Posted on 09/25/2007 4:46:33 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
COLUMBIA University Presi dent Lee Bollinger yester day made some cutting crit icisms while introducing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - but that doesn't make the school's decision to offer a platform to the head of a violent terrorist state any less abject, squalid or shameless.
"Abject, squalid, shameless" is how Winston Churchill described the resolution passed by Oxford University's prestigious Debating Union in 1933 - the year Adolf Hitler came to power - that "this House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country."
And Columbia's event, like the 1933 Oxford resolution, sent (to quote Churchill again) a "very disquieting and disgusting message" to friends and enemies alike.
Many American's won't see that; their blindness goes to the heart of the "red-blue" divide in our country - much like the one in '30s Britain that split men like Churchill from the exponents of appeasing Europe's dictators.
On one side of that chasm, there is outrage and incomprehension that anyone could extend an invitation to a sworn enemy of the United States to speak on an American campus (a campus, moreover, that bans its own military's ROTC); that the head of the world's biggest sponsor of terrorism attacks be welcomed anywhere in the city that was 9/11's principal target; that a Holocaust-denier be welcomed to a university that has so many Jewish students and alumni.
On the other side, again, there is incomprehension that anyone should be offended. And that is the problem.
President Bollinger argues that a university is above all a forum for hearing conflicting views and opinions - as if Ahmadinejad were some controversial social theorist, not the leader of the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. In other words, this is a matter of "free speech."
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
As Hugh Hewitt said, “Bollinger got PUNKED”. What a DOOFUS, he couldn’t argue his way out of a paper bag.
Bollinger is being called a “Bush puppet” and a “zionist” by the Huffies this morning. The Left is not pleased with his introduction.
And to the clueless Columbia students, who really are in the bottom percentile of common sense, who said that Pres. Bolinger’s comments would be heard in Iran...the news reports this morning said that only the parts of the Iranian dictator’s speech that were applauded were shown in the Middle East. Really, how gullible can Columbia students, professors, and administrators be?
Again I ask..... WWIHD?
What would Ike as president of Columbia have done?
Invite Stalin?
They would have had King George on a podium giving Jefferson, Adams, Washington and the rest of our Founders a lecture.
The spineless left won't wake up from their pacifist-stupor until the shock of cold, Damascus steel, is laid upon their necks.
But when Christians or conservatives on campus attempt to speak their minds, suddenly it is all about having a right not to feel offended, hurt feelings and “hate”.
Lets face it - The Left is a bunch of filthy, spoiled little children who attempt to throw themselves into the gears of the public debate in order to get their personal gratification fix to fill their bottomless pit of egoism. There is no pretense of objectivity or rational discourse because all that is important to them is to be able to point to ANY event or issue and say to themselves, “see what we did!. We Are important! See!”
Only a spoiled, narcissistic little brat would attempt to publicly refuse to hear from a legitimate CITIZEN who has strong views (The minutemens Jim Gilchrist) while at the same time allow a sworn enemy of this country a platform to spread his poison. Whats important to them is to inflate their own self worth by engaging in acts contrary to the normally understandable and accepted public good while being sheltered under the protection of those “unenlightened little people” who actually do the heavy lifting of securing our borders and making things run. These are the actions of cowards and preening narcissists and should be treated as such.
I for one am no longer willing to treat such childish narcissists as deserving of any respect or to even listen to their specious, idiotic claims of higher noble purpose. They are nothing but spoiled cowards.
The bottom line is that Ahmadinejad embarrassed himself and hurt his own cause yesterday.
Well said. Very well said.
I think it was great that they invited the guy. What bothers me is the way that everybody has gone apesh*t over it. IMHO, a lot of these dictator-types live in an insulated little world where they their fantasies about America encounter nothing to set them straight. And likewise, we in America persists in believing that all these dictator-types are madmen who go around laughing insanely while plotting to take over the world. We both seem to have cartoonish views of the other.
What if Abracadabra or whatever his durn name is, had come to America and been treated politely, with courtesy? What if he had been permitted to go to Ground-zero, and lay a wreath, and pass in the process about a million New Yorkers lining the streets. What if the Columbia president had been polite and courteous in intorducing him, and the students thoughful and well-behaved?
Abracadabra would have had more reason to confront his own idiocy and his own evil, and the hatred that Iran helps loose on the world. We could have been the abyss that stared back at him.
Imagine Hitler coming to America in say 1937, and actually traveling the country and seeing what he was about to take on. I don’t think AH had a realistic clue of the size of our country and its power.
If anything, we should all get together and buy Abracadabra a plane ticket to Europe and let him visit some of the concentration camp sights.
parsy, the thoughtful and introspective
No, sadly, you're parsy the naive and foolish...
That is a very false incomprehension, IMHO. To a very great deal this sort of thing is deliberate - a sort of a bas les bourgeois that serves to differentiate the speaker from the middle class he or she despises and is very much a part of (and hates all the more for that). To offend is to say "I'm not like you." It is the refuge of the insecure.
The left assumes this neutral posture puts them in the middle and keeps them safe.
Well, safe from having to commit to one course or the other, that much is certain. Those who aspire to an ideal world are very often incapable of making the choice between two evils, which is one reason political theorists tend to make such poor practical politicians. To the left this sort of neutrality means a comfortable cloud from which everyone not in The Club may be safely sneered at for being insufficiently enlightened ideologically. The Oxford Debating Union's grand declaration of neutrality in 1933 was precisely such an attempt. Inasmuch as a fair percentage of those nay-voters did end up dying at Nazi hands during the succeeding war, that sort of detachment proved in the end to be illusory. Anyone but an academic or an intellectual would have learned from that experience.
How can they now defend him against the evil Bush, after he publicly disses gays?
Sad week for Moveon and Kos Kids.
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