College's District Discord Heats Up
When is an anti-Semite not an anti-Semite?
When he is an innocent history teacher and school board member who has the audacity to open a public seminar concerning the assassination of one of our presidents. The hate campaign underway against South Orange County Community College District Board President Steven J. Frogue has nothing to do with JFK conspiracies.* The hate-mongers are intent on negating the choice of the voters and working to discredit Frogue and his reform projects at Irvine Valley and Saddleback colleges.
Frogue planned to present a course called "The Warren Report on the JFK Assassination" at Saddleback College and included four potential speakers with diverse theories on the subject, beside the Warren Report documents.
Never mind that the speakers are published, acknowledged experts in the field**—one of the four has been labeled anti-Semitic because of his theories tying an Israeli intelligence group to the assassination.
So Frogue's opponents scream his experts should not be permitted to speak at Saddleback College. They label Frogue and anyone calling for discussion of this subject on grounds of academic freedom or freedom of speech a bigot or anti-Semite.
Do freedom of speech and academic freedom exist only for those opinions we agree with?***
Did Oliver North get censored last year when he spoke at Saddleback or could he express his views of history? Did the Black Muslim representatives present all sides of the race issue or their point of view at Saddleback?
Now a recall movement has begun against Frogue over a course that was canceled and never once met. Are we in America or the old USSR. Or Nazi Germany?
Shame on the leaders of this campaign, who want to destroy an elected official and accomplish by defamation of character what could not be done in an election of 200,000 voters.
RAY CHANDOS
Electronic Technology Instructor
Irvine Valley College
[Note: Chandos is a faculty union officer. He was the chief scribbler for the old corrupt union's Old Guard.]
*At least two (I do believe more) of Frogue's invited speakers were affiliated with Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, then widely acknowledged as the country's foremost anti-Semitic organization. One of Frogue's invitees was evidently a friend (Michael Collins Piper), who was then the chief "reporter" for Liberty Lobby. When Piper came to address the SOCCCD board, he was accompanied by dozens of racists and anti-semites, some of whom shouted, "There never was a Holocaust!" Frogue never dissociated himself with those people.
**As became clear in the media storm, none of the invited speakers could be thus described. They were in fact classic crackpots who promoted incompetent conspiracy theories.
***In the course of Frogue's defense of his "seminar," he defended Orange County "Institute for Historical Review," the country's foremost Holocaust denial organization. (At one of his press conferences, he held a copy of the IHR's journal high in the air.) Back in '95 and '96, Frogue praised the IHR and its journal. About a dozen former Frogue students wrote signed legal declarations attesting to Frogue's remarks and actions, including Holocaust denial. (Frogue was a high school teacher.)
Piper on John McCain's supposed "organized crime link"
