I have read a great deal and listened to learned commentary and discussion on NPR concerning Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's invitation to give an address at Columbia University. The discussion tends to focus on two particular points.
First, the invitation is described as a celebration of that quintessential American value, free speech. In this framework, to rescind the invitation would be to give in to censorship and would be a repudiation of America's core values. The marketplace of ideas is often invoked as well; one commenter on NPR said he should have the right to speak and if he spouts nonsense it will be obvious to all.
Second, the invitation is offered as an opportunity to put Ahmadinejad on the spot. He will be asked difficult questions and cornered. The questioners will make him look foolish by asking, demanding even, that Ahmadinejad support his Holocaust denial with scholarly citations.
Both of these rationales were advanced by Columbia President Bollinger in his letter to the Columbia community:
In order to have such a University-wide forum, we have insisted that a number of conditions be met, first and foremost that President Ahmadinejad agree to divide his time evenly between delivering remarks and responding to audience questions. I also wanted to be sure the Iranians understood that I would myself introduce the event with a series of sharp challenges to the president on issues including:
the Iranian president’s denial of the Holocaust;
his public call for the destruction of the State of Israel;
his reported support for international terrorism that targets innocent civilians and
American troops; Iran's pursuit of nuclear ambitions in opposition to
international sanction;
his government's widely documented suppression of civil society and particularly of women's rights; and
his government's imprisoning of journalists and scholars, including one of Columbia’s own alumni, Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh (see President Bollinger's prior statement).
I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas—to understand the world as it is and as it might be....
And, of course:
It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.
Culminating in the self congratulation that is usually found in direct proportion to the fatuousness of the statements so invested, Bollinger concludes:
That faith in freedom has always been and remains today our nation’s most potent weapon against repressive regimes everywhere in the world.
This is America at its best.
Yaacov ben Moshe does an exemplary job placing Bollinger's letter into context:
You, sir, are also a useful idiot.
You are ready to play a role (however small and irresolute) in martyring the Iranian people, Israel and Western Civilization in the service of a pathetic misapprehension of what civil discourse in a civil society really is. Civil discourse, President Bollinger, is a two-way street. Your "deep faith" in that "long term process" is indefensible without an appreciation for the fact that when you are not dealing with a fellow believer in that process, you must be exceedingly careful not to allow him to use your openness against you and those who are fellow believers. When you invite a genocidal despot into your University you are inviting death, repression and intolerance into your home. There are no sharp remarks that will take the stench out of the walls.
I would add that only an academic, besotted with his own brilliance and with limited experience in the real world, could imagine he is so clever and facile with words that he could actually "trap" Ahmadinejad with his "series of sharp challenges". Ahmadinejad is a politician who has thrived in a system that rewards those who are most clever and most ruthless. A pipsqueak professor is unlikely to faze him. I am fairly certain that if any pictures from this encounter make their way into the New York Times tomorrow, they will feature Ahmadinejad with his beatific smile, unruffled by the "sharp challenges" he will have had to withstand.
President Bollinger clearly intends the invitation to be an example of Columbia's enlightened attitude toward the interplay of ideas (notwithstanding the censorship of conservative speakers that is a regular part of campus life on elite liberal universities.). A subtext is that Columbia is also quite courageous in facing down those who would forsake American values of free speech in favor of shutting down someone whose ideas we all can agree are noxious. Yet President Bollinger, as is exhibited on an almost daily basis by those who live on the left, misses a fundamental aspect of the distaste with Ahmadinejad.
In his letter, the entire text of which is available at Yaacov's site, Bollinger makes a crucial, but typical, misstatement:
I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas—to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most or even all of us will find offensive and even odious.
While this paragraph has a superficial plausibility, it makes such a fundamental error as to raise questions about the ability of Columbia to prepare its students for a world in which rationality is so necessary and in such short supply.
Here is where the Academic so often fails. Because words are celebrated and rewarded in academia, words and ideas are reified, and the distinction between words and deeds is muddied and lost. The inability to recognize when words and actions part company is a core confusion for people like Bollinger.
Ahmadinejad is not just not eccentric professor who holds outrageous beliefs, he is the consummate man of action, involved in murdering dissidents, channeling weapons and terrorists into Iraq to kill Americans, supporting terrorists in Lebanon and Gaza, representing a state which had been the greatest source of terror attacks against non-combatants prior to 9/11, and threatens and takes actions directed at genocide of Israel and Jews everywhere. These are not quaint beliefs, but evil actions.
America does indeed celebrate free speech, but we do not celebrate those who by their actions have violated our most basic values. Charles Manson has strange apocalyptic beliefs, but we do not give him a forum, though perhaps Columbia would since they have declared they would invite Hitler to attend were he still alive.
This is the great disconnect on the left. Sociopaths can kill untold number of innocents but as long as they couch it in terms of fighting oppression and standing for the victim, they get a pass. Ahmadinejad should be shunned, not because his ideas are noxious, but because his behavior should be unacceptable to anyone who supports the rule of law and the values which President Bollinger claims to stand for.
Bollinger is neither brave nor principled for inviting Ahmadinejad to Columbia. He is simply foolish and silly.
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