The title of this blog is (without the stream of exclamation points and question marks) the title of a propaganda piece of the liberal machine that aired on some cable TV channel yesterday.

While I absolutely refused to watch it, the title of the piece was a clear and obvious reference to Rev. Martin Neimoeller's well known quote regarding Nazi Germany. And it was deliberately inflammatory, and obviously deliberately worded to imply that the recent responses to Ward Churchill are a persecution that we should watch with increasing vigilance.

Please.

Ward Churchill is, first, a PAID public speaker. The controversy is not about "free speech", it never was. It is about the asinine statements of an ignorant, self promoting individual that justified a ruthless attack on a building full of civilians. And the response by most of Americans was simply their exercising of the same free speech Churchill and his ilk claim to have had denied them.

The equation: they push anti-American propaganda, they justify murder and it is free speech. We get outraged and it's persecution. Sorry, it just doesn't add up.

While Mr. Churchill has had a great deal of controversy over his comments, the controversy has not been exclusive to the conservative circles. Many moderates are just as outraged, and, in fact, every Holocaust survivor, or family member of a Holocaust survivor, should be outraged at the way the liberal camp trivializes the suffering of millions of innocents by using it as part of their propaganda machine.

Mr. Churchill has not been hauled away in chains and vetted by some secret government agency in some dark room.

Mr Churchill has not had various family members disappear without a trace.

Mr. Churchill has not been exiled to some dark corner of the country. In fact, he still speaks freely on the airwaves controlled by the same government he and his ilk have accused of persecution.

Mr. Churchill has not ridden in a freight train packed to capacity with human flesh, clamoring for the essentials of air and of water occasionally passed around.

Until Mr. Churchill can bear his skin and show the marks of torture, he and his associates have NO RIGHT to accuse this administration of Nazi tactics.

Respectfully submitted,

Gideon MacLeish