"Guest of Dishonor"

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Colombia University this week seemed to cause nothing short of a frenzy. According to this article, Lee Bollinger “bent over backward” to assure his students, faculty, and fellow Americans that he thinks Ahmadinejad is a crazed dictator and that he was invited to speak at Columbia based on the idea that one should know their enemies. Despite this, most articles I’ve come across are extremely critical of Bollinger inviting the tyrannical president to speak and wasting the college’s money on ensuring the man’s security.

Ahmadinejad touched on the usual brow-raising subjects—his lack of belief in the Holocaust, his feelings toward nuclear power, his thoughts about Israel and how it should be wiped off the map, and (and I think this is a new one) how there are no homosexuals in Iran. Not-a-one.

The reporting on his blindfolded points of view has become almost dull now. Western society can only be reminded so many times that the maniac thinks the Holocaust needs to be “researched in a new light” before the topic only gets us riled up for five or ten minutes. We’ll never “get over it,” so to say, but the original alarm is gone.

This is why, in many online articles, the reporting turned instead to Ahmadinejad’s invitation to Columbia and how apparently misguided Bollinger was in inviting the man in the first place. My position on the issue can be best summed up by a sign being toted by Todd Bookman, a student at the School of International and Public Affairs. Its existence was highlighted in The Daily Pennsylvanian, and it read, “Free speech for all, even douche bags.”

Poor, pressured Lee Bollinger tried to explain his standpoint on the issue in every way. I don’t think a single person feels that because Ahmadinejad was offered a platform for speech at the University that the a single student or administration member stand behind him and his campaigns to do whatever it is he’s trying to do. This would be different were it an American Republican candidate that was considered a little too Right Wing, or an American Democratic candidate that was considered a little too much like a socialist. Those representatives are within an American scope of understanding, so to say. Ahmadinejad is just a little too crazy, or a little too KKK, to be taken seriously.

To sum up my own thoughts on the matter, no I don’t agree with most things he says (though claims along the lines of “who are you, with your nuclear capabilities, to stop us from pursing the same right?” do resonate, even if he wants nukes to wipe out Israel). No, I don’t think anyone in his or her right mind agrees with him, either. And although there is a thick line between denying free speech and inviting someone to speak about their own personal crazies, no one would dare criticize Bollinger for inviting a member of the Bush Administration to speak.

Best put by Joe Kay at The Intelligence Daily, “The American government . . . has become associated in the minds of the world’s population with the bloody occupation of Iraq, the torture at Abu Ghraib, the prisons of Guantánamo Bay, a complete contempt for international law, and a relentless campaign of military aggression.” That can bring us to a larger question (and one that my typing-weakened fingers cannot explore tonight)—who are we to judge Ahmadinejad’s Right Wing madness when we’ve elected Right Wing Mad Hatters of our own design into office?