So let me get this straight. An Ivy League university has issued
an invitation to a representative of a fascist government — one
that rules by thuggery and intimidation, one that kills homosexuals
and “loose” women, one that supports terrorism around the world.
Didn’t I hear this story last year about Yale and its admission of
a former
Taliban deputy minister? After a massive outcry not just from
concerned alumni, but from all sorts of outraged Americans, Yale
backed off and left Rahmatullah Hashemi to stew in Pakistan. Its
justification for doing so was less than honest; it claimed that
his rejection was merely due to a tightening of academic standards
in its non-traditional student program. But everyone knew what had
happened was that the alumni had demonstrated a sense of shame
about its decision that Yale’s administration was lacking.
Apparently Columbia lacks that sense of shame as well.
Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger is going to introduce Iran’s
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Monday night. Bollinger is attempting
to mitigate his ridiculous decision by claiming that he will
deliver a fierce tongue-lashing to Ahmadinejad before he introduces
him. I’m certain that the prospect of a dressing-down from an
American law professor has Runty the Terror Gnome quaking in his
bloodstained platform shoes. (Meanwhile Iran’s government shows its
high regard for American academics by kidnapping them at knifepoint and imprisoning
them, and releasing one just before he’s invited to speak. That’s
magnanimity.)
The curious thing is that President Bollinger didn’t need to
extend to Ahmadinejad the legitimacy of a soapbox at Columbia to
criticize the regime he leads. Bollinger is welcome to speak his
mind about the evils of Iran’s Revolutionary Government, and would
probably be given editorial space in any major newspaper to expound
exactly that view. I imagine someone in Iran would have made
Ahmadinejad aware of it.
Yale tried to hide the behind the noble savage argument,
pretending that its pet Talib needed to be educated in the wily
ways of the West. This was a dodge, of course — Hashemi was quite
smart and well-spoken, having risen through the ranks of the
Taliban by defending their loathsome oppression to gullible Western
audiences. He wasn’t dumb; he was evil, and it makes Yale’s little
gambit of disqualifying him on academic grounds doubly
outrageous.
Columbia cannot even offer this flawed defense. Ahmadinejad is
no young whelp in need of a bit of Ivy-League housetraining, but a
full-grown wolf. And he is coming to Columbia not to be educated,
but to educate all of us. Again, as with President Bollinger, this
man does not lack for a soapbox for his noxious views — he only
lacks one as prestigious as Columbia’s. Through the magic of the
Internet, one can read his ceaseless harangues against the West and
the Zionists in the state-controlled Iranian press translated into
English. (One can also see the greatest hits of Iranian state TV
subtitled at MEMRI — I particularly recommend this
one, in which Ahmadinejad explains how international goodwill,
of the sort he hopes to generate tonight, will keep Iran safe from
confrontation.)
The invitation to Ahmadinejad isn’t about giving a voice to the
voiceless, and it’s not about educating Ahmadinejad. It’s about a
mystical belief in the power of the academy to bring peace upon the
earth. Just as Yale thought it could tame the Taliban’s mouthpiece
and make him good, Columbia believes that by granting Ahmadinejad
access to its prestigious forum, something magical will happen as
he is exposed to the glowing truth of liberal values that emanate
from its gentle hearts, and his own hidden goodness will shine
forth, and we will all understand each other, beat our centrifuges
into tamborines, and lead a global chorus of “We Are the
World.”
As valuable as rigorous scholarship may be in understanding the
world, it has its limitations. The fact is, exposure to education
doesn’t necessarily make people more virtuous or more peaceful. The
most enlightened among us can also be the most vicious and the most
brutal. As art critic Robert Hughes wrote of another “Wolf” in
The Culture of Complaint:
Nobody has ever denied that Sigismondo da Malatesta,
the Lord of Rimini, had excellent taste. He hired the most refined
of quattrocento architects, Leon Battista Alberti, to design a
memorial temple to his wife, and then got the sculptor Agostino di
Duccio to decorate it, and retained Piero della Francesca to paint
it. Yet Sigismondo was a man of such callousness and rapacity that
he was known in life as Il Lupo, The Wolf, and so execrated after
his death that the Catholic Church made him (for a time) the only
man apart from Judas Iscariot officially listed as being in Hell —
a distinction he earned by trussing up a Papal emissary, the
fifteen-year-old Bishop of Fano, in his own rochet and publicly
sodomizing him before his applauding army in the main square of
Rimini.
Even Hitler had artistic pretensions, and as it turns out,
Columbia’s dean now
admits the university would have invited him too
— as long as he took questions from the audience. Apparently a
surfeit of education hasn’t done much for the moral discernment of
Columbia’s leadership, either.
