Cause and Effect World

America and Ahmadinejad

I love this writeup in the Bangor Daily News of Mahmoud Agmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University.  Callling it a “bizarre hawg wrassle“, Kent Ward describes the proceedings as follows:

“Future masters of ceremonies will surely be hard-pressed to top Columbia president Lee Bollinger’s memorable introduction of Iran’s loose-cannon president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.”

It was a great line, albeit one that might reasonably have been mistaken as having been crafted for delivery at one of those insipid celebrity roasts that once were all the rage with The Beautiful People. Egghead educator trashes foreign despot, all proceeds to go to despot’s favorite charity.

A celebrity was getting roasted, all right. But this was the real deal. None of that smarmy kiss-and-makeup stuff afterward to mitigate any offense that may have been accidentally rendered.

Ahmadinejad’s kooky denial of the Holocaust might fool the illiterate and ignorant, but certainly not any rational person, Bollinger lectured. “When you come to a place like this, it makes you simply ridiculous … you are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated,” he told the hard-line Iranian leader, apparently following some new guideline that counsels if you can’t say something bad about a person you are welcoming, you should say nothing at all. [too funny!]

And then he relinquished the microphone to his guest. Your move, Mahmoud, old chap. Good luck. And do remember to acknowledge your gracious host’s kind introduction in your opening remarks.”

Now, Kent disagrees with me about whether Ahmadinajad should have been invited to speak.  I was glad he was invited.  I see it this way; if you’re on the verge of a major disagreement with someone that has potentially lethal consequences, and you suspect that person is funding and fomenting violence against your troops, don’t you want to meet him?  Don’t you want to see how he stands, moves, operates?  Don’t you want to see how he stands up to pressure?

I do.  I would have liked to have seen Ahmadinajad speak at Columbia.

I just wish that Americans would get savvy about these events and use them to our advantage.  See, they aren’t just  for us.  I wish there had been signs in Farsi with messages from the American people to the Iranian people - messages saying ‘we are like you, we want to get along, we just don’t like your government’.  And, ‘thanks for the candle-light vigils you held in sympathy with us after 9-11.  It meant a lot’.