What is amusing about Ahmadinejad being invited to speak there -is this is all on the heals of the Dean saying he’d invite Hitler (which Columbia University did, in fact do in 1933.)

Since I have a petition online objecting to Joseph Massad teaching courses from the position of homicide bombers and urging President Bollinger to dismiss him, I am no stranger to the farce that Columbia University has become as far academics and the positions the school holds in the classroom on a variety of subjects.

Another illustration of the political divide and complete divorce from reason and reality is Flight 93’s memorial in Pennsylvania. Flight 93 has in essence been re-hijacked by Islamofascists with a horrid memorial that is, in fact a mosque memorial to the terrorists on the graves of the crew and passengers who fought the terrorists on 9/11.

It’s a line of thinking that is completely removed from reason and rational thought.

A few articles that are worth noting on Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University:

SQUALID MISTAKE (New York Post)
ACADEMIA’S UGLY BLINDNESS
By ARTHUR HERMAN
Ahmadinejad: A thug — not a thinker.

COLUMBIA University President Lee Bollinger yesterday made some cutting criticisms while introducing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - but that doesn’t make the school’s decision to offer a platform to the head of a violent terrorist state any less abject, squalid or shameless.

“Abject, squalid, shameless” is how Winston Churchill described the resolution passed by Oxford University’s prestigious Debating Union in 1933 - the year Adolf Hitler came to power - that “this House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country.”

And Columbia’s event, like the 1933 Oxford resolution, sent (to quote Churchill again) a “very disquieting and disgusting message” to friends and enemies alike.

Many American’s won’t see that; their blindness goes to the heart of the “red-blue” divide in our country - much like the one in ’30s Britain that split men like Churchill from the exponents of appeasing Europe’s dictators.

On one side of that chasm, there is outrage and incomprehension that anyone could extend an invitation to a sworn enemy of the United States to speak on an American campus (a campus, moreover, that bans its own military’s ROTC); that the head of the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism attacks be welcomed anywhere in the city that was 9/11’s principal target; that a Holocaust-denier be welcomed to a university that has so many Jewish students and alumni.

On the other side, again, there is incomprehension that anyone should be offended. And that is the problem.

Yes, what Arthur Herman is talking about is a huge problem. It is what Alec Rawls has categorized as ‘truth denial’ which produces a complete ‘divorce from reality’.

Of Free Speech And Academic “Progressives” (Townhall.com)
By Bill Murchison

An excerpt:

The New York Times records that 2100 professors, students, staffers and alumni have signed an online petition of protest, asserting the Rumsfeld appointment’s incompatibility “with the ethical values of truthfulness, tolerance, disinterested inquiry, respect for national and international laws, and care for the opinions, property, and lives of others to which Stanford is inalienably committed.” Boo! Hiss! Throw da bum out!

It all seems to depend, in liberal academia, on whose free speech rights we’re talking about — those of a morally deranged foreign despot or of a retired American cabinet officer whose policies you don’t like. The jailer-in-chief of a once-sophisticated nation — let’s hear him out. Yea, free speech! And wouldn’t Mr. Madison be proud of our attachment to his First Amendment. As for a warmongering ex-flunky from the Bush administration — no, no, no. Why, his very words would corrupt our delicate ears!

The apparent moral asymmetry here — pay no attention to that. In the academy, we’re all good “progressives.” That’s the central point. Listening to foreign creeps who hate the United States is a moral obligation (and sometimes an unadulterated joy). Lending an ear to patriots who have sought to serve the United States out of love for its life and institutions — that’s another matter entirely, as the Stanford progressives trust Mr. Rumsfeld will understand while pondering the call to withdraw.

Is it too much to hope that just this once, maybe, a patriot can enjoy in academia the same moral footing as a national jailer and Jew-baiter? We’ll see soon enough.

I doubt if we’ll see any turnaround in this behavior any time soon.

Iran’s leader stirs tempest
Ahmadinejad defies criticsincontroversial NYC university visit
By Bay Fang | Chicago Tribune

Ambush flattens Ahmadinejad (The Australian) Notice how Ahmadinejad is portrayed as a victim in this piece.

Sitting alone under a spotlight on the darkened stage, Ahmadinejad looked silly, vulnerable and under arrest as Bollinger coldly and methodically demanded the Iranian leader explain his Holocaust denial, his support for terrorism, his crackdown on academic dissent and his threats against Israel, the country he wants “wiped off the map”.

As much accusation as inquiry, the questions seemed to go on forever, before ending with a putdown that was the verbal equivalent of being beaten with a baseball bat.

“Frankly, and in all candour, Mr President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions,” Bollinger said.

“But your avoiding them will itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterises so much of what you say and do.

“I feel all the weight of the modern civilised world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better.”

Bollinger had promised to open Ahmadinejad’s appearance with “a series of sharp challenges” and had been adamant that a critical premise of free speech was that the dishonourable could not be made honourable simply by allowing it to be heard.

But nobody had expected Bollinger to pre-empt Ahmadinejad with such venomous language and in universities across the US, questions are being asked: Did the attack go too far? Was it so personal that it became culturally insensitive? Did it compromise the academic search for greater knowledge and understanding?

Funny, but I think not. This last article is incredibly leftist, you can tell by the ‘culturally insensitive’ comment. The first thing leftists do when you try to call out examples of terrorism is that ‘there is no terrorist threat’ and it’s ‘Islamophobic’.

What was surprising to me was Bollinger’s words berating Ahmadinejad considering what seems to be a pattern in Academia today - not only inviting terrorists and terrorists’ line of thinking into the classroom, berating Israel and agreeing with terrorists that Israel has no right to exist - even as De Paul did here - getting rid of a teacher who had the nerve to mention to a table of demonstrating “Free Palestine” people that there is another school of thought and that Israel does, in fact have a right to exist.