy in recent months.

Ward Churchill, chairman of the ethnic studies program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will be on the Clinton campus Feb. 3 to discuss his essay “Some people push back,” a treatise written the day after the terrorist attacks. “True enough, they were civilians of a sort,” he writes of the victims. “But innocent? Gimme a break.”

In the piece, the Native American rights activist argues that the 3,000 people killed in the World Trade Center attacks worked for “the mighty engine of profit,” calling them “little Eichmanns,” a reference to the man who implemented Adolf Hitler’s plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

Art history professor Steven Goldberg said it is “morally outrageous” to bring Churchill to campus. “What is it that they hope to accomplish by bringing him here?” he asked. “What is the investment in this negativity?” Added history professor Robert Paquette: “I regard bringing Ward Churchill here as an act of utter irresponsibility.”

Churchill’s panel discussion is part of a series sponsored by the Kirkland Project, a college-funded program that tried to bring 1960s radical Susan Rosenberg to Hamilton. Rosenberg, who was to teach a half-credit memoir-writing course, withdrew from the position in December, after weeks of debate and protest on and off campus.

Kirkland Project Director Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz said allowing discourse on a variety of positions is what academic institutions are supposed to do. “There are people who are going to be very upset, and there are people who think they want to hear what he has to say,” Rabinowitz said. “They are savvy enough to separate out what they agree with and what they don’t.” …

Jessica Miraglia, 19, a sophomore from Reading, Pa., created a poster that reads: “You don’t have to agree with them in order to learn from them.”

“I’m excited at the opportunity to ask questions and ask him to clarify some things,” the psychology major said. “He has alternative opinions; something you usually aren’t exposed to.”

Yes, because it’s so extreme. But contrary to young Jessica’s feelings, you don’t have to search very hard to be exposed to Churchill’s venomous article. In fact, it’s all over the web’s loony left sites; these people consume America-hatred like noxious candy. Here’s one copy: Some People Push Back.

Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire — the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved — and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” — a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” — counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in — and in many cases excelling at — it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. 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.