Dear Editor:
Angelique Carson is exactly right that “USM should follow Columbia’s example” in providing a free speech forum for Iran President Ahmadinejad’s appearance (“The real meaning of academic Freedom, Oct. l”).
But from the perspective of a career in academe and close attention to Washington’s and the U.S. media’s heavy spin of the words of perceived enemies, may I offer another read on the occasion itself?
Notwithstanding that Columbia President Lee Bollinger was under great pressure to rescind Columbia’s invitation, his boorish introduction was uniquely and embarrassingly inhospitable-nothing for Columbia students to be proud of: if you invite someone, you let your guest speak and then go after him or her in the question/ comment period-or you add someone to the program to rebut the speaker. Bollinger also ignorantly repeated skewed characterizations of previous Ahmadinejad statements.
Second, while Ahmadinejad was caught up in his absurd claim that Iran had no homosexual problem (which could possibly have meant that no homosexual dares come out in Iran so there is no problem of gay rights), the applauding audience when he was done had no doubt appreciated, as the mass media unanimously failed to note, that his assessment of Washington’s bloody imperialism in the Middle East and elsewhere was quite accurate. Far more polite than Bollinger, Ahmadinejad did not mention the U.S. as the villain of which he spoke.
And in what may have been a U.S. mass media first, Ahmadinejad observed-apropos Israel’s 60-year denial of Palestinian human rights, which everyone (save Washington and the U.S. media) condemns as constituting war crimes-that the much-punished Palestinians were not responsible for the Holocaust. That breakthrough was alone worth his visit to New York.
William H. Slavick
Professor of English (retired)