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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
The Columbia Spectator has gone all out covering the Iranian president’s talk in Morningside Heights today. Here is their great liveblogging coverage; witty title, too. The amount of national media attention this campus event is getting has gone way overboard. It’s newsworthy to be sure, but, as Juan Cole says (via a must-read Greenwald post), “The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state.”
Columbia Dean John Coatsworth ran a discursive Q&A period. During which Ahmadinejad repeats his reprehensible call for “more research” on the Holocaust. He says,
“You shouldn’t ask me why I’m asking questions, you should ask yourselves why you think it’s questionable that I want to do so.”
Well, I think the most concise answer to this kind of bullsh*t came from Noam Chomsky a while back:
“I described the Holocaust years ago as the most fantastic outburst of insanity in human history, so much so that if we even agree to discuss the matter we demean ourselves.”
According to the account in the Times, Ahmadinejad kept coming back to the Israel/Palestine issue. Tying the conflict back to the Holocaust, he says, “We need to still question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for it or not.” That’s a provocative sentiment not often heard in this country — and, by my understanding of history, I think it’s an oversimplification — but is worth considering nonetheless. Finally, some good news for the principle of free speech. The Spec reports, after the speech:
According to University phone operator Lareine White, the University is now being flooded with calls to congratulate Columbia on the Ahmadinejad invitation.
Talk about a change of heart.
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This is a direct quote from Zionismontheweb.com:
"Nonetheless, the Zionist organization and the Yishuv ransomed Jews from Nazi Germany in return for economic concessions. The Zionists managed to save over 200,000 European Jews before World War II. When the British responded to Arab pressure and ended Jewish immigration to Palestine, the Zionists, attempting to rescue Jews from the Nazis, organized illegal immigration through the "Institution for Illegal Immigration" (Hamossad L'aliya Beth)."
and also,
"Reports of Nazi atrocities became increasingly frequent and vivid. Despite the desperate need to find a haven for refugees, the doors of Palestine remained shut to Jewish immigration. The Zionist leadership met in the Biltmore Hotel in New York City in 1942 and declared that it supported the establishment of Palestine as a "Jewish Commonwealth."
The Iranian president's statement about the link between the Holocaust and the creation of a Jewish state on Palestinian soil (resulting in the displacement of nearly 4 million people) is well-founded and based on historical evidence.
I am also not sure why it is provocative to ask why innocent civilians had to pay for the atrocities perpetrated Nazi Germany.