| By Justin Elliott - Sep 26th, 2007 at 9:34 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
We've all heard by now that Columbia President Lee Bollinger introduced Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the other day with a monotonous tirade. Many people have pointed out that the introduction was not only sprinkled with questionable characterizations (for example, Bollinger called him a “cruel and petty dictator” but that’s ludicrous because A'jad is largely a powerless figurehead who was democratically elected to boot). Of course Ahmadinejad should have faced pointed questions—and he did—but as Pat Buchanan said on Hardball, Bollinger went way overboard, probably in part to mollify his donor base.
Well, you know, and Ahmadinejad, what he did, he just played off him beautifully. He said, Look, in Iran, we don‘t invite guests and then insult them to their face, and secondly, we generally let the audience decide whether what they have to say, if they agree or disagree with it. And you‘ve sort of insulted the audience. And then he moved on.
Now John Caruso at The Distant Ocean has dug up the “liberal” Bollinger’s introduction of actual military dictator General Perez Musharraf of Pakistan (Via This Modern World). Keep in mind that Musharraf is not an official state enemy while you read for the difference in, ahem, tone:
Rarely do we have an opportunity such as this to greet a figure of such central and global importance. It is with great gratitude and excitement that I welcome President Musharraf and his wife, Sehbah Musharraf, to Columbia University. ...
We at Columbia are eager to listen. As a community of scholars and as students and faculty who come from everywhere in the world, we take a great scholarly and personal interest in what the President has to say. The development in Pakistan over the past several years, from its economic growth to its fight against extremism and terrorism, are vital issues for all of us. Mr. President, as you share your thoughts and insights you will give our students, the leaders of tomorrow, first-hand knowledge of the world their generation will inherit. ...
"President Musharraf is a leader of global importance and his contribution to Pakistan’s economic turnaround and the international fight against terror remain remarkable - it is rare that we have a leader of his stature at campus," said Lee C Bollinger, the President of Columbia University.
After delivering his introductory speech, Bollinger rushed home to transfer the print of Musharraf's boot from his tongue onto a piece of paper, so he could frame it, hang it above his desk, and admire it lovingly every day.
Bollinger's unwillingness to distinguish an elected president from an actual, flesh and blood dictator, and his eagerness to point out the crimes of official enemies while whitewashing those of official allies, extends to Columbia's World Leaders Forum itself. If you look at their bio link for Musharraf, you'll see this creative rendition of history:
General Pervez Musharraf assumed the office of chief executive of Pakistan in October 1999, having been appointed chief of staff of the army a year earlier. After calling general elections in 2002 and then restoring the constitution, he became president and commander of the armed services of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in October of that year.
They source their biographical text completely to a BBC article about Musharraf. So what does that BBC article actually say?
General Pervez Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999 which was widely condemned and which led to Pakistan's suspension from the Commonwealth until 2004. ...
In 2002 General Musharraf awarded himself another five years as president, together with the power to dismiss an elected parliament. The handover from military to civilian rule came with parliamentary elections in November 2002, and the appointment of a civilian prime minister.
General Musharraf has retained his military role, reneging on a promise to give up his army post and to become a civilian president.
"Seized power in a bloodless coup"? "Awarded himself another five years as president"? No, no, no, that will never do. Let's see...how about "assumed the office of chief executive of Pakistan" and "became president"? Yeah, that's much better.
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I say we stop feeling sorry for Ahmadinejad, and we stop shutting our mouths because it might help him back home. Due respect to Pat Buchanan, but does it make any sense to value the perspective of another people over the importance of stating the hard truth? His comments on Monday demonstrated a worldview that must be challenged by more than just questions for him to dodge. It must be challenged by words in his face. Sure, there will be many who feel sorry for him, but I am sure those who yearn for freedom inside Iran heard Bolligner's words and were glad to see him challenged. It makes no sense to allow that man freedom of speech with using it for ourselves. And I would hope that, dictator charges aside, no one here honestly believes that Musharraf is as evil a world leader as Ahmadinejad. Even as a figurehead, he serves as nothing more than a shill for the anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Semitic, and anti-freedom views of the Ayatollahs. This event required much, much more than the average questioning.
The number one reason why the Bush Bush Administration and our Government advocate a less than friendly relationship with Iran is because they claim that we should be concerned about the fact that they are seeking nuclear capabilities.
However Ahmadinejad strongly refuted that his country is doing any such thing, a fact which is corroborated by our own intelligence agencies and independent nuclear watchdogs.
So my question is - what do we what from this Ahmadinejad and his country? Sure we find their civil rights to be backwards - but that's not something new in the Middle-East.
If what we’re really concerned about is their ability to harm our nation and our allies then we should not let that argument get clouded by the fact that we disagree with Iran's societal and cultural issues.
1) It was not a violation of Ahmadinejad's right to free speech. The First Amendment guarantees the right to express your thoughts without fear of persecution, NOT the right to say and do whatever you want without fear of being criticized or held accountable. No one can argue that Ahmadinejad was persecuted or even tangibly harmed by his encounter at Columbia; he was, however, fiercely criticized and forced to account for his words and actions by both Bollinger and the student body. That is what free discourse is all about, and to condemn Columbia for its treatment of Ahmadinejad is to condemn not a violation of the right to free speech, but rather free speech itself. It is disturbing to me that people are not only warping the definition of free speech rights, but doing it to defend a man as vile as Ahmadinejad (who you are serving as an apologist for, despite the cursory criticisms you throw his way to deflect attention from that fact).
2) It was not rude for them to treat Ahmadinejad the way he did. This is a man who has been strutting around and crowing for months about how he'd love to challenge a major Western institution to a debate over the positions he has taken; the problem, I suspect, is that he has never actually had to defend his ideas in front of an audience that wasn't either previously sympathetic or scared into silence. Consequently when Columbia accepted his challenge to debate, he walked in there with unrealistic expectations about what would ensue. He thought he would easily dominate the place; instead his ideas were picked apart and exposed for what they were in the same vigorous academic tone that has marked college discourse since the 1960s. Flustered and upset at his "mistreatment", Ahmadinejad made a jackass of himself for a while, then left to save face. It was predictable that the egocentric faux intellectual dictator who was just trounced in the very debate that he had demanded for months would pathetically try to spin the world's attention away from his failure by vilifying the people who embarrassed him; it is horrifying that so many Westerners are ignorant and hate-filled enough to agree with him.
3) Pervez Musharraf is in fact a dictator, and Bollinger was wrong for not challenging him in the same way that he challenged Ahmadinejad. That does NOT make him wrong for challenging Ahmadinejad, however; if your true desire is the pursuit of truth and the preservation of free speech, you should have applauded him for criticizing one dictator and failing to criticize another, rather than fondly wish he had coddled both.
4) Ahmadinejad's claim of being a "democratically elected" is weaker (if that is even possible) than Bush's claim of a mandate in 2004 (or of being democratically elected four years earlier), as there is a lot of evidence that he stole that election. What's more, even if he had been democratically elected, that doesn't mean he isn't a dictator; Hitler was first elected by procedures entirely in keeping with the democratic protocol of the Weimar Constitution, and yet within a year became a full-fledged fascist authoritarian. Ahmadinejad (who bears more similarities to Hitler than just this) has negated the legitimacy of his "democratic" election by his many anti-humanitarian actions in Iran. I could repeat them all, of course, but you Bollinger did a brilliant job (yes, I said brilliant) of doing that for me.
5) I have no idea what you thought of Stephen Colbert's roast of George W. Bush last year, but I suspect (given your political affiliation) that you applauded it. Let me begin by saying that you were absolutely right for doing so; Bush is an egomaniacal moron whose policies have proven disastrous for this country, and someone needed to penetrate the coccoon of yes-men which he has surrounded himself with and laid on the line what he has done wrong. Even so, the same arguments that have been used against Bollinger could just as easily be used Colbert. In fact, the two men essentially did the same thing; they harshly but insightfully lambasted a powerful authority figure not accustomed to criticism. In both cases the authority figure was an invited guest (for Bush was hardly under obligation to attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner), and in both cases champions of the authority figure being criticized immediately accused the critic of being "rude", "disgraceful", "disrespectful", and a "bully". While I may disagree with people who believe both Colbert and Bollinger were wrong, I can at least respect the ideological consistency of their position (which, I imagine, is that respecting authority figures is far more important than holding them accountable for their wrongdoings). I cannot, however, respect someone who is hypocritical enough to claim one was right and the other was wrong for the action of telling off an authority figure who needed telling off, and I have even less respect for the people intellectually monstrous enough to actually claim there was a difference between the two situations. There wasn't any difference; both men did the same thing, and they were either both right for doing it or both wrong for doing it.
6) You managed to write an entire article while ignoring the giant elephant in the room - the issue of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. Many people suspect that radical leftists like yourself dislike what Bollinger said because he attacked a notorious anti-Semite and terrorist sympathizer, and these radical leftists - despite their humanitarian positions on many issues - secretly possess an evil side to their souls as well, and that like Ahmadinejad that evil comes out in the beating up of the hapless and long powerless Jews and the less powerless but equally chic-to-hate Americans. Given the massive flaws with which your argument was riddled, I wonder if that is indeed the case.
This post is long enough. After criticizing one poster on a different blog for rudeness, I now realize that why his rudeness was so tempting (the temptation will doubtless grow greater as you make intellectual and moral contortions and stretch the bounds of logic to its farthest limits to defend your apologism for the beliefs and the person of this authoritarian anti-Semite and Islamofascist). One can only suffer so much exposure to bullshit before they vomit.
1- Ahmadinejad was formally invited by Bollingrer to give a speech to faculty and students and clarify his positions. He had not agreed to debate. Debates are for people of equal staure. A president of a country will only debate another president or prime minister. As a matter of fact Ahmadinejad has publicly asked to debate Bush.
He had agreed to answer questions AFTER his speech. This is a standard procedure for all invited guests including foreign dignitaries.
2- Even if he had agreed to debate, there was no debate format at Columbia. Debate requires a neutral moderator. Debate means parties involved face each other and pose questions and in turn provide anwsers. Debate is not to be confused with name calling and leveling accusations and leaving the scene after(rather cowardly I should say regarding what Bollinger did).
3- World public opinion(world is not just US and US is not just the right wing media)) has overwhelmingly condemned Columbia and Bollinger. A patient internet search can verify this.
Sept. 19, 2007
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 statement on Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh’s release).
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.
He makes it extremely clear here that Ahmadinejad is indeed a speaker, but in the context of a DEBATE. What's more, it is explicitly spelled out what is going to happen, so that Ahmadinejad had no right claiming surprise, much less offense. I will also add that one of your central assertions is as deplorable as it is inaccurate - "debate are for people of equal stature". Clearly you have either never participated in a debate or loathe those debates you have been in, for in reality a debate is any dialogue between two people about subjects of great substance. Only elitists and other supremacists feel that someone is less qualified to speak than someone else because his "stature" is not as great. In the democratic world, the highest leader can be debated and held accountable by the lowest citizen.
2) Your notion of what constitutes a debate is likewise gravely mistaken. To prove this point, I would refer you to the transcripts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 (which are considered by experts in oratory to have laid the foundations of modern debate formats). In those debates there weren't any moderators, and the two participants (a lowly anonymous lawyer of no political stature named Abraham Lincoln and an internationally-renowned United States Senator named Stephen Douglas) spent the entire time intelligently tearing each other to pieces with the logic of their respective arguments. Bollinger was firmly in keeping with that tradition, whereas Ahmadinejad fell into the tradition of sore losers (who in days more noble than ours were discredited rather than lauded for their post-debate behavior).
3) World public opinion has overwhelmingly sided with Ahmadinejad because:
A) The media, which is heavily influenced by Arab dollars, almost immediately spun the story in a way that was favorable to Ahmadinejad and unfavorable to Columbia.
B) Many people in the world hate America and Jews, and as such love Ahmadinejad anyway.
Even so, the Internet is not the most reliable way of gauging world opinion; only a select slice of the world population actually goes online to spout their political views, so it is not a demonstrative demographic sample.
Could you do us all a favor and just admit why you're taking this position - because you pretty much share all of Ahmadinejad's positions on major issues and are devastated that he had his ass handed to him in a debate? At least it would make the logical inconsistencies of your current arguments seem less dishonest.
1- Nothing in your reply indicates that there was supposed to be a debate. Even the in the 19th century case you came up with, the debating parties were both in the scene. Don't forget that Bollinger left after his offensive remarks.
2- As for Arab money(!) I have to remind you that Iran is not an Arab nation(remember Persians?). Most Arab states are strongly pro American (or pro Bush and as such they wouldn't spend their money for Ahmadinejad. On the other hand no body can deny pro Israel bias in the mainstrem media here and the other major world publications.
3- Being anti Israel's expansionist policy doesn't mean anti-jewish as anti-Bush ddesn't mean anti-American. But the effort to link the two has been politically motivated, designed to silince the critics.
John Mearsheimer of University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University(both jewish) in their best seller book "Israel Lobby and US foreign Policy" argue that "No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical".They argue that "in its basic operations, it is no different from interest groups like the Farm Lobby, steel and textile workers, and other ethnic lobbies. What sets the Israel Lobby apart is its extraordinary effectiveness." According to Mearsheimer and Walt, the "loose coalition" that makes up the Lobby has "significant leverage over the Executive branch," as well as the ability to make sure that the "Lobby's perspective on Israel is widely reflected in the mainstream media." They claim that AIPAC in particular has a "stranglehold on the U.S. Congress," due to its "ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it."
Mearsheimer and Walt decry what they call misuse of "the charge of anti-Semitism," and argue that pro-Israel groups place great importance on "controlling debate" in American academia; they maintain, however, that the Lobby has yet to succeed in its "campaign to eliminate criticism of Israel from college campuses" (see Campus Watch and U.S. Congress Bill H.R. 509). The authors conclude by arguing that when the Lobby succeeds in shaping U.S. policy in the Middle East, then "Israel's enemies get weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying."