Admittedly I have not seen the full dialogue that took place between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, but I found the whole thing to be rather rude and distasteful. If you have such a low opinion of someone, why on earth would you invite him to your campus, just so you could say so to his face? First, I doubt anyone at Columbia appreciated how incredibly inhospitable they were acting towards a guest. It is that sort of lack of appreciation for an important cultural sensitivity that is stunning to me in an age of such liberal "tolerance and diversity." How can you say you want to open and extend a dialogue with someone on important issues and then start the whole event by berating them in an unquestionably harsh manner?
Look, I have very little tolerance for anyone who questions the holocaust and who would love to see Israel and the US wiped off the face of the earth, but I at least have enough decency and common sense to not invite that person to have dinner with me under a guise of open, fair and public dialogue of substantive issues and then turn on them and denounce them before they even have an opportunity to speak. That was disgraceful.
1 comment:
It's probably not any different than when our president goes to another country. Seriously.
Not that I think mistreating a foreign official is good.
I think it was outrageous that anyone in the US would give that madman a soapbox to stand on, to criticize him or not. If I recall correctly from the UD newspaper I glanced at yesterday, apparently Ahmedinejad took the time to criticize the US as a nation and say things like "We don't have gay people in our country."
However, just because he is a madman does not mean that he should be treated without honor. If M.A. came to my house, he'd be welcome to a bowl of my Fruity Pebbles, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't be holding back from puking the whole time.
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