ABOUT THOSE CHICKENS...

On December 1, 1963, a week after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X was asked for a response.  He said it was a case of  chickens coming home to roost.  In other words, Kennedy and, by extension, white America, had it coming.  "Being an old farm boy myself," he said, "chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad," prompting his listeners, according to a newspaper account, "to loud applause and laughter."

The comment was so obnoxious that Malcolm X was censured by the Nation of Islam and was banned by Elijah Muhammad from speaking in public for 90 days. By the end of March, 1964, Malcolm X had left the Nation of Islam and would eventually embrace Sunni Islam.

Fast forward to September 12, 2001.  

Ward Churchill, a Left-wing activist and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, wrote an essay entitled Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, in which he deliberately adopted the obnoxious rhetoric of Malcolm X and blamed the horrible events of the previous day on U.S. involvement in Operation Desert Storm, aka the Gulf War, a decade earlier.  In doing so, he conveniently failed to acknowledge that Desert Storm had been a UN-authorized coalition force from 34 nations (led by the United States), against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait.  Perhaps the most cruel and unforgivable statements in the entire diatribe were these:

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. 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. 

And that was merely the beginning of an epic rant about America's bloody history of "imperialism." A classic, if completely unhinged, example of Marxist agitprop in action.  And Churchill wasn't alone in launching verbal attacks on the United States in celebration of the atrocities of 9/11.

On September 16, 2001, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago stood up to give a sermon.  Did he express sadness about the tragedy of 9/11?  Did he offer prayers for the innocent lives snuffed out that day?  No, not at all.  Like Churchill, Jeremiah Wright saw that the real tragedies were all of the evil deeds done by the imperialist United States to the non-white peoples of the world which naturally resulted in a bloody retaliation against Americans.

"I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. Did anybody else see or hear him? He was on FOX News, this is a white man, and he was upsetting the FOX News commentators to no end, he pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, he pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he was silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true, he said America's chickens, are coming home to roost."

"We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism. 

"We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism. 

"We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.

"We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenage and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathers. 

"We bombed Qaddafi's home, and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children's head against the rock. 

"We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they'd never get back home. 

"We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye. 

"Kids playing in the playground. Mothers picking up children after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day. 

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost. 

"Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y'all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don't have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that."

As you can see, Wright began by claiming that it was Edward Peck who chose to use the "chickens coming home to roost" metaphor to describe what had happened on 9/11.  This seemed to lend credibility to the typical Marxist analysis of 9/11.  After all, Peck had spent 32 years as a career federal employee, mostly in the State Department.  But was Wright being completely honest about what Peck said?  More on that later.

The hate-filled, Marxist rhetoric of Ward Churchill and Jeremiah Wright was quickly suppressed by the Establishment media for a few years.  In 2003 Churchill published a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which merely expanded on his original 2001 essay.  With a foreward written by Chellis Glendinning, whose claim to fame is that she is a pioneer in the field of "ecopsychology," the book is divided into three parts:

1. The Ghosts of 9-1-1
2. The "Most Peace-Loving of Nations"
3. A "Government of Laws?"

In addition to rehashing the original diatribe about how the U.S. deserved to be attacked, Churchill provided a long and detailed list of military interventions and covert actions allegedly conducted by the U.S. government. In the book he also talks at length about the many times that the U.S. has violated international law and ignored U.N. resolutions.  In short, Churchill sees the United States as a rogue nation of imperialist mass-murderers who deserved to be attacked.  Nothing too unexpected from a Left-wing radical "professor" who hates America but refuses to go live in whatever workers' paradise he may think exists somewhere in the world.

In 2005 Churchill was invited to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.  Prior to the event Bill O'Reilly got wind of it and raised awareness of Churchill's offensive book and radical views. The lecture was eventually canceled after the college received a significant amount of negative feedback from folks understandably outraged by Churchill's wildly inaccurate and irresponsible claims and accusations, coupled with deliberately insensitive statements such as referring to the victims of 9/11 as "little Eichmanns."

During the 2008 Democrat primaries the issue of Jeremiah Wright surfaced, including his outrageously hateful comments in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  Since that "sermon" in 2001 he had given other incendiary "sermons" while Barack and Michelle Obama sat in the pews of his church, including the infamous one given in April, 2003:

"The U.S. government gives black Americans the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no. God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme..." 

Naturally the Establishment Media, which had already dived head-first into the tank for Obama, began to spin furiously on his behalf once the radicalism of his pastor and mentor for 20 years became national news (or, "non-news" as the #lapdogmedia insisted). CNN's Roland Martin, for instance, tried to mitigate the situation by claiming that Wright had merely been quoting Edward Peck and had not deliberately chosen the "chickens coming home to roost" metaphor to include in his "sermon."  But that claim was quickly debunked by PBS ombudsman Michael Getler in a review of Wright's rehabilitation interview with Bill Moyers.

However, even though Peck didn't use that specific metaphor, his comments to FNC's David Asman were certainly controversial in their own right:

ASMAN: Ambassador Peck, you know, I'm thinking of a man named Chamberlain back in the 30s who had such a strong adherence to the orderly world and the rule of law, etcetera, that he had become accustomed to that he lost sight of precisely what it was a madman like Adolf Hitler was doing. And, unfortunately there were too many people like him, who in order to adhere to those specific rules of law, allowed Hitler to get away with an awful lot. Some people are saying the same thing is happening now with not only Osama bin Laden, not only those in Afghanistan who support him but people like Saddam Hussein, too, because of adherence to these specific little rules, is able to get away with murder.

PECK: Well, you know, the specific little rules are what we base our entire conduct on.

ASMAN: But there comes a point in which, and we came to that point Tuesday, Ambassador, in which those rules have to be looked at again and have to be taken in context with massive, massive loss of human life and a change of the rules in effect, wasn't it a very significant change of the rules that took effect last week?

PECK: They came to do to us what they perceive, it doesn't make them right, but what they perceive is we've been doing the same thing now for a long time in various parts of the world. It doesn't make them right or us wrong. Don't misunderstand me. But the only thing anybody has to...

ASMAN: I just have to stop you. We've been doing the same thing around the world?

PECK: Yeah. You want a list of the countries that we've bombed and invaded over the last 25 years?

ASMAN: What country, in what country have we rammed a plane loaded with fuel through a known civilian center such as was done this week? Excuse me, Ambassador, but I can't think of a precedent for this week anywhere in the world, certainly not one committed by the United States.

PECK: Certainly not, we've never had to do that because we have, you know, untrammeled military force. These people are terrorists. They resort to that because they can't take us on, head on, nor should they even, well they can't. But the point is that some of the things that we have done in the firm, honest belief that we are advancing the cause of justice, human rights, and freedom and all of that are not perceived that way by the people that we bomb. I offer you Panama. I give you Haiti. Take Cambodia. What about Iraq?

 On October 8, 2001, Peck was even more specific in an interview on CNN's "Crossfire" program as to who he felt was truly responsible for the attacks on 9/11 and all the ones that had occurred during the Clinton administration:

BILL PRESS: I know we’ve been focusing on what comes next. I want to come back, if I can, to what we are doing today.

PECK: Yes, sir. 

PRESS: Day two of this war against terrorism in Afghanistan. 94 percent of the American people support it. Do you? Are you among the 94? 

PECK: Oh, yes, sure. Except that you ask the American people the question one way and they will say, “yes we are for it.” And then you watch the body bags to come home and then they are against it. Polling is a very tricky business, sir. I don’t need to tell you that. When you tell me that 86.2 percent of the people want lower taxes and 94 percent more services, I recognize that there’s a conflict there. What the American people want is something that’s very hard to understand because A) they don’t know where Afghanistan is; B) they know nothing about it; and C) they have no idea whatsoever as to what the potential gains and costs are from getting involved. The difficulty that we face is that I support — because I understand how democracy works — we have to go out and do the sorts of things we are doing. So we will mercilessly, viciously, effectively attack and destroy all kinds of symptoms. When the rubble has settled and the dust is gone, the disease is still going to be out there untouched. Because we don’t want to look at why, why it is that all of these people hate us. It’s not because of freedom. It’s not because Brittney Spears has a belly button or because we export hamburgers. They hate us because of things they see us doing to their part of the world that they definitely do not like. 

Here's Peck in 2008 appearing on FNC as an apologist for Hezbollah. 

And here's Peck in a 2010 phone conversation following his arrest by the IDF during the so-called Freedom Flotilla in which several heavily-armed Turkish "peace activists" were killed after ambushing Israeli soldiers while they boarded the ship.

For those infected by the Marxist mania for unilaterally condemning the United States (and increasingly our ally, Israel) for all of the world's ills and simultaneously justifying the most brutal attacks on our nation and people, it apparently NEVER. GETS. OLD.