Free speech, even for Ahmadinejad?
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- September
- 24
I’ve been tracking Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance at Columbia University today.
The invitation has been extremely controversial. Columbia President Lee Bolinger took a lot of heat, even from many members of the campus community, for granting such a platform to a man who, on a good day, still offends most the world. The irony of granting Ahmadinejad such a showcase “in the name of free speech� was not lost on many. (Wonder if he’ll be invited to hang out with his Neteuri Karta buds in Monsey.)
It seems to me that Ahmadinejad didn’t hide behind his academic rhetoric as well as he might have hoped. There are plenty of news outlets tracking this pretty closely. Here’s a fun one — Ahmadineblog — brought to us by the Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper there. (And yes, I did go to Columbia, but not as an undergrad, so I have no ties to the Spectator.)
So, what do you think? Should he have been given such a prime platform from which to spew?
Was this a great exercise in free speech, and an opportunity to give Ahmadinejad a little full-frontal democracy — as he viewed the protests, read the signs, heard the boos and faced aggressive, demanding questions?
Was it a great academic exercise or a publicity stunt?
This entry was posted
on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 3:19 pm by Nancy Cutler.
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