In the feature story at FrontPage this morning I discuss the dhimmi Columbia profs who are, according to the Mehr News Agency, planning to travel to Iran to apologize to the Thug-In-Chief (links in the original).
When Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University, Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger offered to travel to Iran himself, in the interests of promoting freedom of speech there: “Let me,” he implored Ahmadinejad, “lead a delegation of students and faculty from Columbia to address your university about free speech, with the same freedom we afford you today. Will you do that?”Now, a delegation from Columbia is indeed planning to go to Tehran – but it isn’t quite the delegation that Bollinger had in mind. Tehran’s Mehr News Agency recently reported that a group of Columbia University professors, including faculty deans, are preparing a trip to Iran, but not to promote free speech. Instead, they’re going to present an official apology to Iran’s President, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, for the way he was treated by Columbia President Lee Bollinger when he visited the university last September.
It’s hard to see how their apology can be “official” without the sanction of Columbia’s chief official, and it’s even harder to see what Bollinger did that was so offensive as to give these professors the idea that they must travel halfway around the world in order to make amends.Bollinger, of course, shocked the nation and the world when he called Ahmadinejad a “petty and cruel dictator,” criticized human rights abuses within Iran, and asked the Iranian President a series of pointed questions, including: “Why have women, members of the Baha’i faith, homosexuals, and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country?” and “Why do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and civil society in the region?” He even confronted Ahmadinejad about Iran’s nuclear program, asking him: “Why does your country continue to refuse to adhere to international standards for nuclear weapons verification in defiance of agreements that you have made with the UN nuclear agency? And why have you chosen to make the people of your country vulnerable to the effects of international economic sanctions and threaten to engulf the world with nuclear annihilation?”
Was Bollinger exaggerating the evil of the Iranian mullahcracy? Hardly. Amnesty International noted in its 2007 report on Iran that the “human rights situation” there has “deteriorated, with civil society facing increasing restrictions on fundamental freedoms of expression and association. Scores of political prisoners, including prisoners of conscience, continued to serve prison sentences imposed following unfair trials in previous years. Thousands more arrests were made in 2006, mostly during or following demonstrations. Human rights defenders, including journalists, students and lawyers, were among those detained arbitrarily without access to family or legal representation. Torture, especially during periods of pre-trial detention, remained commonplace. At least 177 people were executed, at least four of whom were under 18 at the time of the alleged offence, including one who was under 18 at the time of execution. Two people were reportedly stoned to death. Sentences of flogging, amputation and eye-gouging continued to be passed. The true numbers of those executed or subjected to corporal punishment were probably considerably higher than those reported.”
Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad’s belligerent statements, some bordering on the genocidal, are well known. He has boasted that “the annihilation of the Zionist regime will come,” and has praised the jihad terrorist organization Hizballah. During Israel’s incursion against Hizballah in Lebanon in 2006, the Iranian President declared: “Today, Hizbullah in Lebanon is the standard-bearer of the resistance of all the monotheistic peoples, of the seekers of justice, and of the free people. Hassan Nasrallah is shouting the loud cry of the vigilant human consciences. Today, Hizbullah stands tall as the representative of all the peoples, all the vigilant consciences, all the monotheistic people, all the seekers of justice, and all free people of the world, against the rule of hegemony. Until now, with the help of Allah, [Hizbullah] is winning, and, Allah willing, it will reach the ultimate victory in the near future.”
That “ultimate victory” would be the total destruction of Israel: “The Islamic umma (community),” he has affirmed, “will not allow its historic enemy [Israel] to live in its heartland.” Israel’s end is near, he said: “There is no doubt that the new wave [of attacks] in Palestine will soon wipe off this disgraceful blot [Israel] from the face of the Islamic world.” He has declared that “the Zionist regime is counterfeit and illegitimate and cannot survive.”
His genocidal statements have gone beyond Israel. At the “World Without Zionism” conference held in Tehran in October 2005, as the crowd chanted “death to Israel, death to America, death to England,” the Iranian President again recalled Khomeini’s words: “Once, his eminency Imam [Ruhollah] Khomeini stated that the illegal regime of the Pahlavis must go, and it happened. Then he said the Soviet empire would disappear, and it happened. He also said that this evil man Saddam [Hussein] must be punished, and we see that he is under trial in his country. His eminency also said that the occupation regime of Qods [Jerusalem, or Israel] must be wiped off from the map of the world, and with the help of the Almighty, we shall soon experience a world without America and Zionism, notwithstanding those who doubt.”
Also, Ahmadinejad has threatened Iran’s foes with nuclear action: “Today, the Iranian people is the owner of nuclear technology. Those who want to talk with our people should know what people they are talking to. If some believe they can keep talking to the Iranian people in the language of threats and aggressiveness, they should know that they are making a bitter mistake. If they have not realized this by now, they soon will, but then it will be too late. Then they will realize that they are facing a vigilant, proud people.”
Would the Columbia professors like to see a world in which America and Israel had been blasted to nuclear ruin? Do they approve of restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of the press, of the violent persecutions of minorities, of torture and stonings?
At Columbia in September, Bollinger concluded by challenging Ahmadinejad: “Frankly, and in all candor, Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. But your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do.” Now, a delegation of Columbia professors is determined to do all it can to confirm Iran’s President in that fanatical, unreflective, inflexible mindset – and the sufferings of the Iranian people be damned.
This is treason. Period.
The blind leading the blind. I wouldnt send my kid to Columbia if they paid all tuition fees, housing, food, and travel expenses. I know in return I would get a liberal, P.C. infected automatron whose faith in God had been pounded from him.
How about our Gov. canceling their passports after they land in Tehran.
This is treason. Period.
Posted by: antishock8 at January 14, 2008 8:28 AM
How about we include insanity? Then the Period.
I wouldnt send my kid to Columbia if they paid all tuition fees, housing, food, and travel expenses. --posted above.
So ditto.
...all government money going to Columbia University should now cease to flow....
What do you say when you meet a Columbia grad?
I'll have a double latte to go.
...how does a Columbia professor spell freedom?
....submit...
If Bollinger had upbraided Olmert like that, do you think a group of Columbia profs would travel to Israel to apologize? It's the Hate-America Left and the Islamofascists, united in their sick beliefs.
Aaaaaaaargh! I shouldn't read Jihad Watch before breakfast.
There is no guarantee that Merd news agency reported something remotely accurate.
Well I hope those professors don't get too much brown on their noses. Maybe Beasty Boy Ahmadinijad will let them witness a stoning, or better yet, throw a few stones themselves. Once they get to Iran, lock the door and don't let them back in. Let them become citizens of Iran, and wear headscarves , burkas, and eat a steady diet of falafel, morning noon and night. Who's paying for this trip anyway?
Its simple. Don't let them back into the country. I am sure that they will enjoy living in Iran, especially the women.
I'm shocked! Well, actually not. Kids at the Ringling Clown School in Florida are getting a better education. What a bunch of fools. Hitler and Stalin would have loved them. Ahmi must be laughing his ass off. Can't believe we still have a travel ban on Cuba and not on Iran.
I wonder if the Universitie's Gay and Feminists organizations will raise any fuss about the trip? then, maybe since there's no homosexuality in Iran, Gays don't have a stake in this, and given that females wear the hijab to feel protected and liberated, they too don't have a stake.
I'll bet these professors are loaded down with every emaginable degtee, except, of course, a degree in common sense, which Columbia doesn't offer.
Rick says - "Kids at the Ringling Clown School in Florida are getting a better education. "
And the diplomas are much more colorful.
Dhimmis
From headline: “Why does your country continue to refuse to adhere to international standards for nuclear weapons verification in defiance of agreements that you have made with the UN nuclear agency? And why have you chosen to make the people of your country vulnerable to the effects of international economic sanctions and threaten to engulf the world with nuclear annihilation?”
Because I'm a hate-filled dictator with an agenda: to spread the cancer of hate-filled Islam.
Let's make no mistake about this - they have gone to Iran to *apologise* for somebody exercising their right to free speech ...
"some free speech is more free than other free speech" as Orwell might have said ..
There are fools, damn fools and then there are academic fools.
These leftwing "professors" should apologize to US too--most of us find them and their views plenty offensive as well.
I like what someone posted the other day by Groucho Marx.
This group"May look like an idiot; Ladies and Gentlemen, he may even sound like an idiot--but don't let all that fool you--he IS an idiot!
Proverbs 10:18
To hide hatred is to be a liar; to slander is to be a fool.
الأمثال 10:18
لإخفاء الكراهية هو ان يكون الكذاب ؛ الى القذف هو ان معتو
According to the Columbia Spectator, there is no meeting (that anyone knows about). This could just as well be more b.s. from Iran.
I just read where they were denying they were going to Iran.
I can't remember where I read it since I am all over the place on some days. I read it over the weekend.
Comments about, denunciations of, a place called "Columbia" are as misplaced as those sometimes made about places called "Berkeley" or "Cambridge." It is not "Columbia" but rather, a group of people who have managed to be hired, and to rise high, sometimes through the influence of a cabal that hires and promotes its own, and aided no doubt by the considerable influence at Columbia, of the late Edward Said. Said provided, in his "Orientalism" (see Robert Irwin, see Bernard Lewis, see Ibn Warraq, see a dozen others who have dealt, unanswerably, with that absurd work written by someone who had no idea what prompted Western interest and study of the Islamic East -- for that was the only "Orient" he cared to discuss, or recognize), an ideological justification for third-world calibans or, as Hamid Dabashi said in his celebrated eulogy (which google: "Edward Said, the Moment of Myth"), such people as Dabashi could never have been hired or promoted without Edward Said and "Orientalism." Indeed.
Now that Said is dead, and his combination of busy careerism (all those book-blurbs he offered so indiscriminately, occasionally even praising a book, such as those of the marxisant Maxime Rodinson, that he could not possibly have read, but assumed would meet his ideological criteria, and that mutual-admiration-society of references for grants -- Bellagio, here I come! -- and of course those "little kindnesses" that are nothing at all to perform, if you are, as Said was, a full-time operator.
There were a few, still at Columbia who, though in their own fields perfectly or even very intelligent, knew nothing about Islam, knew almost nothing about the history of the Arab war -- that Lesser Jihad -- against Israel, knew nothing about the origins of the recently-invented "Palestinian people," but did know one thing. And that one thing was that Edward, our Edward, with his liquid brown eyes, and his obvious decency and his obvious eagerness to help (but ask the students who endured his indifference about that “eagerness to help”) and his supposed cultivation, emblemized by that love of music (and wasn't he a good friend of Daniel Barenboim? And how could he, born a Christian, be connected somehow to the more disturbing aspects of Islam? And didn’t he have so many Jewish friends? Didn’t he even seem to prefer the company of Jews to others? Didn’t he even joke about his Jewish doctors? Why, what was there not to trust, in such a man? And wasn't he a fine person to know, just as long as you never questioned or openly disagreed with his view of Israel, and the "great wrong" done the "Palestinians" -- and look at how Said carefully went out of his way to befriend Jewish academics (or did they not realize that that was deliberate on his part), for, their “friendship,” their support, their falling under his spell, was of far greater propagandistic value to him that than of non-Jews – and that is why otherwise intelligent people, whom one might trust completely in their field – say, a professor of fine arts and former (white) resident of South Africa, (whose background and sympathies may have caused him to confuse, in a manner akin to that of Condoleezza Rice, the experience of blacks with “apartheid” and the completely different experience, cleverly mis-represented by Said and his ilk, of the “Palestinians”), or a professor English and Comparative Literature who, knowing nothing of Islam and nothing about Israel or the real history of the Middle East, would find Said outwardly appealing, and let down that intellectual guard that was otherwise mostly up, and succumb, or at least not oppose, as would have happened had one’s normal intellectual and moral standards continued to be applied, the absurd atmospherics of Saidism that helped to make possible all kinds of hirings, and promotions, in the MEALAC program at Columbia.
But don't attack a place called "Columbia." The school where Jacques Barzun lived and taught, where Wolfgang Friedmann taught, which had until last year, in the Department of Fine Arts, kindly, brilliant, ever-accessible, altogether wonderful James Beck, and many others at that level, mocks those who would dismiss it. And if f Columbia University, which once had Richard Gottheil, and then Arthur Jeffrey, and then Joseph Schacht, three of the greatest scholars of Islam ever to teach in the United States, now has instead, or did until recently, a Middle East Institute headed by a former PLO propagandist, Rashid Khalidi, ably seconded by a professor of Islamic Science and Self-Esteem Studies (see his claims for Arabic astronomers -- why, it turns out that Copernicus owed everything to Ibn al-Shatir), George Saliba, and by one Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian who, among Iranians in exile, is a figure of some fun,but in relation to the late Edward Said (please see Dabashi's maudlin farewell, quite in the spirit of the Pravda eulogist bidding Stalin goodbye) that should not be attributed to a place called “Columbia” but to particular people including, admittedly, one or two deans with hints of that unsavory mental pathology with which we are all, or should be by now, familiar, or at least able to detect. And just as it is hard to imagine Edward Said walking down the same corridors where once walked Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, and hard to think of Zainab Bahrani (an inspirer of the "MESA Nostra contest" put up here, for which relief, much thanks) being the "Director of Graduate Studies" in the same department in which James Beck taught, it is amazing to think that at Columbia three of the most important scholars of Islam once taught. These three were Richard Gottheil, followed by Arthur Jeffery, and Arthur Jeffery followed in turn by the greatest Western scholar of Islamic law, Joseph Schacht, in the very field of Islamic studies where present satyrs to the ghosts of those past hyperions now strut about, calling themselves "professors," thinking of themselves as “professors” at Columbia – unaware that they are clowns and usurpers, and regarded as such, by those who recognize and can distinguish “le vrai” from “ le vraisemblable,” usurpers in this age of decay, and decline, in the humanities – analyzed so well by the unsurpassingly acute Jacques Barzun, who spent his entire academic life at a place called Columbia.
Columbia University. There is a pretty big river by that name. The University, like the river, runs down hill.
Wow, Hugh what a passionate eulogy. Your Alma Mater?
I was only there for a few years before transferring to an Art School, but my A/M has recently boasted an actual terrorist professor. It hurts the soul.
No.
"The blind leading the blind. I wouldnt send my kid to Columbia if they paid all tuition fees, housing, food, and travel expenses. I know in return I would get a liberal, P.C. infected automatron whose faith in God had been pounded from him.
How about our Gov. canceling their passports after they land in Tehran."
Posted by: guide inside
I completely agree - and I wouldn't send my son or daughter there either!
Wouldn't it be terrible if their passports got lost, just as they were boarding their plane back to the U.S.?