College Cancels Class on Alleged JFK Death Plots

After receiving more than 200 angry calls from the public, the South Orange County Community College District on Thursday canceled a controversial seminar featuring speakers who believe conspiracies were behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The district’s board of trustees had approved $5,000 to bring in four panelists--including one who accuses the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, of masterminding Kennedy’s murder in 1963. The proposed seminar had been strongly criticized by some faculty members and the Anti-Defamation League.

The public outcry after a story about the course appeared in Thursday’s editions of The Times was “pretty intense and somewhat surprising,” said district Chancellor Robert A. Lombardi. “Certainly none of us wanted to be offensive or troublesome to any group.”

Amid the furor, Steven J. rogue, the seminar’s instructor and chairman of the district’s board, decided Thursday to move the forum off the Saddleback College campus, where it had been scheduled for Sept. 26-28. The seminar was to have been presented through the community education department and would not have offered academic credit. Frogue plans to hold the event at some future date without any involvement or money from the college.

Meanwhile, one of the scheduled speakers, Chicago author Sherman Skolnick, faxed a letter to Saddleback College President Ned Doffoney on Thursday denying that he had agreed to participate in a seminar “attempting to blame the murder of President Kennedy on Jews” and accusing Frogue of “slandering and blackening my name.”

Frogue declined to comment Thursday about the dispute over the seminar that he had proposed to the board, which approved it, 4-3, Monday.

One member who voted for the seminar, John Williams, said Thursday that he stands by his decision. “We’ve had requests to have public speakers before, some of them very controversial,” he said. “This is an issue of the 1st Amendment.”

But critics saw the issue differently.

Among its objections, the ADL said Skolnick is on the advisory board of the Spotlight, which the organization called “the most anti-Semitic publication in America.”

In his fax, Skolnick said, “I am a traditional Jew,” and denied that he serves on the Spotlight’s advisory board. But he acknowledged, “I allowed Spotlight to print my stories. . . .”

Some inside and outside the campus community maintained that a college is a bastion of free thinking where controversial seminars should be conducted.

However, a spokeswoman for the district said the overwhelming majority of phone calls it received were critical of allowing extremists to participate in a seminar sanctioned by the district.

Lombardi defended the course even after it was canceled.

“I would argue on the side of free speech,” he said. “Obviously, the Supreme Court has made many telling decisions in support of that view. In the largest realm of ideas, I think it’s terribly important to allow differences of opinions to be voiced.”

Lombardi said that when he called the outcry to the attention of Frogue and other board members, Frogue offered to move the course off campus. The chancellor said cancellation does not require the board’s vote.

The speaker list that Frogue submitted to the board included Washington author Michael Collins Piper, who asserts that the Kennedy assassination was engineered by the CIA, in collaboration with the mob, and with profound involvement of the Mossad.

The Mossad, Piper argues, begrudged Kennedy because of a dispute he says the president had with former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion over the Jewish state’s drive to build nuclear weapons.

Also on the list of seminar speakers were talk show host Dave Emory, who contends that renegade Nazis who fled Germany after World War II played a leading role in the Kennedy assassination, and John Judge, who supports the conspiracy theories held by the late New Orleans Dist. Atty. Jim Garrison.

After the seminar was canceled, Piper, author of “Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy,” lashed out at the ADL.

“The Anti-Defamation League has not heard the last of ‘Final Judgment,’ ” he said. “The door has been kicked open. There is now going to be a lot of debate about this book. . . . It’s sad, because we really don’t have freedom of speech in America.”

Some in the community said they were angry enough to protest at Frogue’s seminar.

“I’m a free thinker and believe all points should be expressed, but I think this pales beyond a reasonable view,” said Park Wilson, 52, a San Clemente screenwriter who had vowed to picket the seminar.

Tom Nussbaum, chancellor of the 71-district California Community Colleges, which does not have curriculum jurisdiction over local campuses, said the conflict pointed out an enduring dilemma for academia.

“Throughout history there have been what might appear to be extreme views that eventually were proven,” he said, stressing that he does not subscribe to the seminar’s theories. “I’m not saying that’s the case here, but part of what the academic community does is allow for some new and some different topics to be presented.”

Times staff writer Michael Granberry contributed to this story.