Zammit: Location of Griffin speech was uncertain, not undisclosed

In a blog post on Tuesday Michigan Messenger reported about the near Byzantine path required to identify where Nick Griffin, the Holocaust denying chair of the British National Party, would speak at Michigan State University.

Griffin heads the white nationalist BNP, which until this past weekend was a party that refused membership to any non-white, non-European residents of Great Britain. It was forced by British law to adopt changes to the its charter to allow those who had been excluded to become members. He had been invited to the campus of Michigan State University by the new student group Sons of Liberty.

In the post, Messenger wrote that Jordan Zammit, the president and founder of the student group, refused to disclose the location of Griffin’s speech. But in an e-mail to Michigan Messenger, Zammit says the reason he did not disclose the location was because it was not set yet.

I was not intentionally not answering where the speech was located, nothing was set in stone, I was still in talks with the administration about parts of our contract, and the talks had not yet concluded as of yesterday, Feb. 15, when Mr. Griffin canceled his speaking tour. I did not want to release a location that may change before the day the event was to take place.

Why Zammit didn’t just say that in the numerous e-mails he exchanged with Messenger is unclear, but we take him at his word. And we wonder what makes the process for assigning a room for such an event so cumbersome at MSU.