Iranian Maniac Leader Will Entertain Columbia University Students Monday.

The NY Times reports that Columbia University's president will "challenge" Ahmadinejad. Huh? This Columbia is a University. This Iran is a country. That's like me challenging Tiger Woods to a golf match. He could care less. So that said, Columbia is affording a maniac a platform and credibility. Not a good decision.

Also today, Mr. Bollinger said that Mr. Ahmadinejad would speak at the World Leaders Forum, organized by Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, on Monday. Mr. Bollinger said in a statement:

In order to have such a University-wide forum, we have insisted that a number of conditions be met, first and foremost that President Ahmadinejad agree to divide his time evenly between delivering remarks and responding to audience questions. I also wanted to be sure the Iranians understood that I would myself introduce the event with a series of sharp challenges to the President on issues including:

• the Iranian President’s denial of the Holocaust;
• his public call for the destruction of the state of Israel;
• his reported support for international terrorism that targets innocent civilians and American troops;
• Iran’s pursuit of nuclear ambitions in opposition to international sanction;
• his government’s widely documented suppression of civil society and particularly of women’s rights; and
• his government’s imprisoning of journalists and scholars, including one of Columbia own alumni, Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh.

I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas­ to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most, or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason.

I would also like to invoke a major theme in the development of freedom of speech as a central value in our society. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

That such a forum could not take place on a university campus in Iran today sharpens the point of what we do here. To commit oneself to a life­ and a civil society ­prepared to examine critically all ideas arises from a deep faith in the myriad benefits of a long-term process of meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs and hateful words with wiser words. That faith in freedom has always been and remains today our nation’s most potent weapon against repressive regimes everywhere in the world. This is America at its best.

Hey, just a thought, why not have the infamous almost tenured professor and equally loony Nadia Abu El-Haj introduce him?