... Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.

Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people—then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers' family quarters. Visited the Agriculture Department's 12,000 acre research station ("If you didn't give a turkey a passport you couldn't tell the difference between a Communist and capitalist turkey"), spoke to the National Press Club, toured Manhattan, San Francisco (where he debated Walter Reuther on Stalin's crimes before a retinue of AFL-CIO leaders, or in K's words, "capitalist lackeys"), and Los Angeles (there he supped at the 20th Century Box commissary, visited the set of the Frank Sinatra picture Can Can but to his great disappointment the premier did not get to visit Disneyland), and sat down one more with the president, at Camp David. Mrs. K did the ladies-who-lunch circuit, with Pat Nixon as guide. It's not like it was all hearts and flowers. He bellowed that America, as Time magazine reported, "must close down its worldwide deterrent bases and disarm." Reporters asked him what he'd been doing during Stalin's blood purges, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary. A banquet of 27 industrialists tried to impress upon him the merits of capitalism. Eleanor Roosevelt toured him through Hyde Park. Nelson Rockefeller rapped with him about the Bible.

Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Was the general running the country—the man who had faced down Hitler!—proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?

No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was confident, mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great. We had our neuroses, to be sure—plenty of them. But what progress we have made! Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.

Iran's president speaks at a great American university. That university's president, in the act of introducing his lecture, whines like a baby bereft of his pacifier that his guest is a big meany poopy-head. City Council members, too, and a rabbi, make like ten-year-olds, giving their press conference in front of a sign with his face struck through and the legend "Go To Hell." Up in Albany, Democratic leader Sheldon Silver treat the students of this great university like ten years olds, threatening to defund Columbia University lest censors like himself prove unable to shut the poor children's ears to difficult speech. (What, was he worried they'd be convinced, join the jihad?) Then a Republican presidential candidate chimes in—bye, bye, federalism!—saying Washington should starve the school of funds, too. American diplomats used to have the gumption to spar face to face with dreaded foreign leaders. Now they go on cable TV and whine about what a "travesty" it would have been to visit a site which properly should belong to the world. Hundreds of foreign nationals died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 (maybe even some of the Iranian!). Yet we have to systematically repress that—as if our national ego would crack like fine crystal if we were forced to acknowledge the mingling of American blood with that of mere foreigners.

But—they sputter—Ahmadinejad has has promised to wipe Israel off the map!

Well, Khrushchev had promised to wipe the U.S. off the map. ("We will bury you.") And, unlike Mr. A, who has but some possible stores of fissile material, Mr. K very much had the means, motive, and opportunity to do it—thousands of nuclear-tipped rockets aimed at every city in the land.

How cowardly our conservative Republic of Fear has made us. How we tremble at the mere touch of a challenge. It's conservatives who started it, of course. Here's what they're reading in their own media: a letter from Human Events editor Tom Winter headlined "Are You Ready for a New Dark Ages?":

Juan Cole didn't think so.

Life in the US was pretty good; we were out of Korea (although we were sending military "advisers" to Vietnam), "tailgunner" Joe McCarthy with his own version of the Inquisition was dead and a-mouldering in the ground. The US was enjoying a bout of prosperity and generally feeling pretty good about itself.

The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was still reeling from the double catastrophe of Stalin and World War II. Only a couple of years before, they had come down really hard on Hungary, so it wasn't difficult to make them look really really bad. Europe and Japan still weren't doing all that well. We were on top of the world, feeling cocky.

Would the same thing have happened 10 years later?

The Soviets had launched Sputnik in '57, Cold War tensions rose, and in July of '59 Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev had terse words during the so called Kitchen Debate in Moscow at the American trade exhibition, ending with Nixon apologizing for being a poor host. The State dinner was held after that in September.

10 years later Nixon was meeting with Mao and embarked on détente with the Soviets.

There was a time when foreign relations involved protocol. That framework, though everyone knew it was facade, facilitated relations at its best.

Asked another way, would Ike have let the President of an important nation like Iran come to the States and not meet with him, or be a good host? I think not. But who can say? What we can say is that instead of Ike we have reactionaries with derivative theories and nary an original thought or care other than polemics and power. That, is the difference. Its poisoned us and blinded us to our better interests.

Bollinger was forced into his tongue lashing, I think. I wouldn't doubt that the 'wingers' rang his phone off the hook in between ring throughs from the WH staff. I haven't read this and don't know this for a fact. But it fits contemporary style.

.02

that the head of one of the world's better thought of academic institutions set such a shoddy example as to bow to such pressure.

I'd rather think he was just incompetent [edited to add - what I should have said is - competence aside, I'd rather he was speaking from his convictions] rather than someone who, lacking an ethical keel, sets his academic jib to the prevailing winds. History is rife with these, like German academics before WWII, and it doesn't treat them at all nicely.

But you may be right; I don't know.

we have to realize that Mr. A isn't the Iranian head of state, that would go to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. I don't expect to see him here any time soon. Iran might as well fuss about Henry Paulson visiting.

As an aside, aren't there some who hold that Nixon was maneuvered by China into meeting with Mao? I don't recall the details, but Nixon probably wasn't the statesman that he's sometimes held up to be.

Ottawa Citizen, Dan Gardner, September 26

Among the protesters who gathered to denounce the Iranian president and the university that invited him to speak, one man held a sign that read: "A man of lies does not belong in a place of truth." It is tempting to agree, but it is at precisely moments like this that we need to remind ourselves of the words of John Stuart Mill.

"The peculiar evil of silencing an expression of an opinion is that it robs the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation," wrote the great champion of liberty. "If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity to exchange error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit -- the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

The "collision with error" is essential to truth's vitality, Mill insisted. Without it, "the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost or enfeebled." Unchallenged by falsehood, the truth will continue to be accepted by people but only "in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds." No longer will it be a "real and heartfelt conviction from reason or personal experience."

What happened two days ago at Columbia was a living demonstration of the wisdom of Mill's words. "Look at the reaction," a Columbia student named Ellen Miller told a reporter from Salon, gesturing to the mass of protesters around her. She, like many others, supported the university's invitation. "These groups would not have come together and come out like this and protested if there hadn't been this event on campus."

By inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Columbia University, Lee Bollinger created a "collision with error" that has given us all a "clearer perception and livelier impression of the truth." For that, and for the courage it took to do it, the world is in his debt.
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'No homosexuality here'

The Iranian president's claims are difficult to sustain, faced with a centuries-old tradition of homoerotic themes in Persian and Arabic literature.

By Brian Whitaker, September 25, Guardian

President Ahmadinejad was greeted with laughter and cries of disbelief when he told students and staff at Columbia University: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals. In Iran we don't have this phenomenon. I don't know who has told you we have it."

Coming at a time of political tension with the US, these silly remarks from the Iranian president have caught the headlines. They are not really news, though; political leaders in most countries of the Middle East would say the same thing if asked.

I came across the "no homosexuality here" attitude many times while researching my book about gay and lesbian life in the region. Some concede that a few gay people do exist but claim they are victims of western influence, since homosexuality is a "foreign" phenomenon.

The scorn heaped on Ahmadinejad at Columbia is somewhat ironic, however, considering that one of the university's own professors, Joseph Massad, has been peddling a similar line for years. His latest book, Desiring Arabs (which I reviewed here), was published by the normally-sensible Chicago University Press.

According to Massad, pressure for gay rights in the Middle East is the result of a "missionary" campaign orchestrated by what he calls the "Gay International".

"It is the very discourse of the Gay International which produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist," he writes (pp 162-3).

Such claims are difficult to sustain, faced with a centuries-old tradition of homoerotic themes in Persian and Arabic literature and jokes in popular culture.

Almost every country in the Middle East has at least one town - Idlib in Syria, for example - which has become the subject of jokes about its supposedly homosexual inhabitants. In Iran, it's Qazvin - a town whose reputation dates back more than 600 years to the time when Obeid e Zakani, a bawdy poet and satirist, lived there.

Since the Islamic revolution in Iran, there have been strenuous but not always successful efforts to bury this past. Of all the Muslim countries, Iran at the moment is probably the most active in persecuting gay people. This probably has less to do with religion than local political and cultural factors.

Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, authors of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, argue that this was a reaction - at least in part - to sexual behaviour in the Shah's court. They refer to "a long tradition in nationalist movements of consolidating power through narratives that affirm patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, attributing sexual abnormality and immorality to a corrupt ruling elite that is about to be overthrown and/or is complicit with foreign imperialism".
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_{1."George Washington did not cross the Delaware for Capitalism," -Shmuley Boteach.
2.The Dems haven't punished the GOP enough, so you're going to reward the Republicans?}

Accidents will happen.

Google texas + minor + execution.

Google "amnesty international" + criticism + Gitmo

Google "velvet revolution" + american + covert + support

Or go here to ABC's report.

Google "wiped off the map" + controversy + Farsi + translation, or click here.

He may have pushed everyone's American Patriotism buttons, but frankly - far from competently executing the trivial task of building a rock-solid case against Ahmadenijad, he largely blew his own foot off with namecalling, easily boomeranged accusations and jingoism. It was an incredibly sloppy performance for someone in his position, and believe me - his students are sharp enough to have noticed.

I'll agree that the Q&A session itself was no great shucks and that I expected more from a university president. But it was this statement that made me proud:

...to be clear on another matter - this event has nothing whatsoever to do with any “rights” of the speaker but only with our rights to listen and speak. We do it for ourselves.

Heaven knows, we've had too much of the opposite lately.

- eom

one the right wingers will completely forget about in their rush to demonize Iran.

Transcript: Ahmadinejad's Speech at Columbia University

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/202820.php

oops, Tina found one first, as usual:-)

_{1."George Washington did not cross the Delaware for Capitalism," -Shmuley Boteach.
2.The Dems haven't punished the GOP enough, so you're going to reward the Republicans?}