The Benedict Arnold Chair at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst… Amherst… didn’t I just write about Amherst three weeks ago?
This quaint leafy town in Western Massachusetts is known for its diverse mix of college students and retirees, a former farming community characterized by suburban small talk just as much as cultural institutions. But it is never one to shy from foreign policy, either.
“We like to set our own foreign policy,’’ said Ruth Hooke, a retired University of Massachusetts professor, a Town Meeting member, and participant in Pioneer Valley No More Guantanamos, a local chapter of a national movement calling for the release of detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
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Under a petition Hooke submitted to the town’s Select Board - approved by a 2-1 vote Monday night - the town will call on Congress to rescind its ban on detainees resettling in the United States….
Right, that place.
Well, they’re at it again:
“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.
So, he’s our Bill Ayers, in other words. Maybe not free as a bird, but guilty as sin.
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.
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Law enforcement sources said the event will take place in a campus building. Separate sources said the event is being sponsored by the Department of Social Thought and Political Economy, a progressive campus group, and that a UMass professor extended the invitation to Levasseur. Attempts to reach that group last night were unsuccessful.
If this were truly about freedom of speech, I would look forward to the German Department’s sponsorship of an address by Holocaust denier David Irving, or even the Physics Department’s invitation to global warming skeptic Richard Lindzen.
But no, their views are not welcome, not worth defending (one with good reason, one without—you figure out which is which).
But I’m not letting the governor off the hook. A governor with stones would kill this thing good and dead. Sarah Palin would come in, guns blazing (literally); even Rod Blagojevich would threaten to throw a can of hairspray at the guy if he didn’t leave.