Eric Cheyfitz report: Attacks on Churchill a Sham

Eric Cheyfitz is professor of American Studies at the University of Colorado. He summarizes the charges brought by concerned faculty against the Churchill investigative committee:

Eric Cheyfitz Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters
157 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14850

Investigative Committee Research Misconduct

1.    Charges are politically motivated, being brought simultaneously with the university upholding Professor Churchill’s right to free speech in his “Some People Push Back Essay.”
2.    Academic double jeopardy
3.    Exceptionally small sample of work used to bring the charges (see Boulder AAUP statement).
4.    Violations of due process in the selection of the Investigative committee, which has only one expert in Professor Churchill’s field of American Indian studies; and in the fact that the charges were brought and the penalty determined by the same university official.
5.    Research misconduct in the Report itself:
A.    Use of LaVelle’s essays, which are clearly biased before the fact against professor Churchill and contain substantial errors in their understanding of Native history (Allotment, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act and the legal construction of Native identity through blood quantum) and in their misreading of two of Professor Churchill’s sources: Limerick and Thornton.

Colorado faculty file misconduct charge against Churchill committee

See the faculty’s advertisement in the Daily Camera at ward-churchill-defense.pdf
May 11, 2007
For Immediate Release

Contact:
Marki LeCompte 303-578-2442, Tom Mayer 303-492-2138, Eric Cheyfitz 607-227-2076, Michael Yellow Bird 785-864-2661

Faculty Group Files Academic Misconduct Charges Concerning Churchill Report

On Thursday, May 10, 2007, twelve tenured professors filed formal charges of academic misconduct against members of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct (SCRM) investigating committee that produced a report supporting allegations of academic wrongdoing, including fabrication and plagiarism, by Professor Ward Churchill. The report will form the basis for a recommendation by CU President Hank Brown to either dismiss charges against Churchill or forward the report to the University of Colorado Board of Regents with a recommendation for action, including possible revocation of tenure and dismissal, against the controversial professor. Given the damning nature of the report, it is widely expected to weigh heavily against Professor Churchill.

The group of faculty from the University of Colorado and other institutions as far away as Cornell University in New York filed the charges a few days after newly appointed Vice President of Academic Affairs and Research, Michael Poliakoff rejected an American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Colorado Chapter request the CU administration withdraw the report and rescind misconduct charges against Churchill. The group says the SCRM committee report contains a number of serious flaws including:

*Relying on a biased and flawed source for major arguments;
*Relying on the artificial exclusion of reputable independent sources that contradict the
Report’s arguments;
*Suppressing text from a cited source that contradicts the Report’s argument;
*Distorting the weakness of the Report’s case;
*Artificially limiting scholarly interpretation in violation of norms of scholarship.
*Exaggerating charges of plagiarism that are at best debatable, and relatively trivial in
relation to the great body of his work and the historical treatment of such offenses.

Two American Indian Studies experts, Professors Eric Cheyfitz of Cornell and Michael Yellow Bird of the University of Kansas, independently discovered errors and omissions in the SCRM report that seriously compromises its credibility. The faculty group presented extensive documentation backing its request for withdrawal of the SCRM report. Although the administration addressed the Colorado AAUP request, there was no response to the faculty group’s letter. Professor Tom Mayer who joined the group filing charges sounded a bit of irony: “The administration answered the AAUP, claiming it would not allow such ‘outside requests’ to influence its handling of the Churchill’s case, yet it completely ignored an identical request from its own faculty. Given that fact and the role outside forces played in starting the investigation of Churchill in the in the first place, I think we are witnessing not one but two double standards at play here.”

According to University bylaws, a SCRM investigative committee similar to the one that wrote the report now at issue must hear the faculty complaint. According to CU Education professor Marki LeCompte , “the original investigative committee members will soon have to respond to charges they knowingly produced a deeply flawed report based upon a selective presentation of ‘evidence’ against Professor Churchill.” LeCompte added: “Once we understood from Cheyfitz and Yellow Bird just how incredibly skewed the Churchill report is, we had to conclude that the whole effort to get rid of Churchill is fundamentally political rather than based on any reasonable notion of research misconduct.”

The twelve professors filing charges today include in alphabetical order are:

Leonard Baca, Professor, School of Education, and Director, BUENO Center for Multicultural Education, University of Colorado, Boulder

Eric Cheyfitz
Ernest I White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Elisa Facio
Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder

Vijay Gupta
Professor, Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering
Fellow, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)
University of Colorado, Boulder

Margaret LeCompte
Professor, School of Education, University of Colorado, Boulder

Paul Levitt
Professor, Department of English, University of Colorado, Boulder

Tom Mayer
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder

Peter Michelson,
Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Colorado, Boulder

Emma Perez
Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder

Brenda Romero, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Musicology, College of Music, University of Colorado, Boulder

Martin Walter
Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Colorado, Boulder

Michael Yellow Bird (Sahnish, Hidatsa)
Associate Professor, Center for Indigenous Nations Studies, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas

END

Iraqi Refugee Crisis Rivals Darfur’s

 http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0705070951may08,1,3358394.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
Iraqi refugees flood fragile region

A silent exodus of Iraqis spurred by 4 years of continuous violence is
straining neighbors ill-equipped to handle the huge influx.

The displaced in Iraq and Darfur

The United Nations says about 2.4 million Iraqis are refugees —
having left their country to flee persecution — and 1.9 million more
are “internally displaced,” having fled their homes but staying in the
country.  In the Darfur region of Sudan, the total displaced is 2.2
million to 2.5 million, with the majority remaining in the country.

Sources: UN, Refugees International

Israel and Holocaust Experts Defend Finkelstein

Raul Hilberg and Avi Shlaim Discuss Finkelstein Case on Democracy Now <http://normanfinkelstein.wordpress.com/2007/05/09/raul-hilberg-and-avi-shlaim-discuss-finkelstein-case-on-democracy-now/&gt;
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
See: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/09/1514221 <http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/09/1514221&gt;
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
“It Takes an Enormous Amount of Courage to Speak the Truth When No One Else is Out There” — World-Renowned Holocaust, Israel Scholars Defend DePaul Professor Norman Finkelstein as He Fights for Tenure
The battle over political science professor Norman Finkelstein to receive tenure at DePaul University is heating up. Finkelstein – one of the country’s foremost critics of Israeli policy – has taught at DePaul for the past six years. Finkelstein’s two main topics of focus over his career have been the Holocaust and Israeli policy. We speak to two world-renowned scholars in these fields: Raul Hilberg, considered the founder of Holocaust studies, and Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations at Oxford University and an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shlaim calls Finkelstein a “very impressive, learned and careful scholar”, while Hilberg praises Finkelstein’s “acuity of vision and analytical power.” Hilberg says: “It takes an enormous amount of courage to speak the truth when no one else is out there to support him.” [includes rush transcript]

The battle over political science professor Norman Finkelstein to receive tenure at DePaul University is heating up. Finkelstein – one of the country’s foremost critics of Israeli policy – has taught at DePaul for the past six years. His tenure has been overwhelmingly approved at the departmental and college level, but the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has opposed it.A final decision is expected to be made in the coming weeks. Finkelstein has accused Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz of being responsible for leading the effort to deny him tenure. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Dershowitz admitted that he had sent a letter to DePaul faculty members lobbying against Finkelstein’s tenure. Then last week the Wall Street Journal published an article by Dershowitz titled “Finkelstein’s Bigotry.” In it, Dershowitz accuses Finkelstein of being an “anti-Semite” and says that he “does not do ‘scholarship’ in any meaningful sense.”
Finkelstein’s two main topics of focus over his career have been the Holocaust and Israeli policy. Today we are joined by two world-renowned scholars in these fields:
Raul Hilberg. One of the best-known and most distinguished of Holocaust historians. He is author of the seminal three-volume work “The Destruction of the European Jews” and is considered the founder of Holocaust studies. He joins us on the line from his home in Vermont.
Avi Shlaim. Professor of international relations at Oxford University. He is the author of numerous books, most notably “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.” He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Israeli-Arab conflict.


AMY GOODMAN: The battle over political science professor Norman Finkelstein to receive tenure at DePaul University in Chicago is heating up. Finkelstein is one of the country’s foremost critics of Israeli policy. He has taught at DePaul for the past six years. His tenure has been overwhelmingly approved at the departmental and college level. A college-wide faculty panel voted 5-0 to back his ten-year bid, but the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has opposed it. A final decision is expected in the next few weeks.
Professor Finkelstein has accused Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz of being responsible for leading the effort to deny him tenure. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Dershowitz admitted he had sent a letter to DePaul faculty members lobbying against Finkelstein’s tenure. Then, last week the Wall Street Journal published an article by Dershowitz titled “Finkelstein’s Bigotry.” In it, Dershowitz accuses Finkelstein of being an anti-Semite and says he “does not do scholarship in any meaningful sense.” Professor Finkelstein’s two main topics of focus over his career have been the Holocaust and Israeli policy.
Today, we’re joined by two world-renowned scholars in these fields. Raul Hilberg is one of the best known and most distinguished of Holocaust historians. He is author of the seminal three-volume work, The Destruction of the European Jews. He’s considered the founder of Holocaust studies. He joins us from his home in Vermont. Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at Oxford University in Britain. He is the author of numerous books, most notably The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. He’s widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Israeli-Arab conflict.
We’ll begin in Vermont with Professor Hilberg. Can you talk about Professor Finkelstein’s contribution to Holocaust studies with his book, The Holocaust Industry?
RAUL HILBERG: Yes. I read this book, which was published about seven years ago, even as I, myself, was researching actions brought against Swiss companies, notably banks, but also other enterprises in insurance and in manufacturing. And the gist of all of these claims, all of these actions, was that somehow the Swiss banks, in particular, and other enterprises, as well, owed money to Jews or the survivors or the living descendants of people who were victims. The actions were brought by claims lawyers, by the World Jewish Congress, which joined them, and a blitz was launched in the newspapers. Congressmen and senators were mobilized, officials of regulatory agencies in New York and elsewhere. Threats were issued in the nature of withdrawal of pension funds, of boycotts, of bad publicity.
And I was struck by the fact, even as I, myself, was researching the same territory that Professor Finkelstein was covering, that the Swiss did not owe that money, that the $1,250,000,000 that were agreed as a settlement to be paid to the claimants was something that in very plain language was extorted from the Swiss. I had, in fact, relied upon the same sources that Professor Finkelstein used, perhaps in addition some Swiss items. I was in Switzerland at the height of the crisis, and I heard from so-called forensic accountants about how totally surprised the Swiss were by this outburst. There is no other word for it.
Now, Finkelstein was the first to publish what was happening in his book The Holocaust Industry. And when I was asked to endorse the book, I did so with specific reference to these claims. I felt that within the Jewish community over the centuries, nothing like it had ever happened. And even though these days a couple of billion dollars are sometimes referred to as an accounting error and not worthy of discussion, there is a psychological dimension here which not must be underestimated.
I was also struck by the fact that Finkelstein was being attacked over and over. And granted, his style is a little different from mine, but I was saying the same thing, and I had published my results in that three-volume work, published in 2003 by Yale University Press, and I did not hear from anybody a critical word about what I said, even though it was the same substantive conclusion that Finkelstein had offered. So that’s the gist of the matter right then and there.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think, Professor Hilberg, he was criticized and you were not?
RAUL HILBERG: Well, Finkelstein — I believe Finkelstein was criticized mainly for the style that he employed. And he was vulnerable. And it was clear to me already years ago that some campaigns were launched — from what sector, I didn’t know — to remove him from the academic world. Years ago, I got a phone call from someone who was in charge of a survivors’ group in California who told me that Finkelstein had been ousted from a job in New York City at a university — actually, a college there — and this was done under pressure.
And then, again, I gave a lecture a year and a half ago in Chicago, which is the place where Finkelstein had been employed at DePaul University, and my lecture was about Auschwitz, and it was based on the records, which we’ve now recovered from Moscow, about the history of this camp. Not exactly a simple topic. But there was a question period, and I awaited pertinent questions, when someone rose from his chair and asked, “Should Finkelstein be tenured?” Now, for heaven’s sake, I said to myself, what is going on here?
And whether he’s being intimidated, whether he is in a situation where, whatever else may be happening, the employers are being intimidated, it’s hard for me to say, but there is very clearly a campaign, which was made very obvious in the Wall Street Journal, when Professor Dershowitz wrote in a style which is highly uncharacteristic of the editorial page of this newspaper, which incidentally I read religiously. So I, myself, cannot fully explain this outburst, but it clearly emanates from the same anger, from the same revolt, that prompted the whole action against the Swiss to begin with.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Professor Avi Shlaim into this discussion, a professor of international relations at Oxford University, has written numerous books, including The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. Can you talk about the significance of Professor Finkelstein’s work?
AVI SHLAIM: Yes. I think very highly of Professor Finkelstein. I regard him as a very able, very erudite and regional scholar who has made an important contribution to the study of Zionism, to the study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, in particular, to the study of American attitudes towards Israel and towards the Middle East.
Professor Finkelstein specializes in exposing spurious scholarship on the Arab-Israeli conflict. And he has a very impressive track record in this respect. He was a very promising graduate student in history at Princeton, when a book by Joan Peters appeared, called From Time Immemorial, and he wrote the most savage exposition in critique of this book. It was a systematic demolition of this book. The book argued, incidentally, that Palestine was a land without a people for people without a land. And Professor Finkelstein exposed it as a hoax, and he showed how dishonest the scholarship or spurious scholarship was in the entire book. And he paid the price for his courage, and he has been a marked man, in a sense, in America ever since. His most recent book is Beyond Chutzpah, follows in the same vein of criticizing and exposing biases and distortions and falsifications in what Americans write about Israel and about the Middle East. So I consider him to be a very impressive and a very learned and careful scholar.
I would like to make one last point, which is that his style is very polemical, and I don’t particularly enjoy the strident polemical style that he employs. On the other hand, what really matters in the final analysis is the content, and the content of his books, in my judgment, is of very high quality.

Kenneth Foster: To Be Executed 8/30 for Driving a Car

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT:
Bryan McCann, Media Relations
Campaign to End the Death Penalty – Austin
309.310.5223
bmccann@mail.utexas.edu
http://cedpaustin.blogspot.com (Austin)
http://www.nodeathpenalty.org  <http://www.nodeathpenalty.org>  (National)
http://www.freekenneth.com (Free Kenneth Foster)

San Antonio Native Kenneth Foster to be Executed for Driving a Car

May 8, 2007, Austin, Tex. – Supporters of Texas death row inmate Kenneth Foster,
Jr. learned last week that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to here his appeal
and that the state has since set an August 30 execution date for the San Antonio
native.  Foster was sentenced to death for involvement in the 1996 murder of
Michael T. LaHood, Jr.  Prosecutors claimed that Foster knowingly drove the
getaway car carrying assailant Mauriceo Brown, who was executed June 19, 2006.

Foster was convicted on the basis of Texas’s Law of Parties, which states a
defendant can be held criminally responsible for the offense of another if
“acting with intent to promote or assist the commission of the offense he
solicits, encourages, directs, aids or attempts to aid the other persons to
commit the offense” or if the crime “was one that should have been anticipated
as a result of the carrying out of the conspiracy.”

Foster and his supporters acknowledge he was driving the car on the night of
LaHood’s murder.  However, they maintain that Foster was unaware a crime was
going to take place.  Brown claimed that he shot LaHood in self-defense and
stated he did so on his own.  During Fosters appeal, at the evidentiary
hearing, Dwayne Dillard, the other defendant in the case, testified that Foster
started to drive away after hearing the gunshot but Dillard told him to stop.  A
juror claimed that he would have voted for a different verdict had he known that
Foster had tried to drive away after the gunshot. But Dillard’s testimony was
not presented at the trial.

Foster’s supporters also claim that his conviction under the Law of Parties was
unconstitutional.  They note that the trial judge instructed the jury that it
could find Foster guilty of capital murder based on association with Brown
exclusively, without evidence that Foster intended to rob and kill LaHood.
This, they claim, contradicted the Supreme Court’s decision in Enmund v.
Florida. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty violates
the Eighth Amendment and is a disproportionate punishment when the defendant
did not intend that the victims be killed or did not anticipate lethal force
might be used in the course of a robbery or to effect a safe escape.

“My brother is being put to death for being in the wrong place at the wrong
time, plain and simple,” explained Foster’s sister and advocate Claire Dube.
Dube also noted that Foster has an international network of supporters who hope
to stop the impending execution over the coming months.  “The fact that we have
a date is real blow, but we are not giving up.  Kenneth is a fighter and we
plan to fight with him every step of the way.”

Texas executes more individuals than any state in the country.  So far this
year, the state has performed thirteen executions.  Jose Moreno is scheduled to
be put to death on May 10, 2007.  Nationally, support for capital punishment
continues to drop in the wake of growing concern surrounding the method of
lethal injection and the risk of executing innocent people.  Florida and
California are two of several states that have recently halted executions
following claims that lethal injection causes condemned inmates to experience
pain before they die.

###

The Campaign to End the Death Penalty is a national abolitionist organization
based in Chicago.  The Austin chapter was founded in 1999.  The CEDP opposes
capital punishment for five reasons: it is racist, it targets the poor, it
condemns the innocent to die, it does not prevent crime, and it is cruel and
unusual.  Online: http://www.nodeathpenalty.org  <http://www.nodeathpenalty.org&gt; .

Three US Newspapers Reverse 100-Year-Old Stand on Death Penalty

This is incredible news!

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/11/1117/

Published on Friday, May 11, 2007 by Inter Press Service

Three US Newspapers Reverse 100-Year-Old Stand on Death Penalty

by Eli Clifton

WASHINGTON – Three established U.S. newspapers, two of them among the 10 largest
in the country, in three different states have in the past weeks abandoned their
century-old support of the death penalty and become passionate advocates of a
ban on state-sponsored killing.

The newspapers — the Chicago Tribune in Illinois, the smaller Sentinel in
Pennsylvania and the Dallas Morning News in Texas — announced their change of
heart in strongly-argued editorials following a series of investigative
articles highlighting the flaws in the death penalty system in their states and
country.

“I think in a word it’s the issue of innocence that has brought about these
editorials,” Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty
Information Center, told IPS. “The weight of evidence in death penalty cases as
seen and confirmed in DNA testing has made the death penalty too risky.”

The Chicago Tribune said its “groundbreaking” reporting suggested that innocent
people had been convicted and executed. Two cases in Texas were cited. Also
over the last 30 years more than 130 people had been released from death row in
the U.S. after evidence was presented that undermined the cases against them. In
that time, Illinois had executed 12 people and freed 18 from death row.

“The evidence of mistakes, the evidence of arbitrary decisions, the sobering
knowledge that governments can’t provide certainty that the innocent will not
be put to death — all that prompts this call for an end to capital punishment.
It is time to stop killing people in the people’s name,” the Chicago Tribune
wrote, reversing its pro-capital punishment position held since 1869.

Pennsylvania’s Sentinel newspaper, founded in 1861, also came out editorially
against capital punishment after its reporters highlighted the
“ineffectiveness” of the death penalty system in the state.

“The death penalty is useless,” the newspaper wrote in its Apr. 3 editorial.

The state’s lengthy appeals process created an almost indefinite stay of
execution. This meant the numbers on Pennsylvania’s death row were steadily
increasing. There were now 221 on death row, the fourth largest number of any
state in the country. This was a huge expense for the taxpayers, the newspaper
wrote.

“We are left with a grueling process that in the end only guarantees more
suffering for the victims’ families and society at large as faith in the
justice system erodes,” the editorial said. The majority of public opinion in
the U.S. now favoured prison without parole rather than capital punishment —
either out of “frustration with the system or revulsion at the punishment”.

“The pendulum is swinging away from Pennsylvania’s position on a law it cannot
even execute,” the editorial concluded.

The issue of race was also playing a major role in the fall in public support
for the death penalty, particularly in Pennsylvania, Brian Evans of Amnesty USA
told IPS. “There is a lot of doubt about the death penalty especially in
Pennsylvania because of the disproportionate racial mix of those on death row,”
he said.

In Texas, the Dallas Morning News reversed its century-old support for the death
penalty in an editorial on Apr. 15, citing mounting evidence that the state had
wrongly convicted a number of people in capital trials and probably executed at
least one innocent man.

Carlos De Luna was executed in 1989 for the murder of a petrol station
attendant, although there was no forensic evidence linking him to the crime.
Later, another man boasted to relatives that De Luna had been convicted for a
murder he had committed.

In a second disturbing case cited by the newspaper for its change of mind over
the death penalty, Ernest Ray Willis was convicted of the murder of two women
in 1987. A federal judge later found prosecutors had administered
anti-psychotic drugs to Willis during his trial to give him a “glazed over”
appearance and show he was “cold-hearted”. Prosecutors had also suppressed
evidence and provided no physical proof or eyewitnesses. Questions were also
raised about the competence of the court-appointed defense lawyers.

The sentence was overturned. Another death row inmate also confessed to the
killings. Willis was released after 17 years on death row.

“This board has lost confidence that the state of Texas can guarantee that every
inmate it executes is truly guilty of murder,” the Dallas Morning News wrote.

“We do not believe that any legal system devised by inherently flawed human
beings can determine with moral certainty the guilt of every defendant
convicted of murder. That is why we believe the state of Texas should abandon
the death penalty — because we cannot reconcile the fact that it is both
imperfect and irreversible.”

The number of death sentences handed down in the U.S. has been steadily
decreasing as public opinion in support of capital punishment has been falling.
Some 315 death sentences were handed down in 1995, 128 in 2005 and 102 last
year.

In the last five years, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it is
unconstitutional to execute juveniles and the mentally retarded. Thirteen of
the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia currently do not have the death
penalty.

Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service.
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