By Howard Galganov
September 26, 2007
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This week, Columbia University, in New York City went a long way to best illustrate what the world would be like if academics ran things.
I am all in favor of free speech, but not free speech from people who would use that speech in order to kill it for everyone else.
Columbia University invited a man into their world who is on record by his own words and deeds as being the antithesis of personal freedoms.
To the self-absorbed academic leaders of Columbia and their infantile Leftist students, they KNEW that they would get out of Ahmadinejad in open debate, what the rest of the world could not.
Because of their absolute belief in their own power of reason and persuasion, they would teach Ahmadinejad a lesson.
Instead, Ahmadinejad showed them to be the fools they are.
When the backlash hit the leaders of Columbia for inviting this vile piece of work, and the realization sank in that there was going to be a price to pay for being so stupid, it didn't take much time for the academics to prove that they were even that much more stupid than they already were.
To show how opened minded they are at Columbia, one of their senior Deans justified the invitation to this Moslem madman by saying that he would have invited pre-1939 Hitler to speak at Columbia too. As if that makes the invitation to a murderer, misogynist, purveyor of international TERRORISM and wannabe executioner of the next Holocaust appropriate.
I watched and listened to many of Columbia's students defend their University's decision to invite this religious genocidal nut-job, and came away with the sad reality that these little schmucks will one day manage the affairs of America and elsewhere. How utterly depressing.
I can forgive "children" for being stupid, because children have to learn. But, what I find unforgivable, are the adults (Deans and Professors) who should have known better.
But how could they know better if they never left the halls of academia?
Having Ahmadinejad as a Columbia guest speaker was the perfect podium for him to speak to his people back home. It didn't matter what the rest of the world thought about his speech and Q&A, since it only mattered how it was conveyed to the people Ahmadinejad leads.
As poorly as Columbia handled this mess, is as good as Ahmadinejad took advantage of it. The crass remarks put forward by Ahmadinejad's host, Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University, simply reinforced the Iranian image of the Ugly American.
In the Persian and Arab culture, one does not invite someone into his home to insult him. Bollinger did this only because he couldn't think of anything else to do to salvage whatever he had left of his battered dignity.
If anything positive comes from this mess, it will be that we should understand that the world of academia is a pretend world that should not be taken seriously.
And that "children" who haunt the corridors of higher learning are nothing more than "children", who have yet to grow-up and understand that there is a real world out there that is very much different than the pretend world they are taught to believe in.
That the world of academia is almost always associated with Democrats is another spin-off many people have not noticed.
In the last few years, the world of Leftist elitist academia has been an embarrassment, with professors who are at best incompetent, and at worst imposters, liars and purveyors of untruths. This all splashes back on Democrats.
What Columbia succeeded in doing with their invitation to Ahmadinejad was two-fold. It further empowered a very wicked man amongst his own people. And it showed academic elitism for what it truly is.
More than that though, we now have a much better idea of Columbia University which opened its arms to an international murderer, but won't allow the Minute Men or the ROTC on-campus.
Columbia University is the big loser.
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