Holocaust Center cancels anti-Muslim speaker sponsored by MSU student group

The Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills has canceled a talk by a controversial anti-Muslim speaker.

The Michigan State University chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom student group announced on Monday that they would be hosting the speaker. But administrators at the Holocaust Center said today that the speech will not happen.

Selma Silverman, administrator of the center, said the event was booked without following proper procedures and that the center did not become aware of YAF’s background until Michigan Messenger inquired about the planned talk. The MSU chapter has been named as a “hate group” by the widely respected Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks groups with radical agendas such as the neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

“It should not have been there. It was an accident,” Silverman said. The booking occurred when one of the organization’s booking personnel mentioned the date and speech to another, who then booked it without following procedure, according to Silverman. She added that all groups and events at the center go through a vetting process, and that had not occurred in this case.

Continued -The canceled speaker is MSU engineering professor Indrek Wichman. He was reprimanded by MSU when in 2006, at the height of the controversy over a Danish newspaper’s publication of an anti-Muslim cartoon, he e-mailed a letter to the Muslim Student Association demanding the students accept Western cultural standards or return to their “ancestral lands.”

“I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as you proceeded with your infantile ‘protests.’ If you do not like the values of the West – see the First Amendment – you are free to leave,” Wichman wrote in the letter. (http://yafwatch.blog…)

After the letter was released by the student group, Wichman sent a letter defending his e-mail to the Muslim students in an April edition of the State News (http://www.statenews…). After that he seems to have dropped out of the public discourse on the issue, until MSU YAF Chairman Kyle Bristow published Wichman’s letter on the MSU YAF blog in May 2007.

According to a press release from YAF, the Holocaust Center speech was going to be co-sponsored by the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, a pro-Israeli group based in Washington. But Jim Colbert, communications director for the organization, said they knew nothing of the event.

“We don’t know anything about this, and we don’t know how our name got involved,” said Colbert in a phone interview. “We are not part of this.”

In an e-mail to YAFWatch, Karla Jones, director of Europe Project and Operations at the Jewish Institute, also said: “No one in the office knows anything about sponsoring this event, and we made the calls necessary to make sure that our name was taken off the announcement. In any event, I believe that the event is going to be canceled — a good thing, no doubt.”

YAF has hosted a number of controversial speakers at MSU. They include Chris Simcox, founder of the Minutemen Civilian Defense Corps, an anti-immigration group; Ryan Sorba, who gave a speech called “The Born Gay Hoax”; and the head of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, a Holocaust denier. When Griffin appeared on the campus last fall he was flanked by Preston Wigginton, who the next weekend was in Moscow speaking to a white nationalist rally.

The MSU YAF chapter is the only university-recognized “hate group” in the history of the Southern Poverty Law Center listing. The organization distributes its list and publication, The Intelligence Report, to over 50,000 law enforcement officials worldwide.

YAF’s Bristow did not respond to e-mails seeking comment. Wichman responded by sending copies of a Wikipedia entry on Muslim censorship and quotes from others about the importance of academic freedom.