It’s not easy to get to the bottom of all this, since elements of the moonbat left have targeted Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom with not one, but two, Denial of Service attacks (reported via Blackfive).

Evidently, one Deborah Frisch, a University of Pennsylvania Ph.D., employed as an adjunct instructor in Psychology at the University of Arizona, a lady actually capable of defending Ward Churchill in these terms:

Hours after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Ward Churchill compared the victims to the Nazis. A professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he wrote in an essay that those killed at the World Trade Center were not innocent civilians but “little Eichmanns.”

The analogy is so outrageous, one thinks, that surely he immediately got into trouble.

Actually, the analogy is extremely apt and not outrageous at all. It is clear from the context, that Professor Churchill was referring to Hannah Arendt’s comments about Eichmann.

Hannah Arendt was a journalist for the newspaper “The New Yorker” when she saw the Eichmann Trial in Israel in 1961. Her book is based on a series of articles she wrote about the trial.

In the article, she coined the term “banality of evil.” Hitler’s henchmen who had behaved monstrously did not look like monsters. Instead, they were bland and benign. According to Arendt, Eichmann’s character flaw was mindless obedience to authority, not a sadistic or psychopathic personality.

This, of course, is even scarier than finding that Eichmann and other Nazis were crazy in some way. Arendt’s analysis inspired Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority at Yale University and Philip Zimbardo’s Prison Study at Stanford University.

So there is nothing absurd or outrageous about using the term “Eichmann” to refer to the stockbrokers who died that day. It’s a little strange to completely ignore the firefighters, secretaries and building maintenance workers who died that day. And singling out the stockbrokers and ignoring the firefighters dehumanizes them the same way Nazis dehumanized Jews.

I agree with Churchill that America was not an “innocent victim” on 911. I’m tempted to agree that “titans” of finance are more guilty than the rest of us. But even though they’re better compensated than the rest of us, they’re no more guilty, really. We’re all little Eichmanns. Only the far left is willing to admit it.

made a series of postings in the Comments section of Goldstein’s blog of an irrational and highly inappropriate character. Some readers thought these postings might actually constitute a threat to Mr. Goldstein’s child, and a number of people lodged complaints with the University of Arizona and the authorities.

Having provoked a firestorm, La Frisch prudently resigned her teaching position, and asked for the whole thing to stop.

Goldstein, posting on another site, denied feeling victimized.

1) I don’t feel victimized. Debbie Frisch is as nutty as the ring around a squirrel’s crapper, but I don’t think she’s a threat. She’s more of an object lesson in having too many cats.
2) I allowed Debbie to continue commenting here because she was (paraphrase: making a fool of herself).
3) (parahrase: She did make a fool of herself: a big one.)
4) But no matter. I don’t want apologies.
5) On the other hand, pie would be nice.
6) Or a bottle of really good tequila.
7) Blue agave, Deb.
8) None of that cheapass rail shit you were huffing the other night.
9) Go on, I’ll wait…

Deborah Frisch seems to have a long record of posting less-than-civil comments to blogs she disagrees with. I found another case early in 2005 at Professor Bainbridge.

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UPDATE

This unseemly affair started 7/3 with Frisch posting comments in response to criticism of the New York Times’ publication of the SWIFT program.

Frisch’s academic career.

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FURTHER UPDATE

All this unseemly correspondence, and denial of service attacks on Protein Wisdom, are still continuing Sunday night. link