Like any thinking person, I had mixed feelings about Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia on Monday. Not as regards the freedom of speech issue; I'd defend the right of Nazis and Stalinists to speak publicly. But there is a difference between allowing someone to speak and providing a venue and accompanying respectability for that speech, and when someone has more or less openly called for genocide, I don't think that western institutions are obliged to humor him.
Ahmadinejad is such a buffoon that he could hardly score points with a western audience, and no one back home in Iran who isn't already a fan is going to be won over; but his real audience is in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Nigeria - the larger world of Muslim states, or states with large Muslim minorities, that are now experiencing important debates between secular modernists and religious fanatics. Ahmadinejad, since his election, has been proposing himself as a voice of power and influence in that world.
Standing in the crowd on the Columbia lawn, I noted that the usual agitators were out in force, all varieties of them. The campus was plastered with posters of Ahmadinejad superimposed over a swastika, as well as plenty of others explaining that Iran is really an enlightened moderate state in which women vote and Jews have representation, so what's the big fuss? I must admit I had more sympathy for the Israeli guy who just kept screaming robotically "Hitler is here!" than I did for the Revolutionary Worker people with their banner that said "Ahmadinejad - Bad, Bush - Worse!" and their pamphlets about the million people killed in Iraq (a despicably misleading statistic that has been widely disseminated by bad and lazy people.)
When the main event got underway, I was quite taken aback by Columbia president Lee Bollinger's address, which really pulled no punches; I don't think Ahmadinejad saw it coming. Bollinger covered all the bases: freedom of speech, but also Ahmadinejad's denial of Hitler's holocaust, his threats against Israel, the arrest of Iranian-American intellectuals in Iran, and the repression of women, gays, and political dissidents in that country. Bollinger resorted to some outright name-calling: "you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator." Shockingly, he made it even more personal with a remark that Ahmadinejad is "quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated" and concluding with the hope that Ahmadinejad's foolishness at Columbia would embarrass him at home and undermine his political position there (as if Iranians don't have enough opportunities to hear him speak at home.) The text of Bollinger's address is here; you can watch a video of it here.
I was glad Bollinger confronted him head on - to some extent it resolved the free speech versus giving access problem - but by laying it on so thick he came off as childish. Of course, Bollinger had the trustees and the alumni and the conservative press - which is convinced that Columbia is a hotbed of Bolshevist anti-Semitism - breathing down his neck. But he might have been more effective if he'd been more concerned with an effective approach to neutralizing Ahmadinejad - and with the facts - than he was with fending off right-wing attack.
The dictator thing was certainly the silliest part of Bollinger's speech. Iran is not a dictatorship. It's an oligarchy with certain aspects of democracy, including meaningful elections and a meaningful parliament with some real power. Sort of a hybrid system. It is true that, as the Iran-is-not-so-bad posters have it, women vote and have full political rights, and there are Jews and Christians and Zoroastrians in parliament. Ultimately, however, power rests with the Supreme Religious Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Guardian Council (which can overrule the parliament and which must approve all candidates for the presidency.)
The president himself is supposed to be more or less a figurehead. Although what's interesting is that Ahmadinejad has proven much more adept at using populist manipulation to carve out real power for himself than anyone ever expected; the Guardian Council apparently vetted him out as OK because they considered him easily controlled. Ahmadinejad spends a lot of time traveling all over Iran by private helicopter, (something his predecessors, who preferred to stay in Teheran near the center of power, never did). He stops off at small-town soccer fields to "meet the people" and give a speech. Afterwards, anyone can hand a petition or complaint to men in his party who spread out through the crowd for this purpose, and Ahmadinejad supposedly reads and responds to them all. He has other men in the crowd who hand out money.
That's the way to build a personal power base! And the Guardian Council knows this, and has to tread a little lightly around Ahmadinejad's populism. He may be dumb, but he's not stupid. And if Bollinger had had a better sense of who he was dealing with, he might have been able to counter him more effectively. Instead, anyone who knows about Ahmadinejad and his true political situation has the option to dismiss Bollinger as a know-nothing, which is unfortunate.
Bollinger's defense of Israel, while passionate, was also weak, because he didn't have the intellectual discipline to really think out the reason that Ahmadinejad's diatribes resonate in the Muslim world. When Ahmadinejad denies Hitler's holocaust, he's doing it for a reason: because it is part of his propaganda that Israel is justified in the west, and justifies itself, by that genocide. Many people do try to justify Israel by Hitler, and this is a terrible mistake, both morally and tactically. It is also a mistake to simply let Ahmadinejad himself make this assertion and just ignore it or talk over it as if it doesn't matter, because it proves his point of a false linkage in the west: the Palestinians paying for Hitler's crimes.
For those who are so inclined, it is certainly possible to defend Israel without any reference to Hitler or those other irrelevant arguments, the Promised Land and the Chosen People. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Israel's Jews are not from Brooklyn or Russia. They are native-born or from the Middle East, from Asia Minor and North Africa, places their ancestors had lived continuously for thousands of years, in recent centuries often - usually, although not always - under extreme oppression by the Muslim majority. They fled to Israel as soon as there was an Israel to flee to; there were more Jewish refugees from Muslim states in 1947-48 than there were Palestinian refugees. Almost a hundred thousand Jews fled Iran, around 40,000 in 1947-48 and 55,000 more when oppression of Jews increased after the fundamentalist Shi'a revolution of 1979, but no one ever asks Ahmadinejad about that. There is a tacit acceptance of his thesis that the Jews of Israel are all from places like Poland or Australia. Why didn't Bollinger address this, instead of thundering against the easy target of holocaust denial?
The Middle Eastern origin of many Israeli Jews does not justify the expulsion of the Palestinians from their own traditional lands. But it does make the argument more complicated than the reductionists on both sides would have it.
Just as it complicates things to acknowledge that there is a reasonable argument at the core of Ahmadinejad's objection to the Jewish state. Why, after all, should Israel apportion civil standing on the basis of ethnicity? The question has to make any honest supporter of Israel who believes in democracy a bit queasy.
Suppose Bollinger had forthrightly addressed these issues? Would that not have been more powerful and effective than simply bloviating on ignorance and evil? It might actually have had a chance of getting a few people to think on a deeper level.
And if Bollinger thought that his approach would save him with the right, he was rather naïve. The tabloids and their idiotic letter writers went crazy about Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia, of course. "The Evil Has Landed," "Evil Weasel," etc., were some of the headlines. The New York Post actually ran a cartoon showing Ahmadinejad in bed with a camel; how's that for devastating intellectual argument? Well, they know their readership. And the New York Sun ran an editorial (why does the Sun bother with editorials, anyway? They put their editorials in their "news" stories) with some grudging praise for Bollinger, but took the opportunity to say that
[Columbia's] students have been fed years of anti-Israel, anti-American, and anti-military rhetoric from Columbia's professoriate in Middle Eastern studies and other departments. One of its faculty members publicly wished for our defeat in Iraq and that there would be "a million Mogadishus." Its Jewish and Israeli students have been mocked by professors, a scandal that was opened up by a film made by the David Project which rocked Columbia several years ago...
Most of this is, of course, nonsense, although the Sun is correct that professor Nicholas de Genova's comment about the Iraq war, and Columbia's refusal to allow a ROTC program on campus, are scandalous. But the supposed extremist bent of Columbia's Middle Eastern Studies program is a chimera, and professor Rashid Khalidi, the director of Columbia's Middle East institute - a favorite target of the Sun - is a careful, serious intellectual and historian, not a hater. The people behind the "David Project" are the real extremists. But the Sun has never been restrained by mere facts.
So what did Bollinger really accomplish? His speech is now presented among those arguing for a militant Muslim awakening as an example of the double standards of the west, and, perhaps more powerfully, as typical of a people who have no respect for the status of a guest. He changed the focus for Americans who have no sympathy at all for the president of Iran, but who felt that Bollinger's diatribe was sure to backfire, and this mini-controversy has distracted attention from Ahmadinejad's ridiculous, rambling, ignorant speech - which should really be all we need to judge and condemn him. Bollinger didn't need to gild that particular stinking lily.
Two groups benefited from this event: Muslim recruiters in countries where there is little free flow of information, to whom Bollinger's bullying tone confirmed their worst fantasies about the West; and conservative groups in the United States, who will continue to paint Columbia as solicitous of anything and anyone who opposes Israel and hurts American interests and use the invitation to Ahmadinejad as more evidence for this silly argument. What a shame that Bollinger, by the law of unintended consequences, managed to turn freedom of speech against himself, the university, and political moderates everywhere.
Unlike the hysterical conservatives, I can accept the idea that it was worthwhile to have Ahmadinejad on campus in order to debate him. But if that was what Bollinger wanted to do, he should have debated him honestly, and taken on the ignorant arguments that Ahmadinejad was actually making, rather than just insulting the guy. Failing that, there's no point having him on campus, and freedom of speech would not have suffered by his absence. Ahmadinejad could have rented a hall on his own, after all, and said anything he wanted to say; and Columbia would have kept its dignity.