ALEXIS SEBRING
Perspectives Assistant
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who denies the Holocaust and is arguably as evil as Hitler himself, spoke at Columbia University on Monday. His visit was much more than a speech from a controversial world leader, but an insult to everything this country stands for and upholds.
Ahmadinejad is a dictator. He has been known to execute people who disagree with his policies. He represses women; showing the smallest amount of skin can lead to a torturous, public stoning.
Ahmadinejad was accused of executing 200 people in Iran so far this year, and among them are homosexuals, according to democraticunderground.com. He claims Israel should be “wiped off the map,” says CNN.com and he questioned Holocaust revisionists, confirms abcnews.com
These widely-known facts about Ahmadinejad remind many people of evil dictatorships like Hitler’s.
The fact that Columbia University’s President Lee Bollinger provided a platform for a cruel, inhumane dictator to speak at the university is baffling. He obviously believes that no harm comes from subjecting students to harmful and fatal ideas.
“It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very dangers in such ideas,” Bollinger said at the event.
What Bollinger forgets is that college students are not always set in their beliefs. Many attend college still unsure about themselves, their convictions or even the most basic of their own morals. Even if they are fairly firm in their beliefs, they may still be vulnerable to being swayed by a major authoritative figure speaking at their school. An automatic sense of ‘respect’ will be taken by an average college student, no matter how corrupt the speaker may be, especially if he is a national leader.
If a university president allows someone to speak in front of 600 college students, that speaker must have something principled and reputable to say. Iran is known for having executed more child offenders (under 18) than any other country in the world since 1990, says web.amnesty.org, but any topic that may have elicited unethical answers was avoided.
The corrupt information and propaganda of Ahmadinejad at Columbia University entered the minds and ears of vulnerable college students. His diversion of important questions about his use of authority in Iran probably did not teach the students any lessons about morality. In fact, it allowed them to witness the ability of a major leader to avoid and manipulate the answers of vital questions. Seeing a person of power , who rules over 65,397,521 people, deny homosexuality and support the eradication of a Middle Eastern state is disgusting. The fact that he was invited to do so at an American university is almost as unpalatable.
Imagine the effects a dictator like Ahmadinejad could have on Pepperdine students if President Benton allowed him to speak. It would cause an absolute uproar, it would wreak havoc, but most of all it would cause shame.
The dictator who took the podium at an American campus represents the absolute opposite of those ideals. After all, could American universities have profited off a speech about Hitler’s hatred of Jews? Never.
09-27-2007