So the President of Columbia Lee Bollinger in defending his decision to give a platform and a forum to President Ahmadinejad says he would have invited Adolf Hitler and subjected him to the same 'sharp challenges' he plans to give to the Iranian president. In the same week, we're watching Ken Burns's documentary on the second world war and seeing just what it really cost us and our Allies to defeat the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
Just what is in the waters of academia these days? Ahmadinejad, the president of a terrorist state that calls for death to America, has American blood on his hands through the arming of terrorists in Iraq, executes homosexuals, oppresses women imprisoning them if they venture outside in public without a burka, allows stoning of women, denies the Holocaust happened, calls for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, and is busy making nuclear bombs in open defiance of U.N. resolutions, is welcomed at Columbia.
Before a woman is stoned in Iran, she is half-buried.
Shrinkwrapped writes
The Iranian propaganda operatives in Tehran, one can be sure, are gleeful over Mr. Bollinger's blunder. They know that no matter how tough the questions Mr. Bollinger asks Mr. Ahmadinejad — whether they palaver about Israel, ground zero, human rights, or Madisonian principles like free speech — the Iranian is the victor merely by being received on Morningside Heights. They know that Mr. Bollinger will not permit protesters to rush the stage and physically drive a speaker from campus the way the university permitted students to do when Jim Gilchrist of the Minutemen attempted to speak there.
Where do you draw the line? Roger Kimball says it best.
By providing a madman like Ahmadinejad with a platform at Columbia University, President Bollinger has in effect welcomed him into the community of candid reasoners. He has granted him a patent of legitimacy that no amount of "dialogue and reason" can dissipate. In this case, "listening" is indeed tantamount to an endorsement. It reduces free speech to a species of political capitulation and renders dialogue indistinguishable from a suicide pact.
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The spectacle of these left-wing academics repudiating men like Larry Summers and Donald Rumsfeld even as they abase themselves scrambling to find excuses for welcoming a fanatic like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the halls of a great American University is disgusting. I think again of Bagehot's observation that "History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it." Are we really willing to let ourselves--our ideals, our way of life--be carelessly traduced by a rancid leftism so enfeebled that it can no longer distinguish between free speech and suicide? We are even now in the process of answer that question. How we answer it will determine a lot more than the issue of who gets to speak on American college campuses.
Bollinger claims that there is some important relationship between the invitation that was issued to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Columbia’s commitments to the free exchange of ideas. What is this relationship? Do the aforementioned commitments require the invitation? If not, and thus not inviting Ahmadinejad is also consistent with these commitments, then what was the reason for the invitation? Moreover, that ideas can be exchanged at all is an acknowledgement of the fact that ideas can be debated and analyzed without the presence of particular proponents of the ideas in question. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ideas can be debated, analyzed and otherwise exchanged without him, what was the reason for the invitation?
Posted by: Alex at September 24, 2007 12:34 PM