A former University of Colorado professor, assailed for likening Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi leader and fired for alleged plagiarism, testified in court Monday that the 2001 terrorist attacks were “perfectly predictable.”
Ward Churchill took the stand in his lawsuit seeking to get his job back at the university, where he was a tenured professor of ethnic studies.
“I’m not in favor of terror,” he said while explaining the essay that thrust him into the national spotlight. Public outrage over the essay erupted just before the university launched a research-misconduct investigation into his other work.
Churchill said that when he compared the victims in the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, he was arguing that “if you make it a practice of killing other people’s babies for personal gain . . . eventually they’re going to give you a taste of the same thing.”
Churchill said it was not his intent to be hurtful to the Sept. 11 victims.
The only surprise in the attacks was that “it took so long” for them to happen, he said.
