No place on campus
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
I sat at a coffee shop last week at 7:35 a.m., absent-mindedly flipping through a copy of the Eugene Weekly as I tried to wake up. I spotted an article decrying the Pacifica Forum, a “free-speech” group that holds weekly meetings at the University of Oregon. The article ranted about the group being a platform for anti-semitism, facism, and other such sensitive topics. Knowing that the Eugene Weekly is about as fair and balanced as Fox News, I looked for more information when I got home.
Apparently, the article was actually correct. I found an article in the “Register Guard” that said the same thing. Additionally, I found that the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified the Pacifica Forum (which is in no way affiliated with the Pacifica Foundation or UO) as a hate group, and the local Anti-Hate Task Force has been meeting to try and figure out what to do.
The Forum, which until recently met at the Eugene Memorial Union, hosted speakers such as Jimmy Marr, a member of the American branch of the National Socialist Movement (who aren’t actually socialists, by the way). Marr began his “lecture” by “sieg heiling” several times, giving an anti-semitic interpretation of the Torah, and screaming at a rabbi who attended that week’s meeting. He proceeded to play an NSM propaganda video, and a slide show where NSM and anti-neo-Nazi protesters clashed violently. All of this was accompanied by neo-Nazi heavy metal music accusations of how the “Jewish traitors” are causing all the world’s problems.
This was just the most dramatic and recent in a string of “lectures” which have caused much uproar. Valdas Anelauskas, a Lithuanian-born white-supremacist, is a member and regular speaker. Besides indulging in some “sieg heils” of his own, he also said in a speech about the late feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, that she shouldn’t have bothered writing, because she was “too ugly to rape.”
Other speakers include Holocaust deniers and people who think Muslims are the cause of the world’s problems. Fortunately, UO has banned the Pacifica Forum from the EMU, but they still meet on campus.
It is a difficult line between free speech and hate speech, but the Pacifica Forum has crossed it. I feel that when your rhetoric includes murdering billions of people due to religious, ideological, and racial causes, you should lose the right to spout that message in public. At the very least, you should lose your right to meet on a school campus. Students are supposed to feel safe on campus. They should not have to be concerned that when they go to class that day they might run into a band of neo-Nazis going to their weekly meeting. It’s good that UO banned them from the EMU, which is home to diversity groups such as the Black Student Union, Jewish Student Union and the school’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer group.
I was pleased to read that the leader of the Swastika Club of America was in attendance to protest Marr’s speech. The SCA is an anti-fascist group dedicated to clearing the name of the swastika, and returning it to its original usage as an ancient Sanskrit symbol of peace and good luck.
The Forum insists it is a free-speech group, and not a hate-speech group. I doubt this. Jimmy Marr has been invited to speak multiple times, and Anelauskas is a regular, not to mention their pretty standard lineup of people whose goal seems to be to upset all non-horrible people. If they want to prove they are not a hate group, they should stop inviting people who promote hate speech. Pretty simple solution really.
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