Radical Islamic front groups CAIR and MSA will settle for voluntary (for now) “diversity training” at Michigan State University, after their attempts to have tenured professor Indrek Wichman fired were unsuccessful: E-mail to MSA spurs diversity training.

MSU officials plan on providing diversity training on Islam-related subjects to interested members of the university in response to an e-mail an MSU professor sent to the Muslim Students’ Association, or MSA, in February.

The initial request for the training came from the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, after Indrek Wichman, a mechanical engineering professor, wrote an e-mail to the group in response to controversial cartoons that portrayed Muhammad, the prophet and founder of the Islamic religion, as a terrorist.

In the e-mail, Wichman insisted that Muslims should return to their ancestral homeland if they don’t “like the values of the West.” He also generalized them as “dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems.”

“As a tenured professor who literally can influence the academic future of Muslims, we felt that the statements were inappropriate and can intimidate Muslim students of the engineering school,” said CAIR Executive Director Dawud Walid.

Wichman was unavailable for comment Wednesday, but he defended himself in a letter to the editor published in The State News in May. “My letter addressed the attempts of the MSA to suppress free speech regarding publishing the Muhammed cartoons,” he wrote then. “It was not intended to impugn the integrity and decency of all Muslims in the United States.” …

“We’re working with the MSA to identify the things that they want to discuss,” Granberry Russell said. “Then we’re going to use those ideas as a basis for developing educational programs.”

“Hatred like this can’t be coming from our professors,” said Farhan Abdul Azeez, former MSA president and current MSA liaison to the university. “We’re trying to get more to the root of the problem, which is a misunderstanding of Islam and Muslims. This isn’t just for the Muslim community, but it’s for all minorities.”