The controversial Pacifica Forum held an open discussion of its own significance to the community Friday afternoon that drew heated debate between its members and detractors.
The Pacifica Forum, according to its mission statement, is a program of oral information, discussion, and points of view focusing on war and peace, militarism and pacifism and violence and nonviolence. The forum states its basic purpose is more to inform than to persuade. Local peace activists have accused the group of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
A group of around 15 gathered to listen to forum member Jimmy Flag lecture on freedom of speech, offering his opinion of this basic right, and the importance of forums like this one. Flag has been attending the discussions held by the forum for three years, starting out as a driver for a friend.
“The issues that we talk about, no one wants to talk about in a crowded room,” Flag said. He said that the forum offers a venue for people to both offer their opinions and respectfully listen to others’ views. “Pacifica Forum has really opened my eyes,” he said.
After Flag had finished, the atmosphere quickly turned from calm, quiet listening to a heated argument among forum members.
The members argued over the accountability of the subjects discussed by the Pacifica Forum and the difference between free speech and hate speech.
The issue derives from a series of eight lectures by Valdas Anelauskas, an exiled Lithuanian activist, that were held between May and November 2006. The title of Anelauskas’ lectures was “Zionism and Russia,” yet the subject of the lectures was said to have been laced with anti-Semitic beliefs, said Michael Williams, a member of the Community Alliance of Lane County.
Pacifica Forum had another controversial speaker in June of this year, revisionist historian David Irving, who has been arrested in several countries for denying the Holocaust.
In attendance to the discussion were Irwin Noparstak and Joan Bayliss, both members of CALC and the Jewish community.
“We were here today to be monitors for our anti-hate group,” Noparstak said. “If the Pacifica Forum were really discussing the things they claim to discuss, then God bless them. But they’re not.”
Noparstak and Flag were the main participants of the argument. Noparstak said that the Forum is corrupt and that the content of the discussion is more hate speech than conversation.
“This threatens my life,” he said, in response to forums from the past. “They say lets have dialogue. It’s not dialogue; it’s scary.”
Flag defended the forum by saying that when listeners are offended by hate speech, it is their problem. He said that when this occurs, what needs to happen is to “ask what hit the nerve.” He also reiterated that the accounts made by Williams misconstrued the actual happenings and the sentiment of the discussion by Anelauskas.
Orval Etter, founder of Pacifica Forum, claimed that the point of view of one member should not condemn the entire group, and that Williams misrepresented the program. Etter also stood by the structure of Pacifica Forum, reiterating that it is a program, rather than an organization, where membership of the Forum ceases with the end of the forum session.
This, in itself, is the problem that groups such as CALC have with the Pacifica Forum.
“The problem is that they’re not responsible for anything,” said Noparstak. Noparstak also questions Etter’s motives for bringing people such as Anelauskas to the open discussions.
The discussion lasted an hour and a half and left nothing resolved between the two groups with its closure. Etter concluded the meeting by proposing the forum’s next discussion be titled “Pacifica Forum and Political Incorrectness,” with the intention to continue this argument topic in the next meeting.