The Thought Police are out in force at MSU, in response to Professor Indrek Wichman’s email from last spring. Neither the Muslims on campus nor the MSU officials seem to think it necessary for the Muslim students to address, in some way, in any way, the irrational violence of Cartoon Rage and the fact that the MSA on campus opted to protest the cartoons rather than the riots — which prompted Wichman’s email in the first place. His message was intemperate but raised legitimate questions.
All that matters to MSU officials and the MSA, however, is that this be an occasion to reeducate the MSU students about the connection between Islam and violence. Reeducating the Muslims who commit or condone the violence, or making sure such violent attitudes don’t crop up among MSU Muslims, is not on anyone’s radar screen.
“Professor’s Feb. statement draws MSU response,” by Alex Altman in The State News, with thanks to all who sent this in:
MSU officials plan on providing diversity training on Islam-related subjects to interested members of the university in response to an e-mail an MSU professor sent to the Muslim Students’ Association, or MSA, in February.
The initial request for the training came from the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, after Indrek Wichman, a mechanical engineering professor, wrote an e-mail to the group in response to controversial cartoons that portrayed Muhammad, the prophet and founder of the Islamic religion, as a terrorist.
In the e-mail, Wichman insisted that Muslims should return to their ancestral homeland if they don’t “like the values of the West.” He also generalized them as “dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems.”
“As a tenured professor who literally can influence the academic future of Muslims, we felt that the statements were inappropriate and can intimidate Muslim students of the engineering school,” said CAIR Executive Director Dawud Walid.
Wichman was unavailable for comment Wednesday, but he defended himself in a letter to the editor published in The State News in May.
“My letter addressed the attempts of the MSA to suppress free speech regarding publishing the Muhammed cartoons,” he wrote then. “It was not intended to impugn the integrity and decency of all Muslims in the United States.”