Amber McKenna
Dominic Baez

To be deemed a hate group is not a good thing.
But this doesn’t seem to deter the Pacifica Forum, a group founded 15 years ago by Orval Etter, a 94-year-old retired University of Oregon public policy professor. He intended to create a group that would gather to discuss issues such as violence, militarism and war from multiple viewpoints.
However, it doesn’t seem as though the group is sticking to its proposed mantra. The Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based organization internationally known for its tolerance education programs, its legal victories against white supremacists and its tracking of hate groups, accused the informal group of being a hate group, according to an article from the Oregon Daily Emerald, the UO student-run newspaper.
“‘There are a lot of organizations that register hate groups, but the Southern Poverty Law Center is the most comprehensive and certainly the most thoroughly funded study there is out there,’ Anti-Hate Eugene Representative Michael Williams said. ‘I can imagine that the release of this information is gonna put more pressure on the group than they have experienced in past,’” the article stated.
The main controversy, though, is that the group convenes in the University of Oregon’s Walnut Room of the Erb Memorial Union, causing Associated Students of the University of Oregon’s President Sam Dotters-Katz to demand that it no longer be allowed to hold meetings in the EMU.
However, the group says that it has every right to meet there, as the university has a policy that allows retired professors to rent space on campus to hold public meetings.
It’s one thing to have the right to hold the meetings on campus, but the Review believes it’s quite another to have meetings that host a lecturer who referred to Martin Luther King, Jr. as a “moral leper and Communist dupe” and said that an Emerald columnist who supported the war in Iraq displayed a “Talmudic hatred for humanity” on campus property. No matter how you cut it, to say that there is a difference of opinion would be kind.
The Review agrees with Dotter-Katz’s standpoint that the presence of a hate group within the EMU undermines a student union’s mission of cultural development.
According to an ODE OP-ED article, the debate came to a head May 1 at the Pacifica Forum’s most recent meeting, which was intended to respond to the SPLC’s claim.
The opinion stated that it “began as a discussion [de-evolved] by the end of the meeting into members of the Pacifica Forum and its detractors exercising their right to free-speech very loudly at one another. Notable highlights from the proceedings include a comparison of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the KGB and the declaration from those involved with the Forum that hate doesn’t incite violence, which the Forum’s opponents countered by declaring the Forum a ‘freak show’ and defined anti-Semitism as reading Holocaust denier literature ‘without puking.’ The dispute ended when Etter rose from his wheelchair, Dr. Strangelove style, and adjourned the meeting.”
Holocaust deniers and white supremacists, huh? If the Review isn’t mistaken, these aren’t exactly groups that UO supports. In fact, the article stated that “University spokeswoman Julie Brown said she wants to make it clear that the group is not supported by the University in any way and the group only has access to the Walnut Room because of a University policy that allows retired professors to rent space on campus to hold public meetings.”
What makes the matter worse is that there are those who defend the group to the ends of the earth. Dawn Coslow, a member of the Pacifica Forum, doesn’t agree with SPLC’s claim and said that the SPLC is trying to make money by adding more hate groups to its annual investigative report.
“‘They were not basing their information on anything but hearsay. I am very surprised they would generate a false accusation just to make money,’ she said. ‘I [intend] to confront them and find out what their real reasons for labeling us a hate group were,’” the OP-ED stated.
The Review disagrees, but we aren’t going to get into a verbal brawl with a crazy lady who supports anti-Semitism; it wouldn’t get us very far.
Call the incident what you will, but the Review will call it as it sees it: racism, bigotry and ignorance. That’s why it’s been deemed a hate group. In the Review’s opinion, the University of Oregon can’t get that group off their campus fast enough.