With regards to the current back and forth about giving Iranian President Ahmadinejad a platform at Columbia University and elsewhere during his visit to the United States, it seems to me that we are never badly served by allowing speech, however abhorrent. Free speech doesn't mean we have to give this nutjob a podium, but (1) he's a world figure and already has a pretty huge podium whenever he wants to spew his nonsense, and (2) forbidding him to speak (or visit Ground Zero) makes us look like the bad guys. If we really believe in the free exchange of ideas and opinions, we need to live up to it.
Ahmadinejad is clearly crazy and despotic. Exposing his lunacy for all to see doesn't hurt us. Acting like we're the moral police and suggesting we'll shut down anyone we disagree with does hurt us.
3 comments:
I agree with you but I don't really see why Columbia invited him in the first place. I mean, he was going to be speaking at the UN anyway. And, frankly, I think Columbia and most of these academic institutions are completely hypocritical on the issue of free speech. If Columbia had invited a controversial speaker on the right, all the liberals would have been going bananas, like Stanford is about Rumsfeld. I'm all for free speech, but it has to be the same for both sides. (Now you are going to mock me for being a "conservative.")
If the point was, as it seemed to be, to confront him on the Holocaust and Israel, that was pointless because he has already made his positions clear. He obviously wasn't going to back off of them and say, oh you are right. There were other points that would have been more relevant and I don't know if they were discussed. However, once they invited him, it was incumbent upon them to let him speak and not try to control the agenda. To me, the president of Columbia made a fool of himself by attacking Ahmadinejad before he even had a chance to speak (apparently to compensate for having invited him in the first place) and, then, by trying to engage If you were going to invite him in the first place, then let him speak and, then ask questions. If the only point was to call him names, why bother? It's not as if the things he said were a big surprise. As it was, he can claim he was speaking in a hostile environment--which he was. It reminded me of the time before the invasion when Sean Hannity invited some antiwar protesters on the show and then tried to force them to say what he wanted them to say.
At the same time, I do think that having him speak made him look worse. I think a lot of Iranians look at him with some embarrassment, much as we do Bush. And I agree with you that they should have let him go to Ground Zero. First, no one is claiming that Iran was behind the attacks, and, second, what was he going to do, start dancing on the site?
I find myself a bit surprised at where I come down on this issue. I'm an enormous liberal (seriously, I have a bit a weight issue), and a big fan of free speech. But didn't this guy say one of his main goals was destroying the US? Fuck him. He can't come to our house.
Ahtitan,
Since the United Nations is headquarted in the US, it's a bit difficult to keep him out.
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