It’s Islam Awareness Week at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Muslim Student Association (MSA) is celebrating by inviting a blatant, long-discredited antisemite with ties to neo-Nazi groups to speak—the “Reverend” William W. Baker, former chairman of the hate group known as the Populist Party: Muslim Students at Penn Sponsor Nazi. And UPenn is paying for it.

Baker, the founder and director of Christians and Muslims for Peace (CAMP) will be one of two invited speakers and the first non-Muslim ever invited to speak at this annual week-long event.

Baker’s selection as speaker is bad enough, but the use of university funds to pay for it is a scandal; the Office of the Chaplain and the Office of the Vice Provost for University Life helped MSA come up with nearly $5,000 for the week-long program.

Baker was in the news in 2002 when he was fired by Rev. Robert Schuller of Crystal Cathedral Ministries, following an expos� in the Orange County Weekly, for his ties to neo-Nazism and his anti-Semitic writings. (Schuller’s California-based Crystal Cathedral is perhaps best known for its nationally syndicated television program “The Hour of Power.”)

The weekly’s investigation revealed that Baker had served as the Populist Party’s chairman in 1984 and organized its convention that year. The Populist Party was an initiative of Willis Carto, the well-known neo-Nazi figure also known for founding the Institute for Historical Review, a group devoted to Holocaust denial, and publisher of the nation’s foremost anti-Semitic newspaper, The SPOTLIGHT (now reorganized as the American Free Press).

Baker has a long record of anti-Semitism; for example, his self-published 1982 diatribe, “Theft of a Nation,” called for the dismantling of the “Zionist State.” In a 1983 speech to the racist Christian Patriot Defense League in Missouri, Baker referred to the Reverend Jerry Falwell as “Jerry Jewry” (for his friendliness to Jews), and his disgust at traveling to New York City, getting off the plane to meet, “pushy, belligerent American Jews.”