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Hooray for A Michigan State Professor!

Discussion in 'General Open/Public Discussion' started by Paladin, 1 Jan 2008.


  1. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    The story begins at Michigan State University

    with a mechanical engineering professor named

    Indrek Wichman.

    g

    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 you 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 the university impose mandatory diversity training for faculty

    and mandate a seminar on hate and discrimination for all freshmen



    Now the local 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

    in support of Professor Wichman,

    saying the e-mail was private,

    and they don't intend to publicly condemn his remarks.

    ============================================================

    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 it.

    ==============================
     
  2. Om

    Om DragonWolf

    hate + hate = love? peace?

    Maybe I don't know how to add.
     
  3. Om. That is a very pink elephant kind of response.
    You would not like living in a muslim nation. Doing anything more then being someone's wife might get you killed by the fundamentalist down the street. With no repercusions to that individual. You certainly would not be allowed to practice your art. Or own anything of real value.
    I'm not going to prattle on about things. But the prof's email spoke of fact. Spoke of death to anyone who doesn't follow the muslim way. Though I would like to think it doesn't reflect the muslim religion as a whole. I can't say that I know that for sure. I'd like to think that most of the muslim immigrants in north america are moderates. Who left their home nations to get away from the tyranny of their muslim brothers. They just want to practice their religion and live their lives in peace.
    I think what eats away at the moderates in this world, has to be the hypocracy of all fundamentalists.
     
  4. Just as a foot note to the above. Many of our "christian" brothers aren't any better. It's been awhile since the crusades happened. But we who have been baptised into this faith shouldn't have our noses too high in the air. We are capable of many more subtle atrocities.
     
  5. It's not like me to defend religion, especially Christianity, but the crusades were a response to years of Muslim aggression and expansion by force.
     
  6. Om

    Om DragonWolf

    you imply words are less painful and that is not true. words lead to war. With the freedom to use words comes responsibility, just like the freedom to use guns. It was cartoons in the beginning, against the Jews of Nazi Germany.

    I'm not calling for silence, just hoping people in this world become more aware of how their persuasive words and caracatures can either heal or harm the entire well being of this world.
     
  7. Om

    Om DragonWolf

    Just a footnote: Rax Nahali, what you said is offensive to me. My first post in this thread was laconical.
     
  8. Sorry Om. Just speaking my mind.
    Crusades were also started due to a Pope in Europe wanting to gain more political power within the region. Or am I wrong there?
    btw, I had to look up laconical....thanks for that! :)
     
  9. Om

    Om DragonWolf


    I welcome you to speak your mind, but when you called my post pink elephant, that was offensive. Pet peeve of mine is when people show up and use those kinds of tactics.

    New zero tolerance from me on the mislabeling, and on attatching labels with huge stigma to other people to reduce the value of what they have to say. I fall short sometimes myself, but this is my ideal and I'm trying to live up to it and be firm when I see it happening.

    And rax, I had to look up laconical, too, the other day when someone described my style that way. :p~
     

  10. Well said. One of my pet peeves is when Christians, or Catholics, or whatever, speak out against violence and hatred spread by one flavor of religion, when their own religion was (and in many aspects, still is) in the exact same place. Most of the time they are genuinely unaware of these similarities, and that makes me wonder how and why they think their brand is any better, in terms of harm versus good done.

    These protesting Muslims are fools. But for every Muslim you find protesting the depiction of their prophet in a cartoon, you will find 10 Christians pushing to have Jesus indoctrinated into schools. Different flavors of the same goals. Those Muslims aren't the only fools. That's why religious extremism worries me so much.
     
  11. Anything with the word extreme in it I find isn't good for you. Including snowboarding :)

    I don't see anything wrong with the prof's letter. He's frustrated and angry at the violence we've all watched continue for years. It's surprising that there aren't more letters written in this way.
     
  12. True, extreme snowboarding probably isn't good for you, but only with religious extremism will you find things like treating women like cattle, beheadings of "infidels", and the plethora of other atrocities these people are allowed to get away with on a daily basis. Why are they allowed to get away with it? Because it's for their god, and if you try to get in the way of them doing their god's work, they will kill you.
     
  13. symen

    symen DragonWolf

    I understand some of the good professor's sentiment, but he needs to work on his delivery. He, frankly, comes across as a small-minded, petty individual with his ill-considered rant. There's a more succinct description for this sort of behavior, but I won't use it in polite conversation. His primary logical mistake is to attempt to paint all Muslims with the same brush as Osama Bin Laden. It would strain credulity to, for example, protest a Christian organization's protest of an abortion clinic because killing six million Jews is a far greater crime, yet, change nothing but the religion in question, and the same act apparently makes perfect sense to some.

    Ironically, Professor Wichman is protesting the Muslim Association's objection to being painted with a broad brush by insisting that they should be painted with a broad brush. It's an extraordinarily weak argument, coming from an educated man.

    I would agree that political correctness has run out of control in many ways, but a fair amount of what is perceived as political correctness is simply rejection of indefensible stances.
     
  14. Read that link Rayzer. This is why I try not to write stuff down right away. The written word can be easily mistaken for something that it isn't. Now he regrets his moment of anger in writing that email.
    It's too bad. It's easy to put myself in his shoes and feel the way he feels about things. The killing of Van Gogh really turns my stomach.
    In my opinion it was the muslim belief system saying it didn't have to follow the laws of the land.
     
  15. Om

    Om DragonWolf

    Any belief system, when exploited by sociopaths, can resemble that remark.
     
  16. Ground Chuk

    Ground Chuk BANNED

    Whatever happened to the First Amendment?

    You say I suck, then I counter.

    They are just WORDS.

    Physical violence is where it stops. Say what you want to me, no biggie.

    Raise a hand to me, be prepared for the consequences.

    What is Free Speech if it comes down to "you can't say this, you can't say that..." How Free is that??

    I can imagine one day "Well, I was going to say it, but knew it was illegal, so I just killed him. Made more sense. 10 years for murder or 25 for hate speech."
     
  17. Om

    Om DragonWolf

    Chuck, I absolutely, completely, with all my heart disagree with you. Words do harm. Ask any abused child. It always starts with words. Sometimes the abuse is psychological/emotional. Never a hand laid on a child, but just words or lack thereof.

    To say false things is a crime. http://www.nolo.com/definition.cfm/term/85BAB88B-0660-4AB6-A2F5C32E716A6D52

    Why is it acceptable to imply false things in persuasive political cartoons?

    I'm not calling for someone to be arrested. Own up to the harm it does.
     

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