Ward Churchill goofed on only five notes — really, so what?

It is now clear: Prof. Ward Churchill falsified only five footnotes out of 4,000 pages of scholarship.  Why is he being hounded? Why was he fired? The vast percentage of his scholarship, he says, is sound. Five plagiarized or false footnotes are a trifle. What’s the big deal?

It’s a good point. On the space shuttle Challenger, only a couple of O rings loosened up the fuel tank. Compared to the almost incalculable number of items that the rocket scientists got right, those O rings were a trifle. So they made the Challenger blow up, what’s the big deal?

AIG paid out $165 million in bonuses, compared to the $180 billion in bailout money it received. These bonuses are a trifle, less than one one-thousandth of the whole bailout sum. What’s the big deal?

In the fourth game of the 2004 American League championship series against the hated New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox were down 3 games to 0, in the ninth inning. Then the team did one small thing right — a tiny percentage of all its bad play in four games. The Sox went on to win the game, and the championship, and the World Series; but why focus on that bottom-of-the-ninth triviality? What’s the big deal?

Votes don’t count. Everybody knows that. More than 100 million people vote in presidential elections. In Florida, in 2000, a few hundred out of those votes determined the presidency of the United States. By why focus on the hundreds, when there were another 105,586,000 (or so)votes? What’s the big deal?

Countless Holocaust survivors ate well upon their long awaited liberation. They ate a single meat sandwich or another rich food — and died. They had cheated death, survived starvation and beatings, and escaped death trains; defying the odds beyond all belief. So what if they made a single tiny, unintentional and wholly understandable mistake at the end? What’s the big deal?

On Jan. 4, 2006, as the sun set over the Judean Hills, Ariel Sharon had a few moments of pain. Now, this war hero had lived through hours and days of straight, life-and-death battles, but his doctor, Shlomo Segev, overrode the paramedics who recommended that Sharon be taken to the nearest facility 20 minutes away, and instead sent Sharon to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, 55 minutes away. On the way to Hadassah Sharon suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and has been in a deep coma ever since. For this brave war hero, what’s a few extra minutes in an ambulance to the hospital? What’s the big deal?

So Ward Churchill would have us believe that a few small falsehoods, “details,” he calls them — a trifle plagiarism here, a trivial false footnote there, adding up to a tiny percentage of his scholarly work — make no difference at all. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take it from the famed Jewish sage, the Chofetz Chaim, who observed, ironically and accurately: A 99% truth is a 100% percent lie.