Former Mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, expresses my views exactly:
All in all, it was a fiasco for America and a blunder by Mr. Bollinger, as well as a coup for Mr. Ahmadinejad. His goal was not to respond to Mr. Bollinger, the Columbia students, or Americans seeing him on television. His goal was to talk over their heads to the Islamic world and its terrorists and show how he bearded the Columbia lion in its own den.
President Bollinger, as an encore, why not invite Hugo Chavez? I think he'd come. You could provide him with a platform to enhance his reputation.
Hugh Hewitt comments on Bollinger's "Fantasy World":
Even a cursory examination of The Looming Tower or Inside The Jihad or any of many other serious books on the Islamist war against the West dwells on the crucial role of propaganda in pushing the extremist message, both Salafist and Shia versions. Today's fiasco
has nothing to do with what Bollinger said, a name little known or long remembered anywhere outside of the upper West Side. It is about the platform Columbia provided this thug who is actively engaged in the killing of American soldiers and Marines while plotting the extermination of Israel..
The absurd world of the academic left does not seem capable of imagining that skilled propagandists are at work for the other side, and that Ahmadinejad's non-answers to the questions posed to him will benefit him and his regime. They are naive beyond expression.
John Podhoretz on Chancellor Bollinger's uncivil, insulting speech before Ahmadinajad's speech:
He called his guest "astonishingly uneducated," denounced his "absurd remarks," called him the possessor of a "fanatical mindset," and concluded by saying he felt "all the weight of the modern civilized word yearning to express the revulsion at all you stand for."All this is true. It's also a good reason not to extend the invitation in the first place, or to retract it once it has been foolishly extended. To invite someone to your institution and subject him to a brutal scolding by way of introduction is, when you think about it, more than a little weird. There's a little whiff of Ugly Americanism surrounding it.
David French made a depressing observation on what moved American students in Amadinejad's speech.
Isn’t it a strange sign of the times that the crowd seemed united in derision not when Bollinger described Iran’s support for terrorism, its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, its supply of weapons that are killing American soldiers, or Ahmadinajad’s denial of the Holocaust, but when he denied there were any “homosexuals” in Iran. It seems that sexual identity politics trumps all.
** Other commentaries of interest on Ahmadinejad's visit to the US:
What's Really Behind Ahmadinejad's Speech to the UN? Wm. F. Buckley's 1962 Speech Arguing Why Yale Should Disinvite Communist Leader Gus Hall to Speak - Advice Chancellor Bollinger should have followed and why... Iranian University Chancellors Ask Dr. Bollinger 10 Questions
Michael Rubin on the Question of Apologies:
'Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is demanding that, after Lee Bollinger's introduction at Columbia, the "American people express remorse for their disrespect toward the Iranian president."
The Iranian government has demanded U.S. authorities apologize for any number of slights, real or imagined. The most ironic was former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's apology for U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup. The irony is that most Iranian religious authorities including future leaders of the Islamic Republic opposed Musaddiq as fiercely as did the Eisenhower administration both because of the Iranian premier's populist opposition to their conservatism as well as his flirtation with the communist Tudeh party.
It is ironic that, as apologies go, we bend over backwards to concede, but the Iranian regime has yet to apologize for seizing the U.S. embassy; holding U.S. diplomats hostage; assisting terrorists who blew up the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut during a peacekeeping operation; facilitating the kidnappings of and participating in the subsequent interrogations of U.S. civilians in Beirut; financing terrorists who killed American civilians in the Middle East; training and coordinating the 1996 Khobar Towers attack; providing 9-11 hijackers with safe-transit across Iran; and murdering U.S. servicemen in Iraq.
No matter how desperate Condoleezza Rice is to shake hand with her Iranian counterpart as a sort of "Hail Mary" pass to salvage her legacy, hopefully she'll prioritize U.S. strategic interests and offer no more concessions. The Iranian regime will spin any apology into a further victory and a refutation of every valid point Bollinger raised, no matter how impolitely he raised them. Rice has already conceded enough to Iran without a single thing to show for it. Let Columbia's alumni, and not U.S. diplomats, decide how to clean up Bollinger's mess.