Mahmoud’s Manhattan Moment (UPDATED)
PJM ROUNDUP: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now in New York City, unleashing a tidal wave of controversy. UPDATE: PJM's Ardeshir Arian reports the following from inside Iran regarding Ahmadinejad's speech on Monday: 1) VOA Television nightly services on HotBird and TeleStar 12 satellites were disrupted in Tehran for about 20 minutes, as soon as he was to be introduced at Columbia university's podium. Iranian citizens did not hear the criticism of Ahmadinejad by Columbia President Bollinger. The way the Islamic Republic does this is to scramble the signals of these satellites locally, using stationary and mobile microwave dishes. 2) It has been rumored from inside Iran that one of the conditions for Iranian-American Haleh Esfandiari's release from Evin Prison was for Ahmadinejad to give his speech at Columbia University and to visit Ground Zero. Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia was canceled last year.
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Andrew Marcus - on video assignment for PJM - reports that the Port Authority evicted protesters from Ground Zero this morning. Group - including family members of 9/11 victims - was in front of the PATH station protesting possible appearance at Ground Zero by Ahmadinejad.
Demonstrators are gathering at Columbia University, where he is scheduled to talk after addressing the United Nations. The speaker of the NY State Assembly is considering withholding public funds from the school to protest its decision to invite the leader to campus (NY Sun).
According to AFP, foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini insisted Ahmadinejad’s itinerary still includes a visit to Ground Zero.
American Digest: “Bollinger Rope-A-Dopes Ahmadinejad and Many Conservative Blogs.”
RightWingSparkle: “I’m thinking that never in the history of Columbia University’s Distinguished Lecture Series has a speaker mentioned God more than Ahamdinejad has.”
Matt Sanchez: “I’m never surprised by what my school Columbia University will do or say, not even when they’ll invite men like Ahmadinejad to speak but will refuse people like Ann Coulter or members of the United States military.”
Ian Schwartz: Video: Columbia President Lee Bollinger’s full speech and Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s response (22 minutes).
The Columns, from Columbia U: “For him, there’s no difference between the study of physics and the study of the Holocaust, or the study of God. Facts are only facts when presented with the purity of heart of the almighty. He couched his language well, but the conclusions he reached as a result were often harrowing, especially given his own denial of truth later on.”
Roger L. Simon: “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made one of the most insane and reactionary statements I have heard a national leader say in public ever at Columbia today: ‘In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who has told you that we have it.’”
Kesher Talk: Letter to Bollinger from a fellow academic, “May I ask you what it takes to make someone persona non grata nowadays?”
Fox News: Ahmadinejad responded to a scolding by Columbia University’s president by objecting to the manner in which he was introduced.
Dean of Columbia Law School says Ahmadinejad should not have been invited to campus.
Mahmoudapalooza: Photos and reports from anti-Ahmadinejad protests (Michelle Malkin)
LA Times: As the world watched for news of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who also happened to be in town, prepared to steal some of the spotlight by announcing that California would sever ties with companies doing business in Iran.
Fox News: President Bush said Monday that while he’s “not sure” he would have offered the head of a state sponsor of terror a platform from which to outline his agenda, he thinks it’s OK that Columbia University did invite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak.
Minding the Campus: Who’s too extreme for Columbia? A quotes game.
Barry Rosen, one of the hostages in the 1979 embassy heist: “I wonder what the Founding Fathers would think of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University” (NY Post)
Meanwhile inside Iran, a different concept of free speech: ” Iran’s judiciary has sealed off the offices of a popular news Web site critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s policies after journalists continued to update it despite official filtering, the Web site said.” (Khaleej Times)
Columbia University Spoof Site
Newsbusters: “Of course we knew that The Boston Globe’s Jim Carroll would have his “it’s all Bush’s fault” moment. Even so, the former priest outdoes himself with his concluding paragraph, flatly stating that it is our president, and not the, shall we say, eccentric Iranian leader, who by his presence defiles the 9-11 site.”
MY Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy: “Exactly how far does one have to take moral relativism before it either becomes nihilism or there’s finally an awakening to reality?”
Oliver Willis: “Look, even if I bought all the scare-talk about Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (anyone remember when Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic was touted as the “new” Hitler? I do.), what exactly is there for the cons to be so afraid of him coming to the UN or to Columbia University?”
Dr. Sanity: “Giving a soapbox to a Hitler or a Bin Laden or a pipsqueak like Ahmadinejad is merely yet another histrionic display of narcissistic self-indulgence by a politicized academia; just as the decision to recind Larry Summers invitation to speak was at another institution of higher learning.”
The New Criterion’s Armavirumque: “President Bollinger’s sophomoric conception of free speech is precisely the sort of supine intellectualism that, if consistently embraced, would make free speech impossible.”
The Yeshiva World: “In conclusion says Rabbi Weiss, ‘Out of great respect to the Iranian Nation and their leadership we proudly welcome the Honorable President Ahmadinejad to New York, WELCOME!’”
American Thinker: Who is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
Daily Kos: “Why I Have A Little Crush on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”
Gay Patriot: “Left-Wing Lesbian Has Crush on Ahmadinejad?!?!?!”
Darleen’s Place: “Mz Sally is no agent provocateur but is Project Director at The Center for Community Change. Precious.”
ShrinkWrapped: “Ahmadinejad gains tremendous status when one of America’s leading Universities treats him as if he is a Statesman whose utterances are anything more than the most perverse propaganda. His presence drips contempt but the Solons at Columbia are too blinded by their ideological confusion and ignorance to recognize how they are being played.”
Michelle Malkin: “Mahmoud sucks up to the Left/tinfoil hatters on 60 Minutes, U.S. says Iran sending missiles to Iraq.”
Edward Cropper: “Columbia University would want this” (see photo).
Atlas Shrugs: “Stop the ‘Death to America’ tour!”
Meryl Yourish: Transcript of 60 Minutes.
The Corner: “WBNC in New York just reported that an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said today that visiting Ground Zero “is on the president’s schedule.”
Daniel W. Drezner: “In contrast, everything I’ve heard or read from Iran experts suggests that on the streets of Tehran, Ali Q. Publiq feels a strong sense of national pride about the nuclear program. It’s the one thing that Ahmadinejad has found to boost his domestic standing. So this view among Bush officials is not only untrue, it’s a patronizing view of ordinary Iranians. They are perfectly capable of disliking Ahmadinejad, desiring a strong Iran, and preferring not to be bombed at the same time.”
Fausta’s blog: “The bottom line on Ahmadinejad is, if he can demonstrate that he is treated abroad as a respected leader, he will be better able to counter his critics at home.”
The Oxford Medievalist: “The apocalyptic fanatic managed to check off most of the left’s favorite talking points.”
Belmont Club: “One man who might have held seminars on the combustibility of the human body while ovens at Auschwitz consumed their ghastly fuel is in the video below. What is moral blindness but the inability to tell right from wrong, friend from enemy, love from hate? And what is moral deafness but a man who can hear words and never understand their meaning?”
Gateway Pundit: “New York Times Will Run Anti-Ahmadinejad Ad Monday.” [The ad is on page A21 of the print version.]
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9 Comments
Tony Ryan:I don’t live in the US so excuse my naivety here but I must be missing something.
Recently both Bin Laden and now Ahmadinejad have made noises that appear to be promoting the Democratic agenda. Both of these individuals are clearly enemies of western civilisation and stated anti-Americans. If these boys are pushing for a US government run by the Democrats in 2009 then surely to hell any voter with a grain of sense, even those with a tendency to lean to the left, will vote Republican.
The world can’t afford the US to become another Spain.
Sep 24, 2007 - 7:00 am Appalachian Conservative:I wonder how much the “Freedom’s Watch” ad. will cost. It’s going to be awesome when NYT goes out of business sooner or later.
Sep 24, 2007 - 7:58 am Jay:Blogosphere Roundup
Sep 24, 2007 - 9:44 am Lumpy:Ahmadinejad to Visit Columbia University. UPDATE: The Tyrant Is Still Planning On Visiting Ground Zero.
Sep 24, 2007 - 10:12 am jason:You would think it so, Tony. However, the majority of people who vote in elections don’t pay attention to the news until just a week or so before the elections. As a result, such comments from America’s enemies will not influence very many votes. That and most Democrats can’t see the forest through the trees. Seeing America’s enemies voicing their talking points isn’t an indication that they are on the wrong side, just that Bush is foe to both good and bad people alike.
Sep 24, 2007 - 10:14 am sheik yer'mami:If Bush ‘is not sure’ then he should not be the ‘decider’- this pathetic ape who cannot articulate himself is really hopeless. Bush has done more damage to America than even peanut Carter, who got us into this mess in the first place.
Ah-mad-in-jihad must be called to account and shipped off to Gitmo, along with his supporters.
Sep 24, 2007 - 10:19 am tom swift:Failing to do it will come to bite us in the ass, sooner or later.
http://sheikyermami.com/2007/09/24/a-mad-in-jihad-%e2%80%9ci%e2%80%99m-a-muslim-i-cannot-tell-a-lie%e2%80%9d/
Now’s our chance to kidnap A. and keep him handcuffed to a radiator for a couple of years.
Sep 24, 2007 - 10:46 am Joseph White:tom swift: “It stops the enrichment of weapons-grade plutonium or else it gets the hose again!”
Sep 24, 2007 - 12:42 pm ecj-maxine:Many of us who live here at MAXINE remember, however vaguely, what it meant to become a child of the “sixties”. One of the tenants that the Hippie generation brought forward to the American culture, along with “Flower Power”, Ecology, “if it feels good … do it”, was the concept of “speaking truth to power”!
This process of speaking-truth-to-power was designed to empower the populous … to not be intimidated by those in power. To give permission to anyone to call those in power OUT if they were, in fact oppressing the masses through the curtailing of the personal freedoms that are due to them in this society.
Generally, this process and concept are great for any society if is used in protest and in the proper context.
Columbia University’s president, Lee Bollinger, got the context of the concept and process all wrong when he decided to invite and keep the speaking date with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday.
Bollinger, after receiving a proper and extreme negative reaction to the invitation of Ahmadinejad decided to proceed with the speaking occasion. In order to mollify the alumnae and other possible contributors to Columbia, Bollinger decided to introduce Ahmadinejad in what can only be a grandstanding of a speaking-truth-to-power moment by ripping “Mockmood” a new one!
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“When you come to a place like this, it makes you simply ridiculous. The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history,” he said.
This speaking-truth-to-power moment lasted the better part of fifteen minutes but the Columbia president really had it all wrong. By inviting and hosting the Iranian president in the first place was to elevate this man, his concepts, and his regime to an additional position of power, the respected podium of a first tier University.
For “Mockmood’s” part, he did not disappoint any who watched him. He powerfully put forth that in Iran, women have the greatest of freedoms anywhere on Earth, women are respected, that Iran does not experience the phenomena of homosexuality as we do here in the United States (”homosexuality does not exist in Iran”), on the subject of the Holocaust, “Mockmood” said, “There’s nothing known as absolute,” and that the Holocaust has been abused as a justification for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians. “Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?” he asked, and so on. In otherwords, NOTHING NEW.
By using this time and this place for Columbia University’s president, Lee Bollinger to speak-truth-to-power actually backfired because of the fact that the words were not listened to but the context was. Protests, to be effective, usually are not launched through an invitation and acceptance of the person “in power” being protested.
Bollinger ended up allowing Ahmadinejad to portray himself as an intellectual and argue that his administration respected reason and science, that he was a former engineering professor. “Mockmood” was able to appear shaken and irate over what he called “insults” from his host, and he soon found himself gaining sympathy from and being applauded by the sitting audience in his more powerful “Speaking-Truth-To-Power Moment”.
At MAXINE, we are saddened this event had to happen in the first place.
Source:
Sep 25, 2007 - 11:58 amhttp://tinyurl.com/25ez2l