Quotations

Some things are so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them - no ordinary person could be so stupid.
-George Orwell

The above has long been one of my favorite quotes, a truly useful aphorism to keep in mind when one reads drivel like this:

As to those in the World Trade Center . . .
Well, really. 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.

The creature who penned the above screed is one Ward Churchill, a faculty member at the University of Colorado. If you have a strong tolerance for dogmatic stupidity you can read the rest of his piece, but it's typical leftist swill that you've probably heard before: America evil blah blah blah United States imperialist blah blah. In short, the kind of nonsense only an idiot could believe or a monstrous hypocrite would spout.

But common sense, and things like logic and critical thinking have entirely vanished from academia:

America's homegrown critics hold the peculiar conviction that if hatred of the sort that led to the destruction of the World Trade Center is directed at the United States, there must be good and justifiable reason for it. Yet these same critics never seem to take such a position in regard to victims of other hate crimes. Many of those habitually critical of this society (and claiming a desire to "understand" why it is hated while simultaneously believing that such a hatred is fully justified) support severe punishment for hate crimes without seeking to understand the grievances and resentments that produce them. They do not ask what battered women have done to justify their mistreatment, or what it is in the behavior of homosexuals or blacks that stimulates virulent hatred. Nor do they seek to "understand" or to plumb the "root causes" behind the actions of the wife beater or those who assault or murder gays... It is only when people have some sympathy with the violent act and its perpetrator that they start looking for root causes, to understand the aggressor and something in the behavior or attitude of the victim that shifts at least some of the responsibility from victimizer to victim.
-Paul Hollander, Prof. Emeritus of Sociology, Univ. of Massachusetts