President Bollinger's Statement About
President Ahmadinejad's Scheduled Appearance

On Monday, September 24, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is scheduled to appear as a speaker on campus. The event is sponsored by the School of International and Public Affairs (see SIPA announcement), which has been in contact with the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. The event will be part of the annual World Leaders Forum, the University-wide initiative intended to further Columbia's longstanding tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate, especially on global issues.

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 (see President Bollinger's prior statement).
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.

What it is has nothing to do with Columbia and/or Ground Zero per se.  All they want is the carpet rolled out for yet another war and they see they're not getting it.  They want yet another assault on John and Jane Taxpayer's perception, they want to make us think war with Iran is inevitable.   It worked last time, right?  

But this is one of many signals that they are not going to get quite the same media and institutional complicity in ratcheting up the drums of war as they got for Iraq.

http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html

The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.

Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that "Israel must be wiped off the map" with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.

Instead, we get the same essentially empty outrage, that, at its core, also denies Iran's history, and diminishes absurdly our own wretched role is hindering a nation from determining their own destiny.

We won't even talk to Cuba, can you imagine what we would do to a nation who assasinated on of our Presidents as recently as we did theirs?

If he should speak ill of our country, at least let us hear it for ourselves and form our own opinion.

Perhaps a few members of the MSM could take some tips from Bollinger on how to introduce Bush etal.

"Bankrupted a country, completely divisive, borderline christian wacko, completely asleep prior to 9-11 and cannot speak in complete sentences"

And he walked.

But no one blamed the president.

Then there were these guys who killed some poor kid in Oregon just because he was a homosexual.

But no one blamed the president.

Then there is the history of eliminating an entire nation of indigenous people on the north american continent in the 19th century. About 20 million of them at last count. It's repeatedly denied.

But no one blames the president.

All this does is provide a forum for an enemy of America and the western world.

Should he be shut up? No.