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columbia's controversy

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John Coatsworth, Columbia University: inviteremmo persino Hitler. Se accettasse il confronto

Columbia Would Welcome Hitler, a Dean Insists

The New York Sun, 23 settembre 2007

The next round of controversy at Columbia will involve remarks of a dean who says that Hitler would have been welcome on Morningside Heights if he would take questions from students.

The dean, John Coatsworth, heads the same institution that will serve as Columbia's host for President Ahmadinejad. The decision of Columbia to honor the Iranian anti-Semite and terror master with a speaking platform has drawn outrage among political leaders in the city, including the speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn.

"If Hitler were in the United States and wanted a platform from which to speak, he would have plenty of platforms to speak in the United States," Mr. Coatsworth said in an interview with Fox News that was linked last evening by the Drudge Report. "If he were willing to engage in debate and a discussion to be challenged by Columbia students and faculty, we would certainly invite him."

A former professor of history at Harvard, Mr. Coatsworth is dean of the university's School of International and Public Affairs, whose graduates, according to a statement Mr. Coatsworth issued last week, "serve as diplomats, intelligence analysts, security experts, business leaders, human rights activists," and leaders of non-governmental organizations.

Columbia acknowledged last week that the visit to the university of Mr. Ahmadinejad was initiated not by the university but by the Iranian envoy to the United Nations through a faculty member, Richard Bulliet. Mr. Bulliet is described in Wikipedia as having been criticized for, among other things, "his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as overly favoring the Palestinian cause" and also for offering "qualified support" for the revolution that brought the mullahs to power in Iran in 1979.

Lee C. Bollinger (Columbia University): Statement About President Ahmadinejad's Scheduled Appearance

Columbia News, 19 settembre 2007

On Monday, September 24, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is scheduled to appear as a speaker on campus. The event is sponsored by the School of International and Public Affairs (see SIPA announcement), which has been in contact with the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. The event will be part of the annual World Leaders Forum, the University-wide initiative intended to further Columbia’s longstanding tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate, especially on global issues.

In order to have such a University-wide forum, we have insisted that a number of conditions be met, first and foremost that President Ahmadinejad agree to divide his time evenly between delivering remarks and responding to audience questions. I also wanted to be sure the Iranians understood that I would myself introduce the event with a series of sharp challenges to the president on issues including:

* the Iranian president’s denial of the Holocaust;
* his public call for the destruction of the State of Israel;
* his reported support for international terrorism that targets innocent civilians and American troops;
* Iran's pursuit of nuclear ambitions in opposition to international sanction;
* his government's widely documented suppression of civil society and particularly of women's rights; and
* his government's imprisoning of journalists and scholars, including one of Columbia’s own alumni, Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh (see President Bollinger's statement on Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh's release).

I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas—to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason.

I would also like to invoke a major theme in the development of freedom of speech as a central value in our society. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

That such a forum could not take place on a university campus in Iran today sharpens the point of what we do here. To commit oneself to a life—and a civil society—prepared to examine critically all ideas arises from a deep faith in the myriad benefits of a long-term process of meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs and hateful words with wiser words. That faith in freedom has always been and remains today our nation’s most potent weapon against repressive regimes everywhere in the world. This is America at its best.

Roger Kimball: Columbia & the Poverty of Liberalism

arnavirumque, 23 settembre 2007

The English essayist Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) is not much read these days, I think, and more's the pity. Bagehot (his name, by the way, is pronounced "badge-it") was a delicious writer, commanding a manly, outdoor style, a quiet but infectious sense of humor, and a sensibility that was at once large and admonitory. Of course, those very qualities help explain why he is out of favor today: a manly style? That unpleasant squealing you hear is from nearby feminists powering up their whine-machines. Bagehot would not have been at home in early 21st-century America. Today we prefer our writers soft, exculpatory, self-righteous but nevertheless wrapped in the rhetoric of non-judgmentalism.

Bagehot's prose is the opposite: sinewy, forthright, focused outward toward the world. His mind ranged nimbly over history, economics, literature, politics, and what we would today call cultural criticism. His collected works run to some 15 stout volumes. His legacy, alas, where it exists at all, has been whittled down to a single bit of advice (though it's damn good advice) about dealing with the English monarchy, to wit, that "we must not let in daylight upon mystery." Tell that to Princess Diana!

Among Bagehot's many neglected works is the unfortunately titled Physics and Politics. It's unfortunate because misleading: the book has nothing to do with "physics" as we understand the term. The long subtitle goes some distance in setting things straight: "Or: Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of 'Natural Selection' and 'Inheritance' to Political Society." Bagehot published the book in 1872, at a time when Darwin's ideas about evolution were percolating for the first time through educated opinion. Back then, it still seemed novel to apply Darwin's engine of biological change to the issue of social and political development. Bagehot did it with a light and illuminating touch. (I heartily recommend the book, and not only because I edited a recent edition of this neglected minor masterpiece.)

All of this is rather a long way to my point, which is the connection between an observation Bagehot makes in the course of Physics and Politics and the rationale offered by Columbia University officials for inviting the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at the university on September 24.

Here's Bagehot from Chapter 2 of Physics and Politics, "The Use of Conflict":

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.

"A little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness," all of which, says Bagehot, prepares a nation for "destruction" at the first opportunity. Keep that in mind as you contemplate these words of Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University. Explaining that he intends to confront President Ahmadinejad with some "sharp challenges" (e.g., why does he deny the Holocaust? Why has he publicly called for the destruction of Israel?), President Bollinger goes on to deliver this little aria about free speech and "the powers of dialogue and reason."

I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas--to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most, or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason.

I would also like to invoke a major theme in the development of freedom of speech as a central value in our society. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

That such a forum could not take place on a university campus in Iran today sharpens the point of what we do here. To commit oneself to a life--and a civil society--prepared to examine critically all ideas arises from a deep faith in the myriad benefits of a long-term process of meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs and hateful words with wiser words. That faith in freedom has always been and remains today our nation's most potent weapon against repressive regimes everywhere in the world. This is America at its best.

What can one say? That President Bollinger traduces the idea of "a community dedicated to learning and scholarship"? Yes. That he elides the notion of free speech and the more limited privilege of academic freedom? Yes again. That his incontinent demand that his university provide a forum for all ideas, no matter how toxic, erodes freedom by making it vulnerable to fanaticism? A third time Yes. Powerline's Scott Johnson got it exactly right when, reflecting on this pathetic congeries of liberal cliches, he wrote that

Columbia and President Bollinger are a disgrace. They welcome to their campus a man who is a ringleader in the seizure of American hostages, a terrorist, the president of a terrorist regime, and the representative of a regime responsible at present for the deaths of American soldiers on the field of battle. Columbia's prattle about free speech may be a tale told by an idiot, but it signifies something. And President Bollinger is a fool who is not excused from the dishonor he brings to his institution and his fellow citizens by the fact that he doesn't know what he is doing.

Amen. And it is worth stepping back to ask ourselves why Scott is right and President Bollinger is wrong. Here are some of the reasons: Universities are institutions dedicated to the pursuit and transmission of learning and the furtherance of civilization. They are not circuses for the exhibition of politically repugnant grandstanding. Free inquiry is not a license for moral irresponsibility. At a university, as at every other human institution, freedom can thrive only when it is limited by allegiance to certain positive values--the value of historical truth, for example, or the moral truth that human dignity is worth preserving.

President Bollinger's sophomoric conception of free speech is precisely the sort of supine intellectualism that, if consistently embraced, would make free speech impossible. President Bollinger primly lectures us that "It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas," etc. But he is quite wrong about that. By providing a madman like Ahmadinejad with a platform at Columbia University, President Bollinger has in effect welcomed him into the community of candid reasoners. He has granted him a patent of legitimacy that no amount of "dialogue and reason" can dissipate. In this case, "listening" is indeed tantamount to an endorsement. It reduces free speech to a species of political capitulation and renders dialogue indistinguishable from a suicide pact.

Where, if anywhere, would President Bollinger and his colleagues draw the line? The Regents of the University of California just rescinded an offer to Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, because his presence on campus was offensive to the delicate sensibilities of feminists. (I had more to say about the original Summers debacle here.) So we know where the Regents of the University of California are wont to draw their line. It excludes a former President of Harvard. Meanwhile, at Stanford, there is an uproar about offering former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a fellowship at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. So we know where Stanford would draw the line: in the name of "tolerance" it would exclude a lifelong public servant who was twice Secretary of Defense of the United States.

And Columbia? Would they welcome Larry Summers or Donald Rumsfeld? I wonder. But a man who was likely involved in the 1979 Iranian Hostage crisis, and who was therefore directly implicated in fueling the growth of murderous Islamic fanaticism that has cost the world so dearly these last few decades, the man who has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel and whose government is directly supporting the murder of American servicemen in Iraq--the man representing those possibly "offensive" ideas is just fine.

It would be interesting to know where Columbia would draw the line. In a breathtaking interview on Fox News, Columbia Dean John Coatsworth cheerfully affirmed that, were Adolf Hitler in New York and willing to engage in "discussion" and "debate," Columbia "would certainly invite him." Who would doubt it?

The spectacle of these left-wing academics repudiating men like Larry Summers and Donald Rumsfeld even as they abase themselves scrambling to find excuses for welcoming a fanatic like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the halls of a great American University is disgusting. I think again of Bagehot's observation that "History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it." Are we really willing to let ourselves--our ideals, our way of life--be carelessly traduced by a rancid leftism so enfeebled that it can no longer distinguish between free speech and suicide? We are even now in the process of answering that question. How we answer it will determine a lot more than the issue of who gets to speak on American college campuses.

Roger Kimball is co-Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books.

William Kristol: Boycott Ahmadinejad

Weekly Standard, 21 settembre 2007

A COLUMBIA STUDENT asked how he could effectively protest his university's invitation to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak Monday. My first response was to suggest petitions, e-mails to President Bollinger and the university trustees, letters to the student paper, peaceful protest, and the like. All these are fine. But then I had a second thought. There might be one form of protest that would be effective both in showing appropriate disgust for the Iranian regime, and in shaming the Columbia administration: A total student boycott of Ahmadinejad's speech. Let the Iranian president (and the Columbia president) look out on, and speak to, a sea of empty seats on Monday.

The rationale for a student boycott is simple: The Iranian government is directly involved in killing and wounding American soldiers in Iraq. As a gesture of elementary solidarity with those serving our nation in the military--young men and women, many of them their exact contemporaries--Columbia students should refuse to dignify Ahmadinejad's talk by attending it. Needless to say, Columbia faculty and administrators shouldn't attend either. Some of them will. But this is a chance for the 9/11 generation to show a decency and a sense of honor that some of their elders lack. After all, this is not primarily about Ahmadinejad. Dealing with his regime is mostly a task for our government. This is about us. Columbia students have a chance to shame their elders, redeem the good name of their institution, and make many Americans proud. I urge them to take
it.

Gabriel Schoenfeld: Hitler at Columbia

Commentarymagazine.com, 24 settembre 2007

How many American soldiers perished because the bomb built by Georg Elser to kill Adolf Hitler in a beer hall in Munich in November 1939 failed to go off on time and the dictator lived to prosecute the war he had launched two months earlier?

The number is known to precision: 292,131, including 31,215 from the state of New York, where Columbia University is located. The total number of casualties in that war–U.S. and foreign, Axis and Allied, military and civilian alike–is considerably higher: perhaps as many as 72 million.

As I noted recently in the Weekly Standard, Elser, who was apprehended by the German border police, handed over to the Gestapo, and subsequently executed, explained his action this way: “I wanted through my deed to prevent even greater bloodshed.”

John Coatsworth, the dean who invited the nuclear-bomb-seeking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia today, would have had a different approach. As he told Fox News on Saturday, he would have extended an invitation to Hitler: “If he were willing to engage in a debate and a discussion, to be challenged by Columbia students and faculty, we would certainly invite him.”

Coatsworth’s name will not make it into the standard histories as Elser’s has. But it deserves to be recorded for posterity. The university’s invitation to the genocidal aspirant Ahmadinejad is repugnant on many grounds. The outrage committed by Dean Coatsworth upon the dead of World War II–and, along the way, upon the memory of Georg Elser, who readily sacrificed his own life for the peace of the world–staggers the imagination.

Juan Cole: Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 1

Salon.com, 24 settembre 2007

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited.

The media has focused on debating whether he should be allowed to speak at Columbia University on Monday, or whether his request to visit Ground Zero, the site of the Sept. 11 attack in lower Manhattan, should have been honored. His request was rejected, even though Iran expressed sympathy with the United States in the aftermath of those attacks and Iranians held candlelight vigils for the victims. Iran felt that it and other Shiite populations had also suffered at the hands of al-Qaida, and that there might now be an opportunity for a new opening to the United States.

Instead, the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself little more than a terrorist. Critics have also cited his statements about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse. He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran's 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament.

There is, in fact, remarkably little substance to the debates now raging in the United States about Ahmadinejad. His quirky personality, penchant for outrageous one-liners, and combative populism are hardly serious concerns for foreign policy. Taking potshots at a bantam cock of a populist like Ahmadinejad is actually a way of expressing another, deeper anxiety: fear of Iran's rising position as a regional power and its challenge to the American and Israeli status quo. The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state.

The neoconservatives are even claiming that the United States has been at war with Iran since 1979. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this assertion is absurd. In the '80s, the Reagan administration sold substantial numbers of arms to Iran. Some of those beating the war drums most loudly now, like think-tank rat Michael Ledeen, were middlemen in the Reagan administration's unconstitutional weapons sales to Tehran. The sales would have been a form of treason if in fact the United States had been at war with Iran at that time, so Ledeen is apparently accusing himself of treason.

But the right has decided it is at war with Iran, so a routine visit by Iran's ceremonial president to the U.N. General Assembly has generated sparks. The foremost cheerleader for such a view in Congress is Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., who recently pressed Gen. David Petraeus on the desirability of bombing Iran in order to forestall weapons smuggling into Iraq from that country (thus cleverly using one war of choice to foment another).

American hawks are beating the war drums loudly because they are increasingly frustrated with the course of events. They are unsatisfied with the lack of enthusiasm among the Europeans and at the United Nations for impeding Tehran's nuclear energy research program. While the Bush administration insists that the program aims at producing a bomb, the Iranian state maintains that it is for peaceful energy purposes. Washington wants tighter sanctions on Iran at the United Nations but is unlikely to get them in the short term because of Russian and Chinese reluctance. The Bush administration may attempt to create a "coalition of the willing" of Iran boycotters outside the U.N. framework.

Washington is also unhappy with Mohammad ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has been unable to find credible evidence that Iran has a weapons program, and he told Italian television this week, "Iran does not constitute a certain and immediate threat for the international community." He stressed that no evidence had been found for underground production sites or hidden radioactive substances, and he urged a three-month waiting period before the U.N. Security Council drew negative conclusions.

ElBaradei intervened to call for calm after French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said last week that if the negotiations over Iran's nuclear research program were unsuccessful, it could lead to war. Kouchner later clarified that he was not calling for an attack on Iran, but his remarks appear to have been taken seriously in Tehran.

Kouchner made the remarks after there had already been substantial speculation in the U.S. press that impatient hawks around U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney were seeking a pretext for a U.S. attack on Iran. Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation probably correctly concluded in Salon last week that President Bush himself has for now decided against launching a war on Iran. But Clemons worries that Cheney and the neoconservatives, with their Israeli allies, are perfectly capable of setting up a provocation that would lead willy-nilly to war.

David Wurmser, until recently a key Cheney advisor on Middle East affairs and the coauthor of the infamous 1996 white paper that urged an Iraq war, revealed to his circle that Cheney had contemplated having Israel strike at Iranian nuclear research facilities and then using the Iranian reaction as a pretext for a U.S. war on that country. Prominent and well-connected Afghanistan specialist Barnett Rubin also revealed that he was told by an administration insider that there would be an "Iran war rollout" by the Cheneyites this fall.

It should also be stressed that some elements in the U.S. officer corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency are clearly spoiling for a fight with Iran because the Iranian-supported Shiite nationalists in Iraq are a major obstacle to U.S. dominance in Iraq. Although very few U.S. troops in Iraq are killed by Shiites, military spokesmen have been attempting to give the impression that Tehran is ordering hits on U.S. troops, a clear casus belli. Disinformation campaigns that accuse Iran of trying to destabilize the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government -- a government Iran actually supports -- could lay the groundwork for a war. Likewise, with the U.S. military now beginning patrols on the Iran-Iraq border, the possibility is enhanced of a hostile incident spinning out of control.

The Iranians have responded to all this bellicosity with some chest-thumping of their own, right up to the final hours before Ahmadinejad's American visit. The Iranian government declared "National Defense Week" on Saturday, kicking it off with a big military parade that showed off Iran's new Qadr-1 missiles, with a range of 1,100 miles. Before he left Iran for New York on Sunday morning, Ahmadinejad inspected three types of Iranian-manufactured jet fighters, noting that it was the anniversary of Iraq's invasion of Iran in 1980 (which the Iranian press attributed to American urging, though that is unlikely).

The display of this military equipment was accompanied by a raft of assurances on the part of the Iranian ayatollahs, politicians and generals that they were entirely prepared to deploy the missiles and planes if they were attacked. A top military advisor to Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei told the Mehr News Agency on Saturday, "Today, the United States must know that their 200,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are within the reach of Iran's fire. When the Americans were beyond our shores, they were not within our reach, but today it is very easy for us to deal them blows." Khamenei, the actual commander in chief of the armed forces, weighed in as well, reiterating that Iran would never attack first but pledging: "Those who make threats should know that attack on Iran in the form of hit and run will not be possible, and if any country invades Iran it will face its very serious consequences."

The threat to target U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the unveiling of the Qadr-1 were not aggressive in intent, but designed to make the point that Iran could also play by Richard M. Nixon's "madman" strategy, whereby you act so wildly as to convince your enemy you are capable of anything. Ordinarily a poor non-nuclear third-world country might be expected to be supine before an attack by a superpower. But as Mohammad Reza Bahonar, the Iranian deputy speaker of Parliament, warned: "Any military attack against Iran will send the region up in flames."

In the end, this is hardly the kind of conflagration the United States should be enabling. If a spark catches, it will not advance any of America's four interests in the Middle East: petroleum, markets, Israel and hegemony.

The Middle East has two-thirds of the world's proven petroleum reserves and nearly half its natural gas, and its fields are much deeper than elsewhere in the world, so that its importance will grow for the United States and its allies. Petro-dollars and other wealth make the region an important market for U.S. industry, especially the arms industry. Israel is important both for reasons of domestic politics and because it is a proxy for U.S. power in the region. By "hegemony," I mean the desire of Washington to dominate political and economic outcomes in the region and to forestall rivals such as China from making it their sphere of influence.

The Iranian government (in which Ahmadinejad has a weak role, analogous to that of U.S. vice presidents before Dick Cheney) poses a challenge to the U.S. program in the Middle East. Iran is, unlike most Middle Eastern countries, large. It is geographically four times the size of France, and it has a population of 70 million (more than France or the United Kingdom). As an oil state, it has done very well from the high petroleum prices of recent years. It has been negotiating long-term energy deals with China and India, much to the dismay of Washington. It provides financial support to the Palestinians and to the Lebanese Shiites who vote for the Hezbollah Party in Lebanon. By overthrowing the Afghanistan and Iraq governments and throwing both countries into chaos, the United States has inadvertently enabled Iran to emerge as a potential regional power, which could challenge Israel and Saudi Arabia and project both soft and hard power in the strategic Persian Gulf and the Levant.

And now the American war party, undeterred by the quagmire in Iraq, convinced that their model of New Empire is working, is eager to go on the offensive again. They may yet find a pretext to plunge the United States into another war. Ahmadinejad's visit to New York this year will not include his visit to Ground Zero, because that is hallowed ground for American patriotism and he is being depicted as not just a critic of the United States but as the leader of an enemy state. His visit may, however, be ground zero for the next big military struggle of the United States in the Middle East, one that really will make Iraq look like a cakewalk.

A debate

USA Today, 24 settembre 2007

Our view on Ahmadinejad in New York: Let Iranian president speak — to showcase U.S. values

Lots of people, ranging from the speaker of the New York City Council to the head of the Anti-Defamation League, don't want to let Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talk today at Columbia University. They see it as a chance for Ahmadinejad to spew his odious anti-American, anti-Semitic views.

That it is. But the Columbia invitation represents an opportunity of another, more important sort. The public display of Ahmadinejad getting to taste two fundamental pillars of democracy — free speech and the right to protest — should speak volumes about what the United States stands for, and what he and Iran don't.

That message can be particularly powerful for Iranians who have access to the Internet and sources beyond their propagandistic state TV. In Iran, Ahmadinejad has helped orchestrate a ferocious crackdown on dissent focused on labor leaders, universities, the press, women's rights advocates and Iranian-Americans. The contrast with how the United States treats critics hopefully won't be lost on the Iranian people.

Columbia intends its forum to be a robust debate, a notch up from the straight speech Ahmadinejad is to deliver Tuesday at the annual United Nations General Assembly (the reason he is in New York). At Columbia, the Iranian president will have to answer questions. He will also run a gauntlet of protesters decrying his outrageous views, including his denial of the Holocaust, his call for Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth, his country's development of nuclear weapons and its sponsorship of terrorism.

In all likelihood, this hostility will wash over Ahmadinejad like water off a duck's back. His denial of reality is pathological. He's also a skilled debater and may run rhetorical rings around his questioners. No matter. The most important message is in the event itself: that America continues to uphold freedoms it was founded on and has the strength to withstand its enemies' barbs.

That being said, New York authorities are under no obligation to accommodate Ahmadinejad's desire for offensive public relations stunts. They properly drew a line at his request for a photo-op visit to Ground Zero, which is closed to visitors because of construction at the site. Iran was not behind the 9/11 attacks. Nonetheless, Ahmadinejad's government supports terrorism and supports anti-America fighters in Iraq. He is not welcome to spin a twisted story line at the hallowed ground where almost 3,000 lost their lives.

A long line of dictators has used the U.N.'s annual meeting to behave distastefully. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev even brandished his shoe in 1960 in a fit of anger. In 1975, Uganda's Idi Amin called for the United States to "rid their society of Zionists." Just last year, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez referred to President Bush as "the devil."

Allowing these dictators to vent — and now going one further with the Columbia appearance — can make them look foolish in the eyes of world opinion. It also strengthens the case when the United States argues for letting American officials express their views to people in closed societies, like the one Ahmadinejad leads.

Opposing view: A perversion of free speech
Abraham H. Foxman

All the reasons given to provide a platform at Columbia University to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just don't hold up and don't even begin to compare with the damage done by giving legitimacy to a dangerous and evil figure.

Of course, the first defense of the invitation is free speech. The idea that free speech obligates a university to host a program where the speaker, a head of state, is one who denies the Holocaust, calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, supports international terrorism and seeks to acquire nuclear weapons is a perversion of that doctrine.

Columbia University has no moral, legal or social imperative to provide such a platform. As president of Iran, Ahmadinejad has many platforms to convey his messages of hate every day. For Columbia, the issue is not one of free speech at all but how proper it is to have Ahmadinejad as a speaker.

Second is the argument that a university's role is to provide information and perspectives for its students. But an individual who wantonly concocts the past — not only does Ahmadinejad deny the Holocaust but he also invited Holocaust deniers to Tehran for a conference to give "scholarly" legitimacy to the concept — is clearly not one from whom any learning can take place.

Third, the notion conveyed by Columbia President Lee Bollinger that this is an opportunity to challenge Ahmadinejad on a host of controversial subjects is naive. Anyone who thinks this will be a productive exercise, either to further expose the hatred of the Iranian president or to get him to alter his views, is engaged in wishful thinking. His public statements and media interviews, such as on 60 Minutes, make clear that he is a master at avoiding the question or turning it on the questioner.

In the final analysis, there is only one relevant point about whether he should have been invited: the great need in the world today is to make a moral statement to isolate this individual, not give him legitimacy. His ideology of hatred and Iran's building of a nuclear weapon to implement that ideology are the greatest threats to civilization as we know it. Columbia should have taken a stand that some ideas are simply not acceptable.

Abraham H. Foxman is national director of the Anti-Defamation League and author of The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control

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