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EILEEN SMOLYAR: Criticism defeats purpose of invite
by Eileen Smolyar
Columnists | 10/2/07
Posted online at 9:49 PM EST on 10/1/07
/ Last updated at 2:48 AM EST on 10/1/07
On Monday, Sept. 24, I was mad. Two days after the second-holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, Columbia University had invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to express his views in a "free speech" type debate. The president of Iran is known for denouncing the Holocaust as a myth, calling for the destruction of Israel and supplying Iraqi insurgents with Iranian weapons to kill and wound American soldiers. Just two days after listening to my rabbi list sins you should redeem yourself for, I could not help but wonder which ones Ahmadinejad did not commit.
Ahmadinejad's visit took the place of a visit from the leader of the Minuteman Project, an organization seeking to secure U.S. borders, going so far as to create fences and to patrol the border in search of illegal immigrants. The decision to allow one speaker over the other was unusual since the leader of an all-American organization wasn't allowed to speak, yet the leader of a nation that exports terrorism was. Yet, some stated that even Hitler would have been allowed to speak if he had requested the forum prior to the invasion of Poland.
So, on that heart-racing morning , I woke up early to turn on TV news stations to find out what time the president of Iran would speak in case I had time to watch it. No stations mentioned when the president would speak, and neither did they explain if it would be televised or shown later.
The most tantalizing bit of information I found was that the president was staying at a hotel across from the Jewish Heritage Museum. How could the media devote more time to Britney Spears' umpteenth drug overdose and not cover the simplest details concerning this monumental and uncharacteristic invitation by an Ivy League university? Rather than focus on the event's logistics, the media mocked the speaker and Columbia's intentions for inviting him in the first place.
Although much less a controversial figure than Ahmadinejad, former President Jimmy Carter's visit to Brandeis last year to discuss his points of views in his published work Palestine: Peace not Apartheid was thoroughly organized at least several days before the actual visit. Included in the visit were prescreened questions asked by Brandeis students, followed by Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School.
Ahmadinejad's visit took the place of a visit from the leader of the Minuteman Project, an organization seeking to secure U.S. borders, going so far as to create fences and to patrol the border in search of illegal immigrants. The decision to allow one speaker over the other was unusual since the leader of an all-American organization wasn't allowed to speak, yet the leader of a nation that exports terrorism was. Yet, some stated that even Hitler would have been allowed to speak if he had requested the forum prior to the invasion of Poland.
So, on that heart-racing morning , I woke up early to turn on TV news stations to find out what time the president of Iran would speak in case I had time to watch it. No stations mentioned when the president would speak, and neither did they explain if it would be televised or shown later.
The most tantalizing bit of information I found was that the president was staying at a hotel across from the Jewish Heritage Museum. How could the media devote more time to Britney Spears' umpteenth drug overdose and not cover the simplest details concerning this monumental and uncharacteristic invitation by an Ivy League university? Rather than focus on the event's logistics, the media mocked the speaker and Columbia's intentions for inviting him in the first place.
Although much less a controversial figure than Ahmadinejad, former President Jimmy Carter's visit to Brandeis last year to discuss his points of views in his published work Palestine: Peace not Apartheid was thoroughly organized at least several days before the actual visit. Included in the visit were prescreened questions asked by Brandeis students, followed by Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School.
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