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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jim-thompson who wrote (15274)	9/20/2007 1:18:27 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Respond to of 224744

Columbia Univ disgracefully welcomes Ahmadinejad >Columbia's disgrace powerlineblog.com, Sept 19 2007 There is a suicidal mania that grips elite opinion in the United States. It is exemplified nowhere better than in our elite educational institutions. Today, for example, Columbia University has issued the following statement to its alumni: On Monday, September 24th, 2007 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will speak and participate in a question and answer session with university faculty and students at Columbia University's World Leaders Forum. His appearance is sponsored by Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, which is initiating a year-long series of lectures and events on thirty years of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The SIPA lecture series will include academic experts as well as former officials and critics of the Islamic Republic. This opportunity for faculty and students to engage the President of Iran came about after Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee at the Iranian Mission to the United Nations initiated contact with Columbia through a member of the faculty, Richard Bulliet, who is a specialist on Iran. The event will be open only to university students, faculty and staff with Columbia University identification and invited guests. President Bollinger emphasized that such World Leaders Forum events must allow ample time for students and faculty to pose questions that challenge the views expressed by the speakers. John H. Coatsworth, Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, confirmed that the Iranian president had agreed to this format. Dean Coatsworth will moderate the question and answer period following Ahmadinejad's speech. President Bollinger will introduce the event by challenging President Ahmadinejad on a number of his controversial statements and his government's policies, including his denial of the Holocaust and his call for the destruction of the State of Israel. The US government has accused Ahmadinejad's government of supporting terrorism and developing nuclear weapons capacity. Human rights groups have charged Iran with suppressing dissent and women's rights. Columbia students and faculty will themselves have an opportunity to question Iran's leader on these and other issues. Dean Coatsworth stated that "Opportunities to hear, challenge, and learn from controversial speakers of different views are central to the education and training of students for citizenship in a shrinking and still dangerous world. This is especially true for SIPA students, many of whose careers will require them to confront human rights and security issues throughout the globe." President Bollinger has issued the following companion statement: 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. 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. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason. I would also like to invoke a major theme in the development of freedom of speech as a central value in our society. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. 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. That such a forum could not take place on a university campus in Iran today sharpens the point of what we do here. To commit oneself to a life—and a civil society—prepared to examine critically all ideas arises from a deep faith in the myriad benefits of a long-term process of meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs and hateful words with wiser words. 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. Columbia and President Bollinger are a disgrace. They welcome to their campus a man who is a ringleader in the seizure of American hostages, a terrorist, the president of a terrorist regime, and the representative of a regime responsible at present for the deaths of American soldiers on the field of battle. Columbia's prattle about free speech may be a tale told by an idiot, but it signifies something. And President Bollinger is a fool who is not excused from the dishonor he brings to his institution and his fellow citizens by the fact that he doesn't know what he is doing.<