Community College Course Claims JFK Conspiracy

The South Orange County Community College District has approved a course that claims a conspiracy was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and has committed $5,000 for flying in four guest speakers, one of whom says the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, masterminded the killing.

The course, scheduled for Sept. 26-28 and advertised by district literature as a “high-quality community education” offering, has angered some faculty members and others who say the board’s decision endorses the agendas of political extremists and subjects the college to ridicule.

“All of this is out-and-out anti-Semitism,” said Cheryl Altman, chairwoman of the department of reading at Saddleback Community College in Mission Viejo, which, along with Irvine Valley Community College, is run by the district.

The Anti-Defamation League, which opposed the course at a trustees meeting Monday night, accuses one of the speakers, Washington author Michael Collins Piper, of being a proponent of Holocaust denial and labels his claim that Israelis killed Kennedy ridiculous.

Those in the so-called denial movement contend that some of the facts of the Holocaust are disputable, such as the number of Jews actually killed and whether concentration camps contained gas chambers.

Another speaker, Chicago author Sherman Skolnick, is, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a member of the advisory board of the Spotlight, which the organization called “the most anti-Semitic publication in America.”

Steven J. Frogue, the president of the community college district’s seven-member board of trustees--who cast the tiebreaking vote to approve the course--will teach the three-day seminar, albeit free of charge. Frogue said the $5,000 allocated to the speakers will come not from taxpayer money but solely from the $99 fee being charged to students who take the course.

Frogue also noted at the meeting that no student will receive academic credit for the course.

Gerald Posner, the author of “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK,” was aghast at hearing of the planned course.

“The harm is setting this in an educational environment, where it has an official stamp of approval,” said Posner, a Wall Street lawyer whose book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and whose thesis is that Oswald acted alone. “This strikes me as being similar to the notion that the Holocaust was a hoax.”

Chip Berlet, who has studied the assassination extensively and is a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a nonprofit think tank in Somerville, Mass., that examines authoritarian thinking, laughed upon hearing the names of the panel of experts.

“Oh, get out of here!” Berlet said. “You couldn’t find . . . more embarrassing conspiracists in America. Even among conspiracy theorists, these people represent the outer limits.”

Some faculty members fear that the course will harm the reputation of the district.

“I am profoundly embarrassed that the president of our board of trustees is a man who takes seriously crackpots such as these,” said Roy Bauer, a philosophy instructor at Irvine Valley Community College.

Last November, Frogue received a bigger endorsement than any other candidate in the district, garnering 128,361 votes in a reelection bid for a decisive 61% to 39% win over his opponent.

Frogue did not return calls from The Times, but said during an interview last fall that he believed the Anti-Defamation League played a key role in killing Kennedy.

Calling the Anti-Defamation League “a group of spies that actively keeps files on people . . . people like me,” Frogue added, “I believe Lee Harvey Oswald worked for the ADL. That’s right. . . . I believe the ADL was behind it.”

At the trustees meeting Monday night, Frogue denied making the comment.

One of those who spoke in opposition Monday night was Joyce Greenspan, regional director of the Orange County and Long Beach chapters of the ADL. Greenspan took exception to two of the speakers, Skolnick and Piper, saying they write for “extremist organizations” and, in the case of Piper, “the virulently racist and anti-Semitic newspaper” the Spotlight, which is headquartered in Washington.

At the meeting, Greenspan said Willis Carto, publisher of the Spotlight, is “the most influential professional anti-Semite in the United States.” The Spotlight, she said, is the organ “of the right-wing organization, Liberty Lobby.”

All of this has caused an uproar on both the campuses the district oversees.

Earlier this week, faculty members lodged a protest with the school’s attorney, contending that Frogue would violate state education guidelines by teaching a course while also sitting as the board president, and by voting to approve a course that he will teach.

“At the very least,” Bauer said, “it’s an egregious conflict of interest.”

Robert Lombardi, the district’s chancellor, demurred, saying Wednesday he had checked with both the district’s counsel and the Orange County counsel, and neither saw a problem.

“I know there’s a lot of passion about this,” Lombardi said, “but I believe colleges are places where people can have these kinds of special interests. For instance, we also offer a course on California wines.”

Piper, reached at the Spotlight’s offices on Wednesday, said he was excited about the course and his involvement in it, and he commended Frogue, “a personal friend,” for having offered it.

The author of “Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy,” Piper explained his views.

The assassination, he said, “was a joint enterprise conducted on the highest levels of the American CIA, in collaboration with organized crime--and most specifically, with direct and profound involvement by the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad.”

Piper assessed Israel’s motive as having evolved from a dispute between Kennedy and the late David Ben-Gurion, the former Israeli prime minister.

“They were involved in a heated dispute just months before the assassination,” Piper said, “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.”

As for his views on the Holocaust, Piper said he disputed the figure that 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis, alluding to claims that the figure is actually much lower and that no Jews were killed in gas chambers.

“I believe millions of people died in the Holocaust,” Piper said. “I believe Jews died in the Holocaust--but Germans also died. . . . Many millions more died in World War II itself.”

Skolnick, reached at his home in Chicago on Wednesday, said that he had written many articles for the Spotlight but that he disagreed with its politics, particularly its views on Israel.

Skolnick said he had written about what he called “an apparent plot” against JFK 2 1/2 weeks before the assassination, in which he claimed Oswald and “an Oswald look-alike” had intended to assassinate the president as he rode in a parade en route to a football game in Chicago.

Another scheduled speaker, talk show host Dave Emory, contends that renegade members of Adolf Hitler’s elite Nazi echelon fled Germany after World War II and played a leading role in what happened in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963.

Piper, 37, called himself an intellectual adversary of Emory, saying that because Emory contends that the Nazis killed Kennedy, the two often tangle in JFK seminars around the country.

Emory could not be reached for comment.

John Judge, the last of the speakers, is known for his adherence to the conspiracy theories of the late New Orleans Dist. Atty. Jim Garrison. Those theories had no anti-Semitic overtones. Judge could not be reached for comment.

Posner criticized Judge for defending the work of Garrison, saying it is “demonstrably false.” Many conspiracy theorists, Posner said, no longer give credence to Garrison, “believing he did great damage to the idea that there may have been a conspiracy.”

Posner called the course both problematic and harmful. He labeled Piper’s idea of Israeli involvement “one of the new theories” and one of the more outlandish.

The speakers, Posner said, “are not even mainstream conspiracy theorists. This is the very edge of what passes for somewhat sane discussion, and I find it even more egregious based on the sense of false history they espouse. Clearly, this is the most inflammatory and least supportable edge of that false history.”