Columbia's Fiasco, Or, How To Give Free Speech a Bad Name
Robert Zaller
Issue date: 10/5/07 Section: Ed-Op
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As everyone now knows, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the front man for the ayatollahs' regime in Iran, gave a highly controversial speech at Columbia University while visiting the United Nations.
It would be an understatement to say that Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose credits as an historian include denying the Holocaust and whose diplomacy features regular calls for Israel's extinction, was an unwelcome guest in New York City, with its Jewish mayor and its two million Jewish residents.
He is not particularly dear in Washington, either, where Iran, as a charter member of the Bush Axis of Evil, sits squarely in Dick Cheney's gunsights.
Nonetheless, Columbia's President, Lee Bollinger, whose foot has been in his mouth before, managed to make his guest nearly sympathetic by his stunningly uncivil treatment. It was a propaganda coup for Tehran, and a black eye for academic discourse in this country.
Columbia has a tradition of inviting politically problematic figures; nothing wrong with that. I would personally have drawn the line at Ahmadinejad, but they did give Uganda's Idi Amin a forum, and he had to deny the charge of eating people.
There was something to be said, too, for offering the representative of a country we have been demonizing for nearly thirty years a chance to speak, however unsavory and repellent his views.
We fought a proxy war with Iran in the 1980s, using the good offices of our then ally, Saddam Hussein, and the bitter-enders in the Bush administration will apparently not rest until they have renewed it.
Unfortunately, the Columbia episode played right into their hands, and thus did a political disservice into the bargain.
President Bollinger might have absented himself from Ahmadinejad's speech, but he faced such a community backlash for the invitation that he dared not avoid it.
He might have sat silently, and let someone else introduce Ahmadinejad. Having decided to speak, he might have said simply that giving his guest a platform did not mean an endorsement of his views, but was simply an opportunity for dialogue.
It would be an understatement to say that Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose credits as an historian include denying the Holocaust and whose diplomacy features regular calls for Israel's extinction, was an unwelcome guest in New York City, with its Jewish mayor and its two million Jewish residents.
He is not particularly dear in Washington, either, where Iran, as a charter member of the Bush Axis of Evil, sits squarely in Dick Cheney's gunsights.
Nonetheless, Columbia's President, Lee Bollinger, whose foot has been in his mouth before, managed to make his guest nearly sympathetic by his stunningly uncivil treatment. It was a propaganda coup for Tehran, and a black eye for academic discourse in this country.
Columbia has a tradition of inviting politically problematic figures; nothing wrong with that. I would personally have drawn the line at Ahmadinejad, but they did give Uganda's Idi Amin a forum, and he had to deny the charge of eating people.
There was something to be said, too, for offering the representative of a country we have been demonizing for nearly thirty years a chance to speak, however unsavory and repellent his views.
We fought a proxy war with Iran in the 1980s, using the good offices of our then ally, Saddam Hussein, and the bitter-enders in the Bush administration will apparently not rest until they have renewed it.
Unfortunately, the Columbia episode played right into their hands, and thus did a political disservice into the bargain.
President Bollinger might have absented himself from Ahmadinejad's speech, but he faced such a community backlash for the invitation that he dared not avoid it.
He might have sat silently, and let someone else introduce Ahmadinejad. Having decided to speak, he might have said simply that giving his guest a platform did not mean an endorsement of his views, but was simply an opportunity for dialogue.
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