Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Thomas Klocek's free speech struggle with DePaul: A blog-ography

With this morning's article about the Thomas Klocek case in the Chicago Tribune, a lot of people are just now hearing about this sad story. So I thought I'd put together a series, by no means complete, of excellent articles and blog postings about this case.

Neil Steinberg and the Chicago Sun Times: In September, 2005, Professor Klocek read this Steinberg column. What Neil wrote was the intellectual basis of Klocek's ill-fated discussion with the Muslim students at DePaul.

That column was based on this op-ed by Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the al-Arabiya television network. This is the opening sentence of that article:

It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims.

March 1, 2005: My first posting on the Klocek case. The ABC 7 Chicago article that I based my blog entry is no longer available unfortunately.

Later that night, Michelle Malkin became the first big blogger to cover the Klocek story.

About two weeks later, the Chicago Jewish News published this excellent account of the what happened in the cafeteria at DePaul's downtown campus between Klocek and the Muslim students.

On March 19, Roger L. Simon, another big blogger weighed in.

The next day, mega-blogger Little Green Footballs made the Klocek case its "Outgrage of the Day." Many LGF visitors, 447 of them in fact, added comments to the Klocek posting.

The story was now everywhere in the blogosphere.

On March 22, Israeli Professor Steven Plaut published the first of his several articles about Klocek and DePaul. Plaut brought up DePaul's resident holocaust minimizer, Norman Finkelstein, in that column. Yes, Klocek, who defended Israel is gone from DePaul, but there is a professor who the Anti Defamation League called a holocaust denier among the DePaul faculty.

Around this time, Jay Ambrose of the Scripps Howard News Service wrote several columns about Klocek. Here is one of them, "A Question of Decency."

Chicago writer Richard Baehr has been a great supporter of Thomas Klocek, his well-circulated American Thinker piece hits DePaul hard.

Associated Press joined in on May 14, in this article by Nicole Dizon. It was published by many news sources--this reprint is from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. That organization has been very supportive of Professor Klocek.

Klocek filed his defamation suit against DePaul a month later.

On June 20, the Klocek case was briefly mentioned on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor.

September 15 marked the first anniversary of Professor Klocek's discussion with the Muslim students at DePaul.

On October 10, John J. Miller's detailed account of the Thomas Klocek case appeared in the National Review.

Later that month, the hero of the extreme left, Ward Churchill spoke at DePaul. Churchill was paid about $5,000 for a 90 minute speech at the school's Lincoln Park campus to exercise his free speech rights. We all know what happened to Klocek when he tried to express his....

Ward Churchill's visit to DePaul gave the Klocek story new momentum in the blogosphere, as this press release points out.

There is plenty more "out there" in the blogosphere about Professor Klocek and DePaul, as the reader will learn by typing "Klocek" and "DePaul" into any internet search engine. See what you find.

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