Friday, September 15, 2006

Sept 15: Second anniversary of the beginning of the Thomas Klocek affair

Here is some background as well as some related posts on the Klocek case.

Neil Steinberg and the Chicago Sun Times: In September, 2004, 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. That post was based on an ABC 7 Chicago report of a press conference organized to draw attention to the Klocek's predicament.

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, 2005 Roger L. Simon, another big blogger weighed in.

The next day, mega-blogger Little Green Footballs made the Klocek case its "Outrage 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. Since then, Simon, Malkin, LGF, and Marathon Pundit all became part of Pajamas Media.

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." Ambrose e-mailed me recently that he is still closely watching the Klocek case.

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--and equally tough on DePaul.

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.

Churchill's appearance, ironically, took place just a few hundred yards from the site of the Klocek press conference.

On December 20, 2005, millions of blogging keystrokes later, the Chicago Tribune became the first--and still only--major Chicago daily newspaper to report on the Klocek case.

June 1, 2006: Former DePaul Student Government Association President Wesley Thompson backs up Klocek's version of the incident in his deposition.

It gets curiouser and curiouser: July 5, 2006, CAIR-Chicago recommended that DePaul fire Klocek.

The battle for free speech rights continues.....

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