Columbia University Welcomes the Man Who Would Finish Hitler's Work

A student asked me if there is anybody I would want to see banned from speaking at Tyndale or if I think freedom of speech is absolute. My answer was that yes, there are speakers who should be banned from Tyndale.

If students want someone to protest, there are plenty of opportunities.

For example, just the other day I came across this article by Mona Charon, which talks about how Columbia University has "Oops, done it again." It is once again hosting Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he is in town to speak at the United Nations General Assembly.

And some students, at least a few in the student newspaper anyway, are protesting. Good on them. Charon writes in the National Journal:

The Columbia Spectator is the student newspaper at Columbia University, the school I was once proud to call my alma mater. A report in that newspaper raises the following question: Are leading American universities producing moral illiterates?

According to the Spectator, a group of students who are members of a group called CIRCA, the Columbia International Relations Council and Association, has been invited to attend a private dinner with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he travels to New York for the United Nations General Assembly meeting next week. A student spokesman for the group, asked if the invitation provoked controversy within CIRCA, seemed surprised by the question. “Everyone was really enthusiastic,” said Tim Chan. “They’re thrilled to have this opportunity.”

Ahmadinejad represents everything that campus liberals profess to hate. In order of importance, those things would be: (1) persecuting homosexuals; (2) cruel and abusive treatment of women; (3) brutal treatment of minorities; (4) shooting opponents of the regime in the streets; (5) restricting free speech; (6) building nuclear weapons; and (7) sponsoring terror worldwide. Tehran provides material and moral support for Bashar Assad’s murderous regime in Syria, which has mowed down protesters by the thousands in the past few months. The Iranian regime is also guilty of fetid anti-Semitism, and has the blood of many American soldiers who served in Iraq on its hands — though it isn’t clear that the latter two offenses rate very highly with Columbia students.

Even as members of CIRCA were eagerly anticipating dining with one of the world’s true fiends, the Iranian government was refusing to release American hikers Shane Bauer and Joshua Fattal, who were recently convicted of espionage after a secret trial and sentenced to eight years in prison. Both Bauer and Fattal are graduates of Berkeley, and believers — if you can extrapolate from their backgrounds in “sustainable development” and freelance photography for leftist outlets like Democracy Now! — in liberal causes. Even if members of CIRCA feel no particular solidarity with the hikers as fellow Americans, they might at least feel something for fellow members of the liberal clerisy. But apparently not.

College students are old enough to be responsible for their own moral decision-making, but the faculty and administration of Columbia University certainly provided an appalling example in 2007 when they invited Ahmadinejad to speak.

It is, shall we say, problematic, that Columbia thinks this Jew-hating, holocaust-denying, anti-Western instrument of a totalitarian theocracy is a lovely dinner guest. Why would they think so? Charon nails it in the final paragraphs of her article:

Something is inoculating Ahmadinejad from the total contempt members of the university community would ordinarily feel toward someone with his views and his behavior. . . .

My suspicion is that the harshly adversarial pose of the university toward American society and culture leads to a misplaced benefit of the doubt toward enemies of this country. It is Ahmadinejad’s very hatred of the U.S. that makes him intriguing to Columbia.

This is an excellent example of how blind people have become as a result of the anti-Western, anti-Zionism, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-colonialism, anti-patriarchy, anti-Catholic, anti-Tradition propaganda that almost totally dominates most secular universities today. Just because Muslim fanatics are anti-Western, they are treated as allies by the Left. It is just like Jane Fonda going to Hanoi and calling America evil during the Vietnam War. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The answer to the student newspaper's question above is: "Yes, leading universities are turning out moral illiterates." Here we see the results. Bow to dictators and haters; attack and ban those who would stand up to them. The problem with Columbia is that George W. Bush would be protested and Ahmadinejad gets a pass. It is the mindset that sees this as normal that I see as the problem. We are talking about radically different worldviews here.

What unites radical Islamists, anarchists, Marxists, radical Feminists etc. is the conviction that Western civilization and Christianity are evil and must be destroyed. You can see it in the sexual revolution, which is an assault on the family. You can see it in the way the Obama administration refuses to hold Islamic extremism accountable. You can see it in the way the Left treats Israel.

As the writer of Ecclesiastes might well have said, "There is a time to protest and a time to keep silent."