The incident casts a sharp light on the fevered subculture of conspiracy theorists, which is growing on the Internet and apparently seeking a foothold in academia.
Early last week, the trustees of the South Orange County Community College District approved $5,000 to fly in four guest panelists to participate in a Sept. 26-28 seminar on who was behind the 1963 assassination.
The venue is significant. Orange County, situated between Los Angeles and San Diego counties, is gradually shedding its reputation for rock-solid Republicanism, but its southern portion remains a stronghold of political conservatives and the religious right.
The tie-breaking vote approving the seminar was cast by Steven T. Frogue, president of the board of trustees. His vote was not entirely disinterested, since Frogue organized the seminar and was to teach it.
Frogue is a high-school history teacher who was removed from his classroom for one year for racist comments. He has been a persistent foe of the Anti-Defamation League and its regional director, Joyce Greenspan.
In an interview last fall, Frogue labeled the ADL “a group of spies,” and said that Kennedy assassin “Lee Harvey Oswald worked for the ADL…I believe the ADL was behind it.”
To the seminar, which was advertised as a sample of “high-quality community education,” Frogue invited an eclectic mix of “experts.” The one who got the most attention was Michael Collins Piper of Washington, D.C., author of “Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy.”
Piper posits the Mossad plotted the assassination. The reason, he asserts in his book, is that then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Kennedy “were involved in a heated dispute over Kennedy’s refusal to support Israel in its drive to build a nuclear weapon. Other authors have documented that this dispute, as much as anything, caused Ben-Gurion to resign.”
The ADL’s Greenspan, speaking at the board meeting, described Piper as a Holocaust denier and a regular contributor to Spotlight, an anti-Semitic weekly.
Other slated panelists included:
*Sherman Skolnick, a self-described “traditional Jew” from Chicago, who has been propounding a link between “rogue Mossad agents,” the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the apparent suicide of White House counselor Vincent Foster.
Skolnick, also an occasional Spotlight contributor, denied later that he had agreed to speak at the seminar.
*Talk-show host Dave Emory, who contends that top Nazis who fled Germany after its defeat played a leading role in the assassination. Emory and Piper frequently tangle at JFK conspiracy seminars around the country.
*John Judge, who echoes the views of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that a cabal of homosexuals and the military-industrial complex was behind the assassination.
Faculty members at Saddleback Community College, a two-year institution in Mission Viejo, immediately protested the planned seminar on their campus. Some 200 protest phone calls deluged the college district offices. A considerable number of supportive messages were logged by the ADL.
In the midst of the furor, Frogue announced he was canceling the seminar but would hold it at some future date away from the college and without the school’s financial support.
Robert Lombardi, chancellor of the college district, described the public reaction as “pretty intense and somewhat surprising.”
He had earlier defended holding the seminar on the basis of First Amendment free-speech rights and the college’s prerogative to offer courses appealing to “special interests.”
The ADL’s Greenspan, who was the point person in opposing the seminar, said that while she appreciated the general community’s reaction, she was bothered that the college board “still doesn’t see this racist seminar as their problem.”
She also warned that if and when the seminar is given under private auspices, it will lack public scrutiny and “bring the crazies out of the woodwork.”
Barbara Bergen, the ADL’s Central Pacific regional director, issued a statement: “While I am gratified that the South Orange County Community College District canceled its approval of the JFK conspiracy seminar, the district’s initial endorsement of the program is sad and disturbing. Whether it is through lack of due diligence or indifference to the various forms that anti-Semitism can assume, the Board of Trustees failed in their obligation to ensure that quality education is available to the community.”
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and an expert on racist and hate propaganda in cyberspace, added another perspective.
“The Mossad conspiracy theory may be laughable to us, but I can guarantee that in a short time it will become part of the folklore of hundreds of Web sites on the Internet,” he said.
“For the Frogues and Pipers, the seminar cancellation is only a temporary setback,” Cooper continued. “They got what they wanted by getting into the mainstream press. They don’t need to prove that Israelis had a hand in assassinating JFK; they just have to plant the seed of suspicion that it might have been that way.”