He Hardly Sounds Like a Fan

I wanted to make one final point regarding the criticism Columbia University and its President, Lee Bollinger, have received for extending an invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at the institution's World Leaders Forum. To do so, I decided to provide a short list of excerpts from Bollinger's introduction of Ahmadinejad:

• "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."
• "Mr. President. you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator."
• "Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change?"
• "In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as a 'fabricated legend'. One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers. For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated."
• "Why do you support well documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and civil society in the region?"
• "Why have you chosen to make the people of your country vulnerable to the effects of international economic sanctions and threaten to engulf the world with nuclear annihilation?"
• "Frankly, and in all candor, Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. But your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do."
• "I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for."