The Southern Poverty Law Center, well-known for its studies of the Klan and other racist movements, has released a report on the rise of anti-Semitism, including Holocaust denial and 9/11 conspiracy theories, on West-coast campuses: http://www.splcenter.org/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=952.

In addition to incidents of anti-Israel speech morphing into anti-Semitism at UCIrvine, the SPLC report zeroes in on the Pacifica Forum, a discussion group founded in Eugene, Oregon, by Orville Etter, an “emeritus professor of planning and management at the University of Oregon.” Over the past ten months, according to the report, the Forum has brought a “veritable Who’s Who of leading Holocaust deniers to speak at the University of Oregon,” including Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, a leading Holocaust denial group, and David Irving. Etter has also sponsored lectures by Valdas Anelauskas, an émigré Lithuanian self-proclaimed “racialist and white separatist,” who declared that the Jews perpetrated a genocide in the Soviet Union greater than the Holocaust and that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was not a tsarist forgery.

While the community has “spoken out strongly against the spate of anti-Jewish and racist speakers,” according to the SPLC report, the University of Oregon continues to let Pacifica Forum meet on campus.

Prof. Ernest Sternberg is a member of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
Prof. Emily Tall is co-editor of the SPME Faculty Forum.