by Steven Plaut

There was a time when the Left in the United States was able to field its own intellectual heavy weights, in order to try to offset the intellectual arguments from those opposing the Left. It was a Left of Michael Harrington and Irving Howe and contained people of a similar caliber.

That Left is no longer in existence. The Left in recent years has shown itself incapable of distancing itself from its lunatic fringe. Rational leftists have long ago abandoned the Left, while the adverse selection has produced a Left filled with treasonous lunatics and Hate-America neurotics, whose politics reflect little more than an infantile anger at Mommy and Daddy. There is today no difference between the academic Left and the Left of Mumia Abu Jamal and Ward Churchill. Nothing so clearly illustrates the demise of the “intellectual Left” than the self-recruitment of the stable of writers at Counterpunch magazine on behalf of Churchill, people better named Cockburn’s Cockroaches.

Ward Churchill’s pronouncements about Americans being little Eichmanns and his open endorsement of the 9-11 terrorists are by now familiar to all, although those were just the tip of his iceberg of his anti-Americanism and treason (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16978 ). In recent weeks, Counterpunch has morphed into almost a single-issue magazine, and that single issue is celebrating and defending Ward Churchill. This is not a “free speech” defense of Churchill by free speech absolutists, but rather an endorsement of the contents of Churchill’s anti-American and pro-terror speeches and articles by people staunchly OPPOSED to free speech for neoconservatives!

Counterpunch is a web magazine owned and edited by Alexander Cockburn. Cockburn’s anti-Americanism can compete only with his anti-Semitism, and Counterpunch largely promotes these two sentiments on its pages. Cockburn has been denounced in the past for both his anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism by Frank Foer of New Republic (see https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=express&s=foer040902 ) magazine, by Eric Alterman (in his MSNBC weblog), and by a variety of other journals, organizations and columnists, including the Seattle Times, the Declaration Foundation, Professor Edward Alexander, LewRockwell.com, LeftWatch, and Christian Action for Israel. In the past Cockburn openly gave credence to reports that Jews spread anthrax in the U.S. and that Israel was part of a conspiracy to topple the World Trade Center. Cockburn insists Jews conspire to control the media (see http://counterpunch.org/alexgraham.html ).

There is nothing that so clearly illustrates the collapse of thinking on the American Left and its total intellectual bankruptcy as its near-universal embrace of Ward Churchill. Every single “Indymedia” web site in the country has carried multiple endorsements of Churchill, even defending his lying about being an American Indian. A visit to the Counterpunch web site of leftist Alexander Cockburn currently reveals no fewer than eight separate articles all endorsing Churchill, and not a single article denouncing him.

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