It was so amazing to see that pathetic spectacle at Columbia from the sycophantic President onward. It was what my mother used to call "Lynch Mob Discourse".
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First of all, from a pure intelligence point of view, when you make caricatures of your supposed enemy, when you isolate the supposed enemy from speaking, you cut yourself off from vital intelligence about intentions and capabilities that saves lives in possible war and/or may prevent war altogether.
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Secondly, Columbia University has had all sorts of very odious dictators and outright war criminals like Kissinger speak and never once, before the guy has even spoken, had the president of Columbia denounce him with personal attacks and even caricature/denounce/assert what he was about to say in advance of the person even actually saying it.
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Thirdly, at an educational institution, supposedly about debates between contenting points of view, why not turn it into a learning moment? On the Nazi Holocaust for example, first get him to say what he actually and really thinks and feels--not a presumed caricature of it--and then counter any errors or historical revisionism with concrete data, pictures, witnesses, experts etc on the spot. But let us really get real here. Holocaust denial can take various forms and not just the form of an assertion that the Nazi Holocaust did not occur. Another form is to diminish or rank-order the victims (or even Holocausts and genocides themselves)--just as the nazis did--into those worthy of remembrance and those not. So not only did the Nazi Holocaust occur, but it included not only Jews, but Sinti-Roma (so-called "Gypsies") Homosexuals, Trade Unionists, Communists, Socialists, Peoples of Conscience and Faith, Slavic Peoples, Disabled, POWs--alll were targets of Naziism for extermination and no one group of victims is more or less important than any other. It was nazis that rank-ordered human beings into "Leben su wertes leben" or life unworthy of life (and sufferings unworthy of remembrance versus those worthy of remembrance). It does not diminish respect for the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust to mention and remember all victims and indeed all Holocausts--indeed that itself is very Jewish. And it is true that some Zionists cynically use the Nazi Holocaust for their own polemical and political purposes just as it is a matter of historical fact that some Zionists outright collaborated with Nazis seeing a harmony of interests between Nazis who wanted Jews gone from Europe and Zionists who wanted some Jews (not all Jews--not socialists, not old, not secular Jews) in Palestine.
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Fourthly, the rest of the world is really sick of US hypocrisy, bullying, posturing and arrogance and just naked imperialism and terrorism. It simply undermines rather than enhances the "national security" of the U.S. and the security of the whole world. Here the U.S., the only nation to actually use nuclear weapons, and the only nation to outright threaten use of nuclear weapons against poor nations without nuclear weapons (China, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba), saying nothing about Israel (with a declared 'Samson Option" to take out the whole world if threatened )or Pakistan or Britain or France or other nations, yet summarily declaring that Iran is lying about intending to build nuclear weapons, and indeed really intends nuclear weapons, and that the U.S., acting outside the UN if necessary, will stop Iran with another preemptive war of the kind that Nazis were hanged for at Nuremberg. Another form of Holocaust denial is to deny the binding precedents of Nuremberg and that they apply to us as well as others.
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Fifthly all these idiots with signs saying Ahmadinejad is another Hitler diminsh the real evil and massive carnage of Hitler and thus promote another form of Holocaust denial or equivocation. In fact, if you look at Ahmadinejad's personal history, as an intelligence officer in the 7 1/2 year Iraq-Iran War that Iraq started and conducted with U.S. urging and assistance, that cost over 1 1/2 million casualties, during which the U.s. gave Saddam Hussein satellite intelligence they did not even give the Israelis, then frankly Ahmadinejad had probably more reasons to be angry and call the U.S. a terrorist State than the reverse.
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Sixthly, the Iranians are not stupid. given the demographics of Iraq, with 65% of the population Shiite, they have more of a vested interest in truly free elections in Iraq (not the case in the elections that brought in the present government as Islamacist political parties were forbidden from running in the election) than in the present carnage in Iraq that is causing spillover and destabilizing effects in the whole region as well as on them directly next door. Those who say they have the "evidence" that Iran is fomenting and arming the insurgency are the ones who said they had the "evidence" of WMD and 9-11 from Saddam Hussein.
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Seventh, if Ahmadinejad is so cazy and evil, then that is precisely when he should be given the most open forum with enough rope to hang and self-impeach himself. Let us all see up-close what has been alleged about him. Censorship comes from those usually too stupid, cowardly, uneducated and unprincipled to answer that which they purport--always under the best of rationales--to answer. No, what the U.S. government is afraid of is that maybe the guy might just make some sense. Maybe a caricature has been made of him by those who are the real terrorists, Holocaust deniers, tyrrants etc. And I just love it that Ahmadinejad's homophobic remarks are criticized by real homophobes in the Republican party who play that card for their frightened moron base whenever possible.
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In his "The Russia House" the central character is an Englishman named Barley Scott Blair who is a drunken cynic against blind nationalism and who has inherited and pissed away a publishing house that publishes some Russian works. While on a drunken spree at a dacha in Russia that he has his own love for and illusions about, he says:
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"If there is to be hope, we must all 'betray' our country; we have to save each other because all victims are equal and none is more equal than others. It is everyone's duty to start the avalanche. Nowadays you have to think like a hero just to behave like a merely decent human being."
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Or as Tom Paine put it: "The world is my country; all men [sic] are my bretheren; and doing good is my religion."
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