ISAR - Let's Get Mikey

LET'S GET MIKEY

By Matt Coker
Orange County Weekly
Dec. 25-31, 1998

In this issue, Machine Age columnist Wyn Hilty mentions a Dec. 17 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). The civil rights group's report documents the CCC's ties to white supremacists. Well, guess who pops up in the report? None other than Michael Collins Piper, whose inclusion as a John F. Kennedy assassination expert in South Orange County Community College District trustee Steven J. Frogue's proposed seminar for fall 1997 led to public outcry, international ridicule for the district, the seminar's cancellation, the unsuccessful attempt to recall Frogue, and much of the divisiveness still lingering in the district. Piper even flew from Washington, D.C., to one of the board of trustees' meetings, which quickly devolved into a bizarre game of cat and hatemonger. Piper, who is a contributor to The Spotlight, which the Anti-Defamation League brands the most anti-Semitic publication in America, penned the book Final Judgment, in which Piper alleges the Israeli government played a part in Kennedy's killing. Responding to local critics who had called Piper anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier, he told the Weekly and others that he had nothing against Jews but that he had not paid enough attention to the most horrific event of the 20th century to actually deny that it occurred. But according to the SPLC, Piper was speaking at a meeting of the CCC's National Capitol Region in Arlington, Virginia, earlier this month when he got "progressively angrier" as he talked about "the Jews he says control Hollywood." He ended his address, the story claims, by saying, "how sick he is of hearing about the Holocaust, and how he just doesn't care how many Jews died."