Hooray for Michigan State University!
Well, what do we have here? Looks
like a small case of some people being able to dish it out, but not take it. Let's
start at the top.
The story begins at Michigan State
University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman. Wichman
sent an e-mail to the Muslim Student's Association. The e-mail was in response to
the students' protest
of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group
had complained the cartoons were "hate speech."
Enter Professor Wichman. In his
e-mail, he said the following:
Dear Moslem Association:
As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest.
I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians,
cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests
(the latest in Turkey ), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution
of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the
rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called "whores" in your culture),
the murder of film directors in
Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris, France.
This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many of my
colleagues. I counsel your dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as
you proceed with your infantile "protests."
If you do not like the values of
the West - see the 1st Amendment - you are free to leave. I hope for God's sake
that most of you choose that option.
Please return to your ancestral
homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.
Cordially,
I. S. Wichman
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
As you can imagine, the Muslim group
at the university didn't like this too well. They're demanding that Wichman be reprimanded
and mandatory diversity training for faculty and a seminar on hate and discrimination
for freshman.
Now the chapter of CAIR has jumped into the fray. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, apparently doesn't believe that the good professor had the right to express
his opinion.
For its part, the university is standing its ground, saying the e-mail was private,
and they don't intend to publicly condemn his remarks. That will probably change.
Wichman says he never intended for his e-mail to be made public, and wouldn't have
used the same strong language if he'd known it was going to get out.
How's the left going to handle this one? If you're in favor of the freedom of speech,
as in the case of Ward Churchill, will the same protections be demanded for Indrek
Wichman? I doubt it.
