Columbia's Infamy

Armin Rosen, The Columbia Spectator:

But while these principles might hold that every idea is legitimate enough to be, in Bollinger’s words, “sharply challenged,” it would be pitifully myopic to believe that “sharp challenge” is wholly divorced from context. The world was aghast at Ahmadinejad’s “Holocaust denial conference” in December of 2006. But by designating the Iranian president’s denial of the Holocaust as a point open to critical examination (“sharp challenge”), our president is hosting a Holocaust denial conference of his own, and he is placing the most abstract principles of intellectual openness ahead of whatever basic sense of decency tells you not to play the enabler for someone who is actively working to kill and injure American soldiers, who executes homosexuals and persecutes minority groups like the Ba’hai, and who promulgates Holocaust denial. Inconveniently for Bollinger (and for his legacy as president), it is not a faceless intellect that will speak to us today, but rather the murderous president of a country of 50 million people.

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