Former Cartoonist Accuses Churchill of Once Having Curtailed His Free Speech

In one of the odder jump-in-and-add-ons to an ongoing political hot-button issue, Grant Crowell, a one-time campus cartoonist, has charged the controversial professor Ward Churchill of not supporting his right to free expression while he was a student at the University of Hawaii-Manoa in 1994. The charge surfaced as part of heated debate about Churchill being invited back to Hawaii to speak.

According to this article in the Rocky Mountain News, Churchill, visiting for a speech back then, joined a chorus of educators and students decrying a Crowell cartoon as racist, putting pressure on editors and administrators to punish Crowell in some way.

Leaving aside the continent's worth of emotional issues regarding Churchill, what's interesting to me is that Crowell claims Churchill compared him to Phillippe Rupprecht, a cartoonist who did anti-Semitic drawings for the loathesome Nazi paper Der Sturmer, of which you can see a few here, and asserted that Crowell's fate and Rupprecht's may be similar, meaning, Crowell assumed, death by hanging.

The Rocky Mountain News points out it was Julius Streicher and not Rupprecht who was hanged after the war tribunal, but still, it's hard to imagine speech more strident than what Crowell accuses Churchill of using (even though roughly the same accusation has popped up elsewhere), and it's doubly hard to imagine any cartoonist simply more obscure than Rupprecht popping up in the news at all. I mean, what's next, a major newspaper profile of Hak Vogrin?
 
posted 9:10 am PST | Permalink
 

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