Afrah Jamal

Published in THE POST SEP 29, 2007 “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 real dangers inherent in such ideas”; Lee C. Bollinger, President Columbia University pointed out, as he launched into a 19 minute invective against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; the speaker for World Leaders Forum, held at Columbia University on 24 September 2007; thus sparking the controversy that Ahmadinejad had been expected to ferment. While these words illustrated the sentiments of the university administration, they were merely a sample of the brutal character assassination that followed soon after. Lee Bollinger may have been just a professor and the University’s President, as he put it but his diatribe lacked the finesse expected of an academics or the decorum exhibited by Americans on global platforms. He did, however, attack...