Selective free speech
>Anti-semitism at Columbia University
By Armin Rosen
SEPTEMBER 24, 2007
In the 1930s, the Columbia administration participated in what could be described as the coddling of the Nazi regime. In 1933, Nazi ambassador Hans Luther gave a speech on campus in which, according to a 2006 article in Spectator by Rafeal Medoff, he focused on Hitler’s “peaceful intentions” in Europe. Columbia maintained student exchange programs with Nazi universities throughout the ’30s, while, in 1936, our university sent a representative to the 550th anniversary celebration of the University of Heidelberg, even though, writes Medoff, it had “already had been purged of Jewish faculty members, instituted a Nazi curriculum, and hosted a burning of books by Jewish authors.”
This is an unacknowledged, and, as we learned this past week, misunderstood chapter of this university’s past. Had President Lee Bollinger any concept of history, he would have realized the dangers of conferring even symbolic legitimacy on governments that are so completely beneath our contempt. But 70 years later, under the spurious pretext of open discussion and freedom of speech, our university has both handed a propaganda victory to a morally reprehensible regime and perverted the very values of intellectual discourse it pretends to be nobly upholding.
Indeed, it’s shocking that Bollinger didn’t take even a cursory glance at last year’s headlines before renewing his invitation to the Iranian president. This past Wednesday, two stories broke on the Ahmadinejad front: Israeli U.N. ambassador Dan Gillerman called for the Holocaust-denying president to be banned from the world body, and Ahmadinejad made what he knew to be an inflammatory request to visit Ground Zero. With Israel, the NYPD, the New York tabloids, and most reasonable people in an outrage over Ahmadinejad’s New York itinerary, the president turned to the one place where he could give his opponents a monumental comeuppance: Columbia, where he would receive the respect afforded to a head of state as well as an introduction from the president of one of the world’s top universities. This exploitation of liberal inclusiveness has precedent with Iran’s ally Hugo Chavez, who used an appearance at a Harlem church to reiterate his belief that George W. Bush is “the devil” and was thus able to create the perception that people outside the establishment were willing to hear him out.
So Columbia has become a complicit partner in Ahmadinejad’s PR blitz. And if you think this appearance was not a premeditated stunt, keep in mind that it was the Iranian delegation that contacted Columbia and asked for the renewal of last year’s speaking invite. This appearance serves the agenda of a man that some accuse of actively working to kill U.S. soldiers far more than it serves Bollinger’s vaunted academic principles.
But while these principles might hold that every idea is legitimate enough to be, in Bollinger’s words, “sharply challenged,” it would be pitifully myopic to believe that “sharp challenge” is wholly divorced from context. The world was aghast at Ahmadinejad’s “Holocaust denial conference” in December of 2006. But by designating the Iranian president’s denial of the Holocaust as a point open to critical examination (“sharp challenge”), our president is hosting a Holocaust denial conference of his own, and he is placing the most abstract principles of intellectual openness ahead of whatever basic sense of decency tells you not to play the enabler for someone who is actively working to kill and injure American soldiers, who executes homosexuals and persecutes minority groups like the Ba’hai, and who promulgates Holocaust denial. Inconveniently for Bollinger (and for his legacy as president), it is not a faceless intellect that will speak to us today, but rather the murderous president of a country of 50 million people.
Today’s event is at least significant as a wake-up call and a reminder that commitment to free discourse does not absolve us of moral responsibility, just as “free discourse” is complicated when it occurs in a world of consequences—the very real world in which Iranian bombs are killing American soldiers in Iraq, rather than the splendidly isolated world of the Contemporary Civilization class discussion. If anything, that is what Columbia’s shameful cooperation with the Nazis should have taught us: that a university’s decisions matter, and that it is the highest folly to fetishize intellectual openness at the expense of sound judgment.
The people who see today’s event as an opportunity to use this openness as a weapon against the Iranian president and who envision him having some unlikely existential crisis after getting tripped up on a pointed question should consider that nobody remembers the exact specifics of Hans Luther’s speech here—all we remember is that he spoke. Seventy years from now, it’s likely all that will be remembered is that Columbia gave a podium to one of the most dangerous men on earth. And today will rightly go down as one of the darkest in our university’s history.
Armin Rosen is a sophomore in List College.< |
