Why Columbia President Bollinger Should Be Celebrated for Inviting Ahmadinejad

--Bollinger shot down an invitation from leading school officials to Ahmadinejad a year ago, censoring a point of view that scholars wanted to hear. He has nobly reversed that judgment.

--Ahmadinejad will be traveling to the heart of the Jewish intellectual world in Manhattan. Bollinger is sure to engage him on issues of concern to Jews: his Holocaust denial, his threats to Israel, and the meaning of his famous phrase, wiped from the pages of history. There may actually be some meaningful dialogue (I pray).

--Americans may learn some things from Ahmadinejad. How Iran sympathized with us after 9/11 and supported our (completely justified) invasion of Afghanistan. How the large Iranian-Jewish community is treated. The significance of the Palestinian experience to the Islamic world...

Comments

[MM]

Yes Philip, "completely justified", as in 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and the CIA (working through the Pakistani ISI) helped create and fund the Taliban to begin with, in the name of those lofty ideals of access to markets and Caspian oil for the west. Oh yes, I'd say the invasion and destruction of Afghanistan were indeed "completely justified," and especially now that we see what a tremendous achievement we've made there, bringing justice to the perpetrators of 9-11, not to mention so much peace and prosperity.

I love your blog, but please, get a clue. The Jon Stewart line (Iraq baaaaad, Afghanistan greeeeaaaat) is pathetically wishful thinking; thought you had more intellectual integrity than that.

[Alex]

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?

[Muslims Against Sharia]

Muslims Against Sharia condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the decision of Columbia University to provide a speaking venue for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Apparently letting Akbar Rafsanjani speak at the National Cathedral was not the height of American Dhimmitude, because providing a venue for the world's foremost anti-Semite, whose proclaimed goal is the destruction of the USA and Israel, definitely takes the cake. What is surprising is that we don't hear any complaints from Columbia alumni who should be ashamed of their silence.

More on the subject: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=38223
Why Does Columbia host Ahmadinejad?

[Kevin]

No fan of A-Nejad myself, but I gotta say Bollinger was an ass. He began well enough, and showing up A-N on the holocaust is a valid (if too easy) knock... but all the BS about Iraq and Iran as an "enemy", no less the allusion to "evil" and his other gloating overstatements were really stupid. "Will you wipe us off the map?"

But A-Nejad took the bait and threw himself into the holocaust "further research" question.

Idiots throwing mud at idiots.

[Ken Hoop]

As further research one might read Arno Mayer's "Why Did The Heavans Not Darken?"

This Jewish Princeton University history profs combined functionalist/smaller figured
holocaust is not commonly recognized by the masses who assume quite a different story.

[lysias]

Speaking of nuanced views of the Holocaust, the second volume of Saul Friedlaender's Nazi Germany and the Jews has now been published. From it, I learn that the immediate cause of the decision to expel all Jews from Germany (to sites where there was already mass murder of Jews) was a couple of terrorist incidents committed by Jews, one in Berlin, in early 1942.

[Ben Brackley]

One positive thing that can be said about Ahmadinejad (and there are a lot of negative things one could say) is that at least he is willing to appear before and answer questions from a hostile audience and interviewer. May not be much, but it is more than can be said of our President. And we live in a liberal democracy that theoretically values such conduct far more.

See Greenwald's take today:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html

[Alan]

Here is Greenwald on Columbia and Ahmadinejad and the threats made by Democratic State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver:

Monday September 24, 2007 11:05 EST
Columbia to be punished for hosting the new Hitler enemy

"All of the hysteria over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speaking at Columbia University is so tiresome for so many reasons, beginning with the fact that it is all rather transparently motivated by exactly what Juan Cole says: "The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state."

In their minds, we are at war with Iran -- even though, in reality, i.e., according to our Constitution, we are not -- and all of the ensuing hysteria is rooted in the fantasy world they occupy in which Iran is our Enemy at War. By their nature, such fantasies cannot be reasoned with.

This desire to prevent people from speaking when they express views that one finds offensive is just always baffling. That is true in general, and includes even pettier though still inane suppression efforts such as this one, which recently resulted in the recission of an invitation to Larry Summers to speak at an event for the University of California regents. Other than converting the individual into a martyr and dramatically elevating their importance, what do people think is accomplished when a person with a certain viewpoint is denied a forum?

In any event, there is not much new worth saying about the "debate" over whether Columbia should have invited Ahmadinejad to speak. People either believe in the value of having academic institutions be a venue for airing all viewpoints or they do not.

Exactly as is true for the First Amendment, it is so often the case that those who claim to believe in this principle when it comes to ideas they like suddenly find all sorts of reasons why the "principle" does not apply when it comes to ideas they hate most. And -- as is true for Osama bin Laden -- nobody has done more to inflate the importance and power of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who, just by the way, is not even the leader of Iran, let alone the WorldWide Evil Axis of Hitlerian Dictators) than those who have focused on him obsessively.

But what is new, and what most certainly is worth commenting upon, is this extremely disturbing report from The New York Sun regarding the threats made by Democratic State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to use state power to punish Columbia for inviting a speaker whom Silver dislikes. Silver -- who, among other things, has long been a leader in efforts to free convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard from prison -- did not even bother to disguise the threats he was making:

"As the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, prepares to address Columbia University today amid a storm of student protest, state and city lawmakers say they are considering withholding public funds from the school to protest its decision to invite the leader to campus.

In an interview with The New York Sun, the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, said lawmakers, outraged over Columbia's insistence on allowing the Iranian president to speak at its World Leaders Forum, would consider reducing capital aid and other financial assistance to the school.

Lawmakers warned about other consequences for Columbia and its president, Lee Bollinger, who has resisted campus and public pressure to cancel Mr. Ahmadinejad's appearance today, arguing that Columbia's commitment to scholarship requires the school to directly confront offensive ideas.

"There are issues that Columbia may have before us that obviously this cavalier attitude would be something that people would recall," Mr. Silver said. "Obviously, there's some degree of capital support that has been provided to Columbia in the past. These are things people might take a different view of . . . knowing that this is that kind of an institution" . . .

"It's not going to go away just because this episode ends. Columbia University has to know . . . that they will be penalized," an assemblyman of Brooklyn, Dov Hikind, who also attended the rally, said. The lawmaker said Mr. Ahmadinejad should be arrested when he sets foot on campus."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/24/ahmadinejad/index.html

**********

[lester]

ahmedenajds holocaust denial is pretty much exactly what most muslims i know believe, as well as his opinions on israel and the US. I don't know why they believe it but they do. they to go on about "further research" when pressed they have no idea what they are talking about. I try to explain that you know, this isn't considered to be any mystery, all the stuff is well documented. It's a bizarre phenomenon. We usually understand each other but that issue it's different. You hit a wall.

But my guess is virtually all our "allies" in that region believe the same thing, if not worse.

[Christopher Brown]

There's a pathos to Phil's attempts to look for something to celebrate in the boorish behavior of Bollinger. This kind of rudeness is par for the course in New York City, but a lot of Americans are grossed out and increasingly fed up with the bayunskis and mouthpieces such as Bollinger:

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/09/24/us.iran/?imw=Y&iref=mpstoryemail

[David]

CB, I can only assume Phil wrote the piece before hearing what Bollinger actually said, which I agree with you was pretty incredible for a university president. I smell fear -- of the press and of his donor community.

[David]

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
lester, what is your understanding of Ahmadinejad's opinions on the Holocaust™?
"Iran's president: I don't deny Holocaust"
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/09/24/2007-09-24_irans_president_i_dont_deny_holocaust-3.html

[Richard Witty]

I just saw the presentation.

There are two countries that original revolutionary Iran would never negotiate with, South Africa and Israel.

Now there is only one.

Everyone else "he wants to extend the invitation to brotherly relations".

My wife described her impression of his comments, "wily".

"There are no homosexuals in Iran" (My wife, "they're all dead or scared shitless".)

Were you taken in?

[Homo Amongus]

I guess that Iranian stud who sucked me off four years ago in LA on Westmoreland was really an Iraqi in disguise.

[Christopher Brown]

No, Richard, we are not taken in by your racial nationalism masquerading as liberalism.

[Christopher Brown]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18453.htm

Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 1

Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.

By Juan Cole

Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation probably correctly concluded in Salon last week that President Bush himself has for now decided against launching a war on Iran. But Clemons worries that Cheney and the neoconservatives, with their Israeli allies, are perfectly capable of setting up a provocation that would lead willy-nilly to war.

David Wurmser, until recently a key Cheney advisor on Middle East affairs and the coauthor of the infamous 1996 white paper that urged an Iraq war, revealed to his circle that Cheney had contemplated having Israel strike at Iranian nuclear research facilities and then using the Iranian reaction as a pretext for a U.S. war on that country. Prominent and well-connected Afghanistan specialist Barnett Rubin also revealed that he was told by an administration insider that there would be an "Iran war rollout" by the Cheneyites this fall.

[freespeechlover]

Unfortunately, Bollinger acted the part scripted for him by the same right-wing Zionist hoodlums that attacked Columbia a few years back. He made Ahmadinejad look good, because he behaved like a Republican politician along the lines of a Peter King. He looked like every politician in the U.S. who will say anything at all, no matter how rococo, just to hold onto his position. The idea that Bollinger is "noble" is not shared by anyone who actually works in academia and who knows the leadership role he played in setting the wildfire that has spread across university campuses in the wake of his horrible treatment of Joseph Massad, an untenured Palestinian faculty member. To be fair to Bollinger, however, the faculty were complicit. They let Massad hang in the wind, because they were too intimidated to tell Bollinger that they not he would determine what kind of "faculty investigation" of the stupid David Project's claims would occur. Bollinger will forever be remembered by rank and file academics as the person who invited the systematic attack on academic freedom we are witnessing in the U.S. today.

[David]

freespeech, one small glimmer of hope comes from the ouster of Harvard's Lawrence, which seems to have been, at least partially, a reaction from the faculty to creeping "Bollingerism". The media treated it as an issue about feminism, but I don't sense that was the root of the animus. The original letter of no confidence came from the same Prof. Matory that wrote the recent scathing anti-Zionist piece in the Crimson: "Israel and Censorship at Harvard".

[WM]

"completely justified"? Afghanistan's grand council, or Loya Jirga, requested from the US for evidence showing that Al-Qaeda was responsible for 911. Since they had no proof it was Bin-Laden that did it, they just decided to carry out vigilante mob justice on a country whose only crime is to host the group that booted the soviet occupiers out for them.

Ahmadinejad never denied that holocaust never happened, he just phrased it in his usual way, where it is carried on like a legend (aka myth), the justification for every aggression by Israel. One would have known it if one have heard his speeches in context, instead of the snippet of translation by CAMERA.

Bollinger has proven as usual to be a coward, having to insult Ahmadinejad before his speech. This just follows the so called "free speech" advocate's action last year on cancelling his speech and on his investigation of the Middle East Studies group.

[Gene]

I'm really getting tired of people trying to decide for the rest of us whom we can hear from in America. If free speech is such a drain on some people, I wish they'd move to a country where they don't have any and let the rest of us alone. They were so afraid that Columbia students might applaud Ahmadinejad their solution was to try to keep the rest of us from hearing anything he had to say.

[David Seaton]

America is caught and struggling in a trap in the Middle East. Those who would like to see America weakened (more friends of themselves than really "enemies" of America) have little to do more than rummage among the fallout produced by the paralysis of US domestic politics.

Hysterical fear combined with racist arrogance have led a mighty giant to play the role of a trembling dwarf. A mastiff with the heart of a chihuahua. Even the Israelis are finally victims of America's psychodrama... Riding a tiger is a dangerous sport.

[David Seaton]

Here, read this:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/906890.html

[Richard Witty]

The Haaretz article was one opinion.

Ahmadinejad should have been allowed to speak.

I saw for myself that he was as much of slimy fascist as was claimed by the neo-conservatives.

Israel is the nut of the issue. ONLY if one regards Israel as not a nation is it possible to regard him as potentially "peace-loving".

But, the REALITY is that Israel IS a nation, and his rhetoric "we are willing to negotiate with any nation" (excluding Israel, by his definition that Israel is not a nation, not a state), is slimy rationalization.

Anyone buy into his "science is illumination", of which experimental science is secondary? That is an advocacy for the "illumination" of the word from Allah, that that is more reliable and authoritative than empirical logic.

I thought I was in the Scopes trial, hearing that.

[Arie Brand]

And where do you think you are when you hear pastor Hagee, Richard?

[David Seaton]

Of course Israel IS a nation. As is South Africa to which Ahmadinejad also referred.

South Africa STILL is a nation, arguably the SAME nation -- all the same people are still there -- the ONLY thing that has disappeared is APARTHEID.

Ahmadinejad pointed out that Iran now has relations with South Africa, which has not expelled the Afrikaners, but which now allows all the people within its borders full civil rights.... perhaps Ahmadinejad was hinting at something?

The REAL nub of the question is that Israel cannot TOLERATE any other power in the region. Egypt, the most important country in the area, has been bought off with massive aid -- after Israel, of course, it is the largest recipient of our largess -- Iraq has been destroyed and is in the process of being dismembered... That leaves Iran, which must be neutralized too.

Iran has never attacked anyone, why is this necessary?

Because if Iran cannot be intimidated, that defiance will encourage Muslims to continue to resist Israel's continued consolidation of its control over biblical Judea and Samaria... THAT Mr. Witty is truly the nub of the question.

For the Israeli ultra-right and for a powerful minority of American Jews and evangelical Christians, even if the world goes up in flames, Israel MUST retain the land the God "gave" them. ALL the rest is just a cloud of Hasbara, agitprop and assorted bull and horse manure to cloud the issue.

Fortunately a growing number of people are catching onto the gag. This means that the hurry to start the war against Iran increases. Get it over before too many people read Mearsheimer & Walt.

[David Seaton]

Another gem from Haaretz:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/906924.html

[Richard Witty]

Iran's attitude towards Israel is NOT conditional, as in any meaningful sense of the word.

Its hatred of any state in which Jews constitute an actual nation, rather than a minority religion, is unconditional.

Its an expression of fascism in the sense of the dehumanization of the Jews, including the notion that Jewish people are not a coherent nation, deserving SELF-governance.

The prospect of a single-state solution, with a loaded deck, is NOT a civil or peaceful one.

As the population of geographic former borders of Palestinian mandate are approximately 50% Jewish and 45% Palestinian Muslim and 5 % Palestinian Christian, a plebiscite would likely result in the suppression of a LARGE minority.

Such conditions usually lead to civil war, which would be likely settle out into two states, where the dominant national self-definitions would prevail.

Its a fantasy to propose a single-state plebiscite as Ahmadinejad did. Either a fantasy or strictly a rhetorical ploy.

That only gullible would buy as somehow benign.

I invest in the Zionism that the Jewish people are a people and deserve to self-govern.

And, in the specific form of enough, not expansion. I consistently oppose policies of settlement expansion. The West Bank is/should be sovereign Palestine.

Israel within the green line is sovereign Israel.

Fantasies to the contrary, fuel abuses of human beings. Both Israelis as considered legitimate targets for terrorism masquerading as "resistance", and Palestinians as perpetual pascal lambs used as cover by Islamicists.

Iran is NO civil society, internally or in relation to the rest of the world.

Israel needs reform, not revolution. Palestine needs sovereignty and peace.

Iran gets in the way.

[Richard Witty]

What does a civil state do about Iran?

I really don't know. I reluctantly favored the Clinton era containment policies towards Iraq.

Bush blew the prospect of containment wide open. I think he was greedy for the oil frankly and that clouded his judgement.

I don't know if containment policies are possible now in Iran. It would be a great tragedy if that were the case, a tragedy that Israel frankly predicted (and rationally urged the US to focus on Iran more than Iraq).

Wishful thinking about Iran is not useful.

[David Seaton]

If Israel was willing to really return to its 1967 borders as per UN-242, that could be quickly arranged. That is basically the Saudi plan. Even Iran has said that they will accept any solution that the Palestinians themselves accept. But Israel has NO intention of EVER (Witty likes caps) RETURNING to the Green Line... never, ever. Any argument to the contrary is purely disingenuous, the Israelis are simply stalling and playing for time, they always have and unless the US position changes, I'm afraid they always will.

[Richard Witty]

I personally advocate for the green line as border. When I've been in the West Bank, I thought of myself in Palestine.

It is an effort to get there.

What gets there is the big question?

Noting the prospect of over-reaction on the part of many Israeli military and wariness on the part of the Israeli populace, I don't understand how anyone could conceive that advocating for the dissolution of the state of Israel would have any effect except harsh reaction.