Columbia, an example of all that is wrong with the left.

On Monday, September 24th, 2007 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will speak and participate in a question and answer session with university faculty and students at Columbia University's World Leaders Forum. His appearance is sponsored by Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, which is initiating a year-long series of lectures and events on thirty years of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The SIPA lecture series will include academic experts as well as former officials and critics of the Islamic Republic.

But no worries. Although this "world leader" hangs 16 yr olds from cranes in the middle of cities for having sex, chops off the heads of homosexuals, and denies the holocaust, its OK. All these questions will be addressed.

I may puke.

President Bollinger has issued the following companion 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's 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.

It's all about dialogue. If we just understand holocaust denying terrorists, then we can come to terms with each other. This is the left's worldview.

These academic elites have lost their minds. They would have Osama Bin Laden speak on why he had those planes fly into the twin towers if they could. Meanwhile Ahmadinejad will pat himself on the back all the way back to Iran about how respected he is by some of the American people.

via Powerline

Related outrage:

It looks like Ahmadinejad might visit ground zero without our permission.

Michelle is asking everyone to come out and protest this murderer. If you live in New York visit the link and get down there. Atlas Shrugs will be there across from the UN, join her.