Tuesday, March 09, 2010

from the blog archive

I posted this (below) in the fall of 2007. Of the 1,111 entries added to this blog, this is one of those that generates an especially great number of responses. I don't have a reply function here (for many reasons) but you can always reach me at afilreis [at] gmail [dot] com.

- - -

Tom Short, an itinerant evangelist brought to campus by the A&M Christian Fellowship, told one student that, because she is Jewish, she is going "to burn in Hell." He told another Jewish student that "Hitler did not go far enough."

This was the lead in a November 1996 story about anti-semitism at Texas A&M University.

Shortly after the incident was described on a Holocaust listserv to which I subscribed in those days, a scholar called the leaders of a Christian organization on that campus and then posted a response, which included this comment: "Subscribers may be interested to know that I have spoken with both the adviser and student president of the A&M Christian Fellowship, the organization that invited the antisemitic preacher Tom Short to campus. Both claimed that his comment about Hitler was 'taken out of context,' and that Short 'is not that kind of man.'"

(Well, what "kind" exactly is he?)

I posted these materials to my Holocaust site at the time and it has received more response from viewers than almost anything else.