AHMADINEJAD'S IDEOLOGY OF HATE MAKES HIM UNWORTHY OF PLATFORM
By Abraham H. Foxman
National Director of the Anti-Defamation League
This article originally appeared in USA Today on September 24, 2007

All the reasons given to provide a platform at Columbia University to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just don't hold up and don't even begin to compare with the damage done by giving legitimacy to a dangerous and evil figure.

Of course, the first defense of the invitation is free speech. The idea that free speech obligates a university to host a program where the speaker, a head of state, is one who denies the Holocaust, calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, supports international terrorism and seeks to acquire nuclear weapons is a perversion of that doctrine.

Columbia University has no moral, legal or social imperative to provide such a platform. As president of Iran, Ahmadinejad has many platforms to convey his messages of hate every day. For Columbia, the issue is not one of free speech at all but how proper it is to have Ahmadinejad as a speaker.

Second is the argument that a university's role is to provide information and perspectives for its students. But an individual who wantonly concocts the past — not only does Ahmadinejad deny the Holocaust but he also invited Holocaust deniers to Tehran for a conference to give "scholarly" legitimacy to the concept — is clearly not one from whom any learning can take place.

Third, the notion conveyed by Columbia President Lee Bollinger that this is an opportunity to challenge Ahmadinejad on a host of controversial subjects is naive. Anyone who thinks this will be a productive exercise, either to further expose the hatred of the Iranian president or to get him to alter his views, is engaged in wishful thinking. His public statements and media interviews, such as on 60 Minutes, make clear that he is a master at avoiding the question or turning it on the questioner.

In the final analysis, there is only one relevant point about whether he should have been invited: the great need in the world today is to make a moral statement to isolate this individual, not give him legitimacy. His ideology of hatred and Iran's building of a nuclear weapon to implement that ideology are the greatest threats to civilization as we know it. Columbia should have taken a stand that some ideas are simply not acceptable.

_____

Abraham H. Foxman is National Director of the Anti-Defamation League and author of The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).