One community access TV guy sort of hit it big. At least he's making a bigger spectacle of himself than usual.
A fellow named Barry Sommer had a show on the local cable access channel. He would sit and read anti-Muslim items he apparently got off the internet. For example, one thing he read was a complaint by the British television writer Ben Elton that the BBC cut a Muslim joke from a show but he didn't think they would have cut a similar joke about an Anglican. It didn't seem like much of a comment on Islam, but Sommer seemed to feel it was deeply significant.
In addition to his community access TV show, he's apparently self-published a book attacking Islam. It appeared to be available only on kindle. I haven't seen it, but judging from its title and looking at his TV show, my guess is that it's a copy-and-paste job, a compilation of stuff he found on the internet.
Sommer is 56. He's unemployed and has a high school diploma. He lives in a trailer in an unincorporated area between Eugene and Springfield.
But Sommer proposed that he teach a non-credit course on Islam at the local community college, and for some reason, they went along. They offered his course. No one signed up for it. A Muslim civil rights group pointed out Sommer's background to the college. On his blog, Sommer supported a constitutional amendment to ban the practice of Islam in the United States. He described it as “brilliant, crystal clear and something to seriously consider in the face of Islamic supremacism”.
LCC dropped the class. Not surprisingly, Sommer is claiming to be a victim. And now that "civil rights" group Pat Robertson started is threatening to sue to reinstate the class.
Interesting thing is how polite the press has been about Sommer's "qualifications". They mention his book and his TV show. They don't mention that his only qualification to do the TV show is that he paid a ten dollar annual membership fee to the TV station and that he paid to have his "book" "published". My guess is that no one reporting on this has seen either one.
The Muslims he quotes in the book and on the show ought to sue him for copyright infringement.
Pacifica Forum
Sommer used to be part of Pacifica Forum which was designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, for whatever that's worth. It's a strange little discussion group made up of aging crackpots.
It started out as a much more serious pacifist discussion group. They were critical of Israel, as any genuine peace group is. This resulted in their being targeted by local Jewish and pro-Zionist groups. They were smeared as "anti-Semitic" and run out of their regular meeting place. The founder of the group was a retired law professor. As a retired professor, he was entitled to use classrooms at the University of Oregon for meetings, so they started using rooms at the university.
That's when things started getting weird. Being critical of Israel, they attracted a Lithuanian anti-Communist who blamed Jews for socialism. He wanted to give a lecture to the group. Members didn't want him because he was clearly an anti-Semite, but the 90-year-old founder overruled them in the name of "free speech".
What they did after that didn't make sense. Local Zionists called them Nazis. They inexplicably responded to what I think were false accusations of Nazism by inviting actual Nazis to speak. A "historical revisionist" spoke there (although he stuck to the topic of Palestine) and they invited David Irving to speak (he had just gotten out of prison in Austria where he'd been locked up for denying the Nazi genocide.)
This attracted the one aging local Nazi, a short gray haired guy who keeps showing up in a kilt. Then HE wanted to speak there. He gave a presentation and showed a video from a Nazi rally he attended in California.
That brought on a wave of protests against Pacifica Forum that went on for months. University students wanted the group off campus.
Barry Sommer, who is Jewish, joined Pacifica Forum after the protests started and gave his own lecture, not on Islam but on the Nazi genocide. I was there. There was a large crowd, nearly all of them protesters in addition to the dozen or so elderly people who made up Pacifica Forum.
Sommer spoke for about an hour. The main thing that stood out to me was that he doubted that there had been gas chambers. He dismissed eyewitness testimony as "anecdotal evidence." He doesn't know what anecdotal evidence is.
It wasn't long after that that Sommer and another couple of guys, including the Lithuanian who had started the group's downward spiral, left Pacifica Forum to devote themselves to their hatred of Islam.
One more thing about video
I didn't want to be seen at Sommer's lecture. I didn't want anyone thinking I was part of Pacifica Forum, certainly, and I didn't especially want people to think I was part of the anarchist groups protesting. But there were cameras everywhere!
In the old days, I would attend a rally or an event and would be one of only a handful of people taking pictures or filming. Now everyone has a cell phone camera or digital camera and they take pictures constantly. It's free. They're not wasting film. You can't stay out of the crossfire.
