Engineers: our tactlessness has its uses!
June 5, 2008
The latest “good guy” in the freespeecher struggle? An engineering prof at Michgan State University:
The story begins at Michigan State University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman.
Wichman sent an e-mail to the Muslim Student’s Association. The e-mail was in response to the students’ protest of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group had complained the cartoons were ‘hate speech.’ Enter Professor Wichman. In his e-mail, he said the following:
Dear Muslim Association,
As a professor of Mechanical engineeringhere at MSU I intend to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called ‘whores’ in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris, France. This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many of my colleagues. I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Muslims to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile ‘protests.’ If you do not like the values of the West — see the 1st Amendment — you are free to leave. I hope for God’s sake that most of you choose that option Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.
Cordially,
I. S. Wichman
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
The best part? The university is not getting involved — what the professor said in the context of a private email is his business, and not theirs.
