Dude calling someone a dictator and a hypocrat is the easiest thing to do. He reminded me of Taxi drivers in Iran (Taht's exactly the way they talk) rather than the president of coloumbia university. i had respect in my mind for coloumbia university, but when it's head is such a lunatic and talks like uneducated street thugs well....

I thank Lee Bollinger for what he did today

ErinHere's a different take on it.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2007/09/018558.php

Seriously? Name calling is so the easiest thing to do.

If those are what balls are, keep them and have mine.

Dear friends,
As I am very pleased by the courageous speech of Lee Bollinger to the dangerous and ignorant Iranian dictator,please transmit this to Lee Bollinger and add my opinion that we must know our enemies and that the USA is not lost ( as many intellectuals in my country fear now) as long as man and woman like him defend human rights and fight the danger of ignorant, pathological and murderous beings.
I am a woman, writer and doctor in the field of literature and anthropology.Thanks for the possibility offered to me to express my opinion.
dr.Sonja Pos, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Europe.

Bollinger is a loser. Ahmadinejad is not his enemy and neither is Iran. It's like me calling Bollinger my enemy. His narrow-mindedness is the enemy to my intellect. An intellectual would not speak that way. But, when he moved on to talk about reality, about specific facts, like human rights issues, he has a right to discuss.

It was a horrible mistake for Bollinger to invite A'jad to Columbia in the first place. While it is true that our society guarantees him the freedom to do so, there is a fundamental difference between "can" and "should," and the very fact of A'jad's talk will be used as a propaganda device to legitimize his point of view in Iran and throughout the Middle East.

But if nothing else, not-right-wing Bollinger staked out a position of absolute moral clarity: he discarded the murky moral relativity of the academic left, and actually passed judgement on a tyrant and his oppressive government.

His was a meaningful statement in favor of just those oppressed groups (gays, political dissenters and women in particular) the academic left claims to champion, but does not, unless such championing can be linked to US shortcomings or used to demonize Bush.

Bollinger will take hits for his stance: he will be damned for being impolite; for having given A'jad a forum to increase his legitimacy; for having staked out a position with the cynical goal of keeping Columbia's funding from drying up; of being a tool of the Jewish lobby; of being a hypocrite (there is the ROTC issue); etc.

But in my view, he made his comments knowing full well he'll be attacked, and with full knowledge of what happened to Larry Summers when he offended the academic left.

Nor can Bollinger be blind to the possibility that A'jad has certain friends who might issue a fatwa or two calling for the elimination of him as an enemy of Islam (remember Salman Rushdie?).

What remains to be seen is if Bollinger will continue to be an outspoken advocate and critic of real tyranny, or whether he'll retreat to the shadows and equivocate, or say nothing more.

Ebi wrote:

Dude calling someone a dictator and a hypocrat is the easiest thing to do.

Dude! If that's true, why hasn't the academic left said what Bollinger said?

Did they hold their tongues because he was an ally in their crusade against Bush, the US and western values?

Or were they just afraid?

I give Bollinger credit for speaking more forthrightly than is common among members of his profession. But I don't think he "put himself on the line" in any meaningful way. What was the risk? Admadinejad wasn't going to physically attack him. It's unlikely that he would be attacked by any membes of the Iranian expat community, who almost by definition are anti-regime.

I think the handling of the Walid Shoebat speech by the Columbia administration undercuts any positioning of them as courageous champions of free speech.

Also, if Bollinger is a proponent of free speech and rational argument, why is he so opposed to reinstating ROTC at Columbia? If students can be exposed to the case for killing Israelis, suppressing women, etc, and make their own decisions, why can they not make their own decisions regarding participation in a military training program?

David Foster writes:

I give Bollinger credit for speaking more forthrightly than is common among members of his profession. But I don't think he "put himself on the line" in any meaningful way. What was the risk? Admadinejad wasn't going to physically attack him.

In a post today, Jules Crittenden cites a NY Sun story that reports a backlash against Bollinger from students and faculty.

The key graphs from Crittenden's post:

Here’s his real crime:

A professor of history, Eric Foner, said faculty members objected more to the content than the form of Mr. Bollinger’s remarks. “He accepts as true claims that are being made about Iran’s role in Iraq, which are being put forward by people whose credibility on weapons in the Middle East has not always been 100% reliable,” Mr. Foner said.

Rudeness, of course, not an issue, but failing to recognized that Bush lied, people died, unforgiveable.

Sounds to me like Bollinger might suffer the same fate as Larry Summers.

Surely this cannot come as a surprise to him.

Right on, Mr. Bollinger! To hell with the critics: what you said had to be said. This is not an issue of politeness: you were not hosting a tea party. Politeness in the face of tyranny is a cop-out. Would that someone had spoken to hitler that way: Ah. wants to annihilate Israel and the Jews and Western civilization and someone had to tell the bastard that this is unacceptable! Cowardly silence denotes acquiescence and approbation: if we remain silent in the face of Ah.'s pronouncements and machinations we implicitly give agreement and consent. As for Eric Foner: he may be correct about the accuracy of the Iran-Iraq connection but he should not ignore all of Ah.'s other behaviors and pronouncements. Stop the quibbling, you cowardly, hair-splitting academics and recognize Ah. for what he is: a destroyer of good things, Columbia University and academic freedom included!

A dictator is an absolutist or autocratic ruler who assumes sole power over the state, though the term is normally not applied to an absolute monarch.

Ahmadinejad is elected, and can serve 2 four year terms.
He does not control the armed forces of Iran.
In fact he only has 15% of the power.

HOW DUMB ARE YOU AMERICANS?

I would expect common courtesy from the President of an esteemed university such as Columbia...You invite the President of another country and then insult him in your opening remarks. No-one expected the debate not to be hard hitting, but to show such a petty side of yourself by greeting the guest so rudely just makes HIM look bad to many people. People in NYC protested this visit - perhaps it would have been a better idea to cancel the visit of Ahmaninejad than to so OBVIOUSLY bow to public sentiment by demeaning your institution by behaving so boorishly. No-one likes Ahmaninejad anyway, now many don't think too highly of Bollinger either.

Tina North...do you think that General Eisenhower should have shown courtesy to the defeated German generals by shaking hands with them? Does the fact that he declined to do so make you think less of him?

Oh please. Tyrants do not deserve "politeness" or "civility": they deserve nothing but unending scorn, contempt, and that most classically Anglo-American of political virtues, irreverence. Castigating A'jad in the harshest of terms is the ONLY proper response by someone who had allowed a forum. To do any otherwise would be complicity in his evil.

"Ahmadinejad is elected, and can serve 2 four year terms."

Here's someone who would've believed the literal truth of every word in the Soviet constitution.

Would Lee Bollinger be just as tough with President Bush regarding his war policies in Iraq? I doubt it; therefore, he has not truly overcome the wimpiness of academia. Rather, he seems to have simply caved in to the New York Post, the Christian Right, the Pro-Israeli Lobby, and the hawks in the Bush Administration by contributing to the demonization of Iran's bellicose, repressive reactionary, homophobic President.

Not sure whose side Ron is on, there.

I have to agree with Tina that it's kind of weird to invite a person to speak and then insult him. Not that A'jad didn't deserve everything that was said, and more. But if I felt that I had to be ugly to an invited guest, I'd uninvite him first.

I wonder if General Eisenhower went out of his way to invite those German generals to a public forum for the purpose of snubbing them.

Ron, surely you're kidding? To attack the President over Iraq hardly requires "courage" from an academic: it's the expected norm.

As for contributing to A'jad's demonization, he does more than enough to demonize himself that it's hard to imagine anyone else substantially adding to it.

Laura wrote:

I have to agree with Tina that it's kind of weird to invite a person to speak and then insult him. Not that A'jad didn't deserve everything that was said, and more. But if I felt that I had to be ugly to an invited guest, I'd uninvite him first.

Bollinger was guaranteed to take major hits the instant he invited A'Jad to speak, an invitation that never should have been offered: he was under no obligation to do so, and should have foreseen the trap he stepped into.

It would have been simple-on-stilts for him to have defended himself from any accusations that he deprived students the opportunity to hear from a tyrant and sponsor of terror and murder.

But once he took the decision to invite A'Jab, he couldn't disinvite him, since he would have been attacked unmercifully by the academic left (for caving to the right), proving to them that he was wishy-washy and not his own man. He would have been mobbed, not unlike Larry Summers was, and that's something he wisely chose to avoid.

He couldn't just offer up a mild introduction, which would have implied a moral equivalence that would be used to beat him and academia about the head and neck in perpetuity (like the academy's strawman defense of Ward Churchill on free speech grounds, and the academy's attacks on Larry Summers). Plus, there would be the obvious problem of him having endorsed A'Jab's right to speak, without having defended Minuteman Gilchrist's right to speak.

Having made the Great Error of the invitation in the first place, Bollinger took the wisest option available to him.

But his comments did seem heart-felt, even if they were defensive, and it's my hope that this whole adventure will broaden his perspective, Time will tell.