Hooraw for Michigan

And the email keeps coming in! While I'm out meeting HR folks, or at home rearranging stamps or just peering at my belly-button, I'm still in touch with the world, and vice-versa.

Old friend and foil Anon E. Mouse sent me an email yesterday; I read it this morning, and pounced on it immediately. It appears to have originated with a Tall-Corn fellow I'll call John Smith:

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2007 2:09 PM

Subject: hooray for michigan

This was checked out on SNOPES and found to be exactly as is stated.

Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 11:43 AM

Professor Tells Muslims to Leave Country

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.

Send this to your friends, and ask them to do the same. Tell them to keep passing it around until the whole country gets it. We are in a war. This political correctness crap is getting old and killing us.

If you agree with this, please send it to all your friends, if not simply delete.

Keep the Faith!

John Smith

She must have heard my eyes rolling. I sent back to her:

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 11:56 AM

Nope; I don't agree.

The university is quite right in standing by their man over issues of free speech and the privacy of his communication.

However – and I think most of the "Right" has lost sight of this – the students' protests, and Wichman's complaint, simply are not equivalent issues. The students were protesting the depiction of Muhammad in those Danish cartoons; they found it offensive. I don't, but I'm not as sensitive, nor as vociferous. Regardless; the students were well within their rights to protest an issue that, though overseas, they found personally insulting.

Or should we Christians, in turn, not complain if someone, say, in Malaysia does a TV and internet commercial featuring (this is just a what-if, okay?) Jesus climbing down off the cross, soul-kissing a young lady in the crowd, and selling her father a car and bowl of noodles?

Wichman, again, was well within his own rights to notify that student group he'd felt they had gone over the line (they had not), and that by his own (spurious and specious) perceptions they were being hypocritical. And the group had indeed stepped over the line by making public a private communication without his consent. (See the Snopes article; he at least claims he'd thought he was emailing just one of the students, and not the full group.)

However – and this seems to me so typical of the knee-jerk, anti-Islam, huge-tarbrush-wielding bigmouths of the "Right" – by associating this group of peaceful students with the blood-drenched, atrocity-rich fanatic radical fundamentalist pseudo-Islamist terrorists currently plaguing much of the Middle East and beyond, Wichman fanned the flames of the hatred that often passes for dialog in both West and East; he brings that dialog to a common and embarrassing low; and he has personally, unfairly, and derogatorily insulted a group of people legitimately exercising Constitutional rights. And this John Smith fellow is simply adding more gasoline and throwing lit matches.

If the students had been speaking at Wichman's own level of reasoning and sensitivity, they would have been accusing him personally of torturing Jews, killing blacks, murdering babies, burning widows, and torching and plundering whole cities – things that have been done (and are still being done today) throughout history in the name of Jesus.

We Christians too easily forget that our faith-history is guilty of much innocent spilled blood, and anti-Christians could make a good and reasonable case against us, pivoting just on Matthew 7:16, "By their fruits you will know them", and James 2:18, "I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works". Indeed, I suspect that Judgment Day will see many, many cries for justice against us Bible-wielders, and justice will indeed be served us.

In a genuine debate, the points would unquestionably go to the students. They stayed with their topic on what they felt to be an insult, and did not stoop to pouting, juvenile argumentation. Wichman cannot claim the same, and the university would in turn be within its own institutional rights to reprimand the man for being unneedfully provocative. That they haven't, and may well not, is their business. Their own position (though I don't agree) may in fact be wise, in refusing to spotlight it beyond where it's already gone.

I will admit that I do largely concur with some of the us-or-them folks on the right who are all for showing the door to non-citizen cultural hypocrites who take advantage of this country's broad protections for all, and use their stance under that umbrella to incite violence and hatred; that's not what we're about.

But it's also not what the students were doing. Yet that's exactly what Wichman was doing, and what Smith is applauding. Jesus would be ashamed of them both.

Regards,

AgingChild

Ms. Mouse was not going to let this be; she respectfully dodged my counterpoints, and responded with a silly argument she's brought up before:

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 1:00 PM

Okay, but why is it alright for minorities to voice their opinion and call it their civil rights but it's not right for the white's to voice their opinion?

Regards,
Anon E. Mouse

I decided not to point out that she'd switched topics on me, rather than address my points. I answered her:

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 1:30 PM

Certainly a reasonable question! Yes, I'll take it.

In our free society, all individuals and legitimate associations are entitled to be able to present their views in the court of public opinion. I bristle where this constitutionally-protected freedom is commandeered to – as I said – push hatred and non-civility, whether by minority or by majority.

Yes; if it's an African-American advocating the firebombing of Lester Maddox's First National Bank, s/he's going too far. Likewise if a cowardly crowd of sheet-wearers stirs up a riot to go hang some darkies. Same also for a Muslim on Main Street USA advocating the violent overthrow of the oppressive American régime. Ditto a fellow with a white collar, ornate robe, and mighty cross demanding his followers drag all Muslims out of this country because some folks claiming to follow the same Koran are butchering children and horsewhipping women halfway around the world.

Free speech is, and must continue to be, protected. It is not, however, the be-all and end-all of citizenship. For a just society to flourish and remain healthy, there must also be a genuine, responsible civility, or there'd be no point in instituting protection (i.e., the police) of the citizens heeding, or disagreeing with, that same speech.

Regarding that Michigan issue, both sides made good use of their speech-freedoms, but only one was jeopardizing civil order in doing so. Smith and Witch-Hunt – excuse me; I mean "Wichman" – pose shallow, transparent, bigoted arguments, whereas the students (from what I've seen; I concede there may be more to it… but I'd think that would have made the news as well, at least on Fox) kept themselves reined in, and clamored only for intercultural sensitivity… a concept that may well be beyond Smith and Wichman.

In general, modern-day America has lost sight of the meaning of the concept of freedom, insisting that "freedom" means unrestricted liberty to do whatever one darned well pleases. It does not; our sloppy language leads its speakers into sloppy and fallacious assumptions and reasoning. Unrestricted personal indulgence is license; see Definition 3 in Webster's, and also check a related word, licentiousness.

"Freedom" in a civil society is the unimpeded doing of what one ought to do, not the self-indulgent pursuit of what one wants to do – or burning polling stations would be a legitimate means of voting for/against one's candidate of choice, for instance. Free speech embraced the burning of draft cards a generation ago; it cannot embrace the burning of bridges today.

Regards,

AC

I ran this e-dialog past Spartacus, who is extremely intolerant of BS from the left or from the right, though politically is farther to the left of me. Sparks answered simply, and – baffled – perhaps just a bit uncharitably:

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 6:31 PM

and this is an educated woman?

Too many people seem to take the term "conservative" to mean not having to think.

I can hardly qualify as a gentleman – but I will at least defend my opponents (as would Spartacus, of course). I explained to him:

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 6:54 PM
Subject: RE: Hooray for Sanity Clause!

Correct on both counts, sir!

Friend Mouse has also most eagerly agreed to provide a job reference for me (so I'm a little more soft-stepping around her) – she and I worked for [a particular conservative firm] around the same time, and I even sat in for her a couple times when she was on vacation, either snorkeling off the Caymans, or firing away at the NRA range.

She has very high, professional accreditation, is lovely on the eye, has a sweet voice, has weathered serious health problems (I was one of several friends helping her through after she lost a breast to cancer, which had left her feeling her life was over… then she married, and she's never been happier)… and politically I think she's an utter bonehead. Not stupid! But unaccountably lockstep with the you-know-whos. I may yet scratch a bald spot in my scalp over her, and her ilk.

I'm also pickled tink that she and I can circle a common issue and growl like the merciless dogs we are… and still be able to fetch and bark together, with nary a nip to the ear (Michael Vick would've given us up as hopeless, heh-heh). I can't hope for her to do anything but constantly make right turns (never noticing she and her rowing crew are getting nowhere), but I want to put a face on the left for her – be an advocate for the non-conservatives – and do what I can to both feed the dialog, and keep it civil.

Regards,

Acey

Likely Mouse finds me wishy-washy and pompous... and I may in fact be driving her to her own bald spot – for which I apologize in advance! But it's fun having friends who don't agree with you (along with those who do): like the occasional cold-water plunge, it's quite invigorating… although a good blast of nice hot steam can be quite the thing.

I think, uh, some of us geyser driving her crazy…