There is something approaching a consensus in the press that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University was a victory for the Sultan of Swing. You will find that confirmed by the Internet's most trusted voice, Dr. Schaff.
While I won't defend Columbia's decision to invite Ahmadinejad to speak, I don't agree that the outcome favored him, or the people who invited him. It may be true, and Professor Schaff indicates, that some of the student audience were sympathetic to some of the things he said, but that puts on display the confusion rampant in that student body. Public applause by the pro-Palestinian left for a man who wants to destroy Israel, well I think that is something we ought to have on public record.
As I indicated in my recent post, this incident is glaring example of the incoherence of the contemporary academic left. Ahmadinejad, whose government hangs homosexuals, stones women to death for adultery, and regularly executes dissidents, is allowed to speak; Lawrence Summers, who merely said something unfashionable among good academic leftists, is not. Columbia President Bollinger's hostile introduction, satisfactory or not, is a sign that the incident was at least embarrassing. Let's call that therapy.
Moreover, it is hardly a good thing for the Iranian President that he revealed himself to be more than a puppet for a barbaric theocracy. He also revealed himself to be a buffoon. Dana Milbank, at the Washington Post, paints the picture:
"Our people are the freest people in the world," said the man whose government executes dissidents, jails academics and stones people to death.
"The freest women in the world are women in Iran," he continued, neglecting to mention that Iranian law treats a woman as half of a man.
"In our country," judged the man who shuts down newspapers and imprisons journalists, "freedom is flowing at its highest level."
All that is pretty good theater. But then there is the show stopper:
"In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country," he informed the Columbia audience.
I gather with that remark, the accidental Vaudeville comic brought the house down. Even the innocents who applauded the Palestine stuff could see, at least for a moment, that they were listening to a twenty-four karat ignoramus.
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