Free-Speech Lee grills Johnnie

To make up for the disgrace of inviting Johnnie to Columbia, Lee Bollinger, leftist idiot, opened the event with a series of blistering, extremely insulting questions directed at the Iranian president. So now Free-Speech Lee has it both ways: he gets kudos for his “courage” in inviting Second-Holocaust Johnnie to Columbia, and he gets kudos for his “courage” in challenging and personally insulting his guest, with comments like, “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” which turns Johnnie almost into a victim. Better Bollinger should not have had him at Columbia at all. Civilized men do not invite people they regard as “petty and cruel dictators” to be their guests.

This is typical liberal behavior, outlined with surgical precision by James Burnham over 40 years ago in Suicide of the West. The liberal, constitutionally uncomfortable with the use of power in defense of his country, veers between appeasement of enemies, and clumsy, exaggerated aggression toward enemies.

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Update: Notwithstanding my contempt for Lee Bollinger, I must, to be fair, give him credit for holding Johnnie’s feet to the fire on the Hitler’s war against the Jews:

“You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated,” Bollinger told Ahmadinejad about the leader’s Holocaust denial. “Will you cease this outrage?”

It is an excellent thing for Johnnie to be roundly contradicted on this point. It’s so rare for any leader (or almost anyone in this Age of Self-Esteem) to be told to his face that he’s wrong. Frankly, I didn’t think Free-Speech Lee had it in him.

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Update: Here is more on the cross-currents of Bollinger’s attempt to redeem himself, or to cover his rear, depending on how you see it, by Lisa Schiffren (who has apparently gone back to school) writing at the Corner:

Just came from the Columbia campus, where a shocking number of my classmates skipped out on discussion section to go watch the show. In the SIPA lobby I joined a hundred and some other people watching Bollinger on closed circuit TV. There was a certain amount of cheering as he made his hard hitting points. A few students seemed to think that he was redeeming himself. About half the room burst into spontaneous applause when he finished. I personally did not. I thought that he was being a tough guy—even though I liked the content of the rhetoric—to compensate for what he had done by inviting Ahmadinajad.

When A’jad began by complaining that basic Iranian manners precluded inviting a guest then lecturing him harshly, to inoculate yourself from press criticism, I did NOT join the other half of the students, who burst into spontaneous applause and cheering. But I thought A’jad won that round against Bollinger—who needs a haircut.

Schiffren thus correctly acknowledges that Bollinger said some worthwhile things, while she also correctly recognizes that they should never have had to be said, because Bollinger should not have let Johnnie come to the campus in the first place. (Note also the conveniently shortened form of the Iranian president’s name that Schiffren and others at the Corner are using.)

Update: Powerline in a blog entry entitled “Columbia’s disgrace, part 11” quotes Hugh Hewett on Lee Bollinger’s opening speech today in his debate with Johnnie. Hewitt handles well the question of whether Bollinger should be praised for attacking Johnnie, given that it would be better had the event not taken place at all. See also Powerline’s quote of William F. Buckley from 1963 concerning a similar incident at Yale.

Update: To boil down the absurdity of Bollinger’s position: If you invite a person to come to your university as your guest to have a debate with you, you treat that person civilly. But if you regard that person as so wrong or as such a bad person that you feel compelled to insult him before he even speaks, then you should not have him as your guest and you should not be debating with him, but rather you should be denouncing him from afar. Bollinger wanted it both ways. He is a fool.

Update: Stanley Kurtz draws an interesting parallel between the debate over Johnnie’s appearance at Columbia and the debate William Buckley initiated at Yale in 1962 over an invitation to Communist Gus Hall.

Update: Kurtz rounds out the point:

[I]n order to turn back legitimate criticism of his decision, Bollinger had to act in such a way as to reveal its folly. Everything Bollinger said was by way of admitting that a civil discussion with Ahmadinejad was impossible. Columbia may not have rescinded its invitation, and that was indeed a bad ending of sorts. Yet the open contradiction between Bollinger’s invitation and the thrust of his own remarks was the next best thing to the Gus Hall solution.

In other words, by treating his invited guest so rudely, Bollinger was in effect rescinding the invitation and treating Johnnie as a person with whom one cannot have a rational discussion. It’s the typical liberal thing. The liberal refuses to recognize the existence of an enemy until after the damage has already been done. The liberal can never recognize the existence of the enemy beforehand and thus avoid the whole problem, because such recognition would require a rational/noetic insight into the reality of evil and enemies, which would make one a non-liberal. But the liberal is allowed to recognize the existence of the enemy prudentially, as a result of being hit on the head with it, as a result of experience not of principled thought, because such prudential response does not challenge liberalism.

Update: Bollinger’s insults of his invited guest, the president of Iran, are now stirring up support for Johnnie in his country. A New York attorney and Columbia Law alumnus writes to Powerline:

I am delighted to watch Columbia squirm at being called imperialistic cowboys, since heaven knows that they used this term to smear those who disagreed with them in at least half of my classes. However, only ivory tower academics could have actually managed to find a third alternative that was worse than either disinviting him or giving him a platform. This will turn into such a media victory for him at home that it will make the Oxford Union Debate look like a victory for the West. Bollinger should be congratulated for destroying internal dissent in Iran and solidifying the present regime in a way that I thought could only be done by a large scale bombing campaign. I hear North Korea is shaky right now too. Perhaps Bollinger should have Kim Jong-il over to speak as well.

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Stephen F. writes:

I’ve been thinking about this issue of “free speech” and how it’s distorted in a liberal society, in which freedom to “express opinions” is righteously defended, to the benefit of enemies of the traditional society or to the society itself (e.g. Johnnie), while serious traditionalist/conservative challenges to liberalism are shunned, mocked, and suppressed.

Remember how Bush himself, faced with criticism, always says, completely unseriously, “others have a different opinion … I respect that,” whether the critic is an enemy of America, an enemy of Bush or his party, or a thoughtful loyal opponent. In none of these cases does he respond to the substance of the criticism or the nature of the critic/enemy. Instead, he intones piously that America is about respecting free speech! It’s not just Bush … it’s a real pattern in our society. Just because we’ve been able to allow the occasional offensive KKK demonstration without much harm done, we imagine speech can never be harmful, can never be an act of war. Just as democracy is supposed to lead to civilized societies without any struggle on our part, free speech is supposed to always benefit civilization.

In any case, the way the Ahmadinejad’s visit is now being spun by our enemies, including those lovely reporters for the Associated Press with Muslim names, shows the ghastly results of Bollinger’s invitation.

Johnnie gets to look like the reasonable one, the forbearing victim of bullying. This incident provides an important lesson for us.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 24, 2007 06:21 PM | Send