Rossputin.com: Rational Thinking About Our World

I've written previously about why I give money to Hillsdale College rather than my alma mater, Columbia University.

Columbia has again earned my derision for their decision to invite the modern face of evil, the President of Iran, to speak on campus.

This is a man who thinks that Hitler's problem was that he didn't go fast enough, a man whose ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel, a man who wants to acquire nuclear weapons for this and other horrible purposes.

Despite his soft rhetoric being sucked up by gullible mainstream American media, the man would be a mass-murderer if he could. On the other hand, I'm not convinced that he is insane in the way that right-wing prognosticators often describe in the sense that his actions and probably consistent with his religious beliefs and maybe not that far from potential realization.

Some people argue that Iran is not a suicidal nation, that they would never launch an attack on Israel because they know that any retaliation would cause truly massive devastation within Iran. But if you are a rabid jihadist Muslim who believes that Israel must be destroyed and that Jews are the enemy, would you not attempt to destroy Israel and with it half the world's Jews if the resulting response still left a billion Muslims on the planet? In other words, suicide is definitely within the parameters for people like Ahmadinejad and Khameni if it came with a big enough "victory" for them.

In any case, my anger with Columbia is less with them letting this truly reprehensible person come speak to students than with their absolute hypocrisy: Columbia routinely finds ways to prevent conservative speakers or allows them to be harassed by leftist students (sadly the majority at Columbia). Columbia creates a petri dish for anti-semitic slime despite having one of the highest percentages of Jewish students in American higher education.

I listened to Ahmadinejad's talk at Columbia. Columbia President Lee Bollinger, trying to make himself look better than his poor initial decision made him look, asked Ahmadinejad some fairly hard questions, but got no real answers.

When asked "Do you or your government support the destruction of Israel?", Ahmadinejad just said "We are friends with all nations". When pushed further, he basically called Israel a terrorist nation.

When asked why he supports "further research" in to the Holocaust, he said "Well, we don't stop research in physics, do we?"

When asked why homosexuals are being executed in Iran, he said "I don't know who told you we have homosexuality in Iran. We do not have that problem."

Typical of Columbia, sadly, Ahmadinejad got about an equal mix of cheers and boos for the first two questions and only got an unequivocal negative and jeering response when he said there aren't gays in Iran.

When asked about their nuclear program, he first said that Iran only wants nuclear energy not nuclear weapons, but then said "If you are testing your 5th generation of nuclear weapons, who are you to question other nations on their nuclear programs?" Again, to much cheering from the idiot students whom I had to tolerate for my nearly 4 years at Columbia.

I certainly wish that Columbia would stop making me embarrassed to have to answer the question "Where did you go to college?" Inviting a speaker who wishes he could just be more successful than Hitler is reprehensible, earning Columbia my continued disdain and continuing to ensure that they never get a penny of my money.