Meanwhile, In Other Diversity News
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick takes a hard line, decides he won’t have his own Bill Ayers-type problem. Bucks the lefties at UMass, sides with the cop’s widow, says “No” to an aging hippy explosive diversity activist’s speech. So insensitive! Who would have thought Obama’s doppelganger would be anti-academic freedom? Boston Herald:
A fuming Gov. Deval Patrick is taking on University of Massachusetts officials who now say they must allow a convicted terror bomber to speak on campus because of “academic freedom” - even after angry cops thought the event had been stopped.
“Gov. Patrick is outraged and extremely disappointed at reports that the University of Massachusetts has again extended a speaking invitation to Raymond Luc Levasseur,” said Patrick spokesman Joe Landolfi.
The governor last night called on UMass brass to “review” the abrupt about-face.
Levasseur, now under federal parole in a Maine halfway house, was the radical leader of United Freedom Front, a violent anti-government group linked to some 20 bombings, including one at the Suffolk County Courthouse in 1976.
Because the group’s rage resulted in the slaying of a New Jersey state trooper and attempted assassination of two Bay State troopers, cops strongly protested and the speech at UMass-Amherst was called off last week - until news yesterday that it was still being planned for Thursday night on the publicly funded campus.
“It’s truly unbelievable,” said Rick Brown, president of the State Police Association of Massachusetts, who added that cops from around the nation are prepared to protest the event. “If the governor told UMass not to bring this terrorist to a taxpayer-funded campus, it should not be happening.”
What’s truly unbelieveable is that Patrick doesn’t seem to grasp that it’s 2009. Grow a set, Deval! Obama was actually hanging around in living rooms and sharing office space with an unrepentant social-change-inducing pyrotechnics enthusiast, and he got elected president. If we learned anything in the 2008 campaign, it’s that explosive 1960s exuberance isn’t terrorism. Just an excess of social concern in heady times. Since then, we’ve advanced beyond Bush-era hate speech. Ixnay on the “T” word. It’s man-caused disasterists and Pre-TSD diversity advocates. GWOT’s over, Deval. The security moms all voted for the good-looking guy with the smile. And I’d like to point out that guy has done a lot to advance the public’s understanding of the threat Americans pose to diversity every time someone tries to change society.
I just don’t know what’s happening in bluest Massachusetts. What if Deval knows somethig Obama doesn’t? Maybe it’s his tanking approval numbers that are making him a sap for The Man. Huh … I wonder what that means for Obama.
Here’s more on what Levasseur is supposed to speak about. via MassLive, which helpfully highlights what he wasn’t convicted of:
AMHERST – Robert S. Cox knew that bringing Raymond Luc Levasseur to the University of Massachusetts campus would be controversial.
But the head of special collections and university archives also understood that bringing a man found innocent of a sedition charge after a 10-month trial in Springfield in 1989 would provide an opportunity for people to understand that trial and what leads a revolutionary to violence.
(Blah blah blah. Four graphs later, one cop got killed and they tried to kill another cop. Come on, people. Bygones.)
He is scheduled to reflect on the past and present significance of the Springfield sedition trial as well as his life as a French-Canadian youth growing up in a Maine mill town, a Vietnam veteran, and an anti-imperialist revolutionary active in the Civil Rights, anti-war, and prison reform movements among other topics.
It’s part of UMass Amherst Libraries’ Department of Special Collections’ 5th Annual Colloquium on Social Change, which is hosting speakers “whose activity in the past speaks to the present.” Reportedly they seek to present a “a very wide spectrum of perspectives.” A quick glance at the names of Thursday’s speakers suggests the event will span the entire spectrum from radical violent left to moderately less radical left to the disillusioned but still hopeful left.
Thursday, as part of the colloquium, historian Blake Slonecker will talk on the Liberation News Service and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s at 4 p.m. on the 25th floor of the De Bois Library, and writers and activists Todd Gitlin and Raymond Mungo will speak a 7 p.m. in a discussion moderated by Christian Appy, history professor here, in the Cape Cod Lounge in the Student Union.
Here’s to the very wide spectrum!
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Topics: academia, terrorists
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:26 am on Tuesday, November 10, 2009
3 Responses to “Meanwhile, In Other Diversity News”
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November 10th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Off Topic:
Today’s the USMC Birthday.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7fTppX5swo
Semper Fi
November 10th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
I’d tell UM they can have this POS as a speaker if they insist. Then I’d cut their funding to the bone, and let them know why..
November 10th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
This will never happen, but wouldn’t it be interesting if the police informed UMass that they will no longer be investigating crimes committed at UMass, or even set foot university land (and that would include campus security)?