Dean's World

I have to admit, Columbia did a great job here.

Score one for classical liberalism!

I have to say, Columbia was a shameful spectacle today. It got itself into a hole it could not get out of, and played host, however "rudely," to a mass murdering dictator.

Dean is right that to some extent, the debacle of this invitation was ameliorated by the protests and other aspects of this murderous man's visit. But not enough.

I say score one for a fallacy of liberalism -- that the "airing of ideas" is always appropriate.

No. Some people shouldn't be "airing ideas." They should be swinging in the air from gallows. Ahmadinejad is one of those people.

Quoted:

At Columbia, university President Lee Bollinger pulled no punches. He called him a "petty and cruel dictator" and said his Holocaust denials suggested he was either "brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated."

"I feel the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for," Bollinger said to loud applause.

I heard him saying these things on the radio, and the anger and outrage in his voice was apparent.

Although on one point, one which can't be emphasized enough, President Bollinger is wrong: Ahmadinejad is not a dictator. He's not a legitimately elected President either, but that's not the point, because he's not a dictator. Supreme Leader Khamenei is the dictator. He holds absolute authority over the military and security forces, including the unilateral right to declare war, the right to approve or reject any legislation, and has absolute control over all media.

Ahmadinejad's position as "President" is almost entirely symbolic, and over matters military he has no control to speak of.

Anyway, to continue:

"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at Columbia University on Monday in response to a question about the recent execution of two gay men there.

"In Iran we do not have this phenomenon," he continued. "I do not know who has told you we have it."

Loud laughs and boos broke from the audience of about 700 people, mostly students at the Ivy League school whose garb included "Stop Ahmadinejad's Evil" T-shirts.

The President of Columbia made a great point too:

"It's extremely important to know who the leaders are of countries that are your adversaries. To watch them to see how they think, to see how they reason or do not reason. To see whether they're fanatical, or to see whether they are sly," he told ABC's Good Morning America.

The College Republicans and College Democrats both helped supply many of the questions, which weren't "tough" so much as frickin' merciless. The man was hectored by Bollinger and heckled, booed, and laughed at by the audience.

I honestly think Columbia did itself proud, and proved the critics wrong.

Quotes taken from here and here. Oh, and for an in-depth understanding of how Iran's government really works, and how it's stupid to call Ahmadinejad a dictator (he's not, he's a dictator's plaything), just read this.

Bret Stephens does something amazing: shoots his own argument down without even realizing it.

In the article, he says that the Columbia University of the 1930s, prior to World War II, would certainly never have allowed a madman like Adolph Hitler to come and give a speech and be grilled by faculty and students.... but then acknowledges, twice, that Columbia did in fact do exactly that with Hitler's frickin' ambassador, who prattled a bunch of nonsense about his country's peaceful intentions.

What, pray tell, is the difference? Especially, as has already been established (see "How to Treat A Bad Man" below) Ahmadinejad is not his country's dictator, is in fact a figurehead representing a dictator in much the same fashion that one of Hitler's ambassadors would be? Once again, the "President" of Iran holds no military power of substance and only limited political power; the man known as the Supreme Leader of Iran holds all the important power, including all military, security, and media control. If Iran were ever to, say, throw a nuclear bomb at Israel, it would be Ali Khamenei giving that order, not the pathetic Ahmadinejad.

Indeed, there's something ironic here, since "Fuhrer" is German for "leader." So it would be perfectly reasonable to translate "Supreme Leader" as "Supreme Fuhrer" or whatever German for "supreme" would be (Uber Fuhrer, perhaps?).

So, Ahmadinejad is not a dictator--someone else already has that job. He isn't the one setting Iran's military policies--that's the Fuhrer'sSupreme Leader's doing. So what is the difference between hosting Adolph Hitler's representative, and hosting Ali Khamenei's puppet-president? None that I can see.

Mr. Stephens can't have it both ways. Either Columbia was wrong in the 1930s, or they were right this week.