[NYTr] Ahmadinejad: Columbia Pres Bollinger's Introductory Remarks

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Columbia University's website (thanks to G for sending)
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/07/09/lcbopeningremarks.html

President Lee C. Bollinger's Introductory Remarks at 
SIPA-World Leaders Forum with President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Sept. 24, 2007

I would like to begin by thanking Dean John Coatsworth and Professor
Richard Bulliet for their work in organizing this event and for their
commitment to the role of the School of International and Public
Affairs and its role in training future leaders in world affairs.  If
today proves anything it will be that there is an enormous amount of
work ahead for all of us.  This is just one of many events on Iran that
will run throughout this academic year, all to help us better
understand this critical and complex nation in today's geopolitics.

Before speaking directly to the current President of Iran, I have a few
critically important points to emphasize.

First, since 2003, the World Leaders Forum has advanced  Columbia's
longstanding tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate,
especially on global issues. It should never be thought that merely to
listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those
ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our
naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a
critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the
dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold
otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

Second, to those who believe that this event never should have
happened, that it is inappropriate for the University to conduct such
an event, I want to say that I understand your perspective and respect
it as reasonable.  The scope of free speech and academic freedom should
itself always be open to further debate.  As one of the more famous
quotations about free speech goes, it is "an experiment, as all life is
an experiment." I want to say, however, as forcefully as I can, that
this is the right thing to do and, indeed, it is required by existing
norms of free speech, the American university, and Columbia itself.

Third, to those among us who experience hurt and pain as a result of
this day, I say on behalf of all of us we are sorry and wish to do what
we can to alleviate it.

Fourth, 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.

We do it in the great tradition of openness that has defined this
nation for many decades now.  We need to understand the world we live
in, neither neglecting its glories nor shrinking from its threats and
dangers.  It is consistent with the idea that one should know thine
enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the
mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right
temperament.  In the moment, the arguments for free speech will never
seem to match the power of the arguments against, but what we must
remember is that this is precisely because free speech asks us to
exercise extraordinary self- restraint against the very natural but
often counter-productive impulses that lead us to retreat from
engagement with ideas we dislike and fear.  In this lies the genius of
the American idea of free speech.

Lastly, in universities, we have a deep and almost single-minded
commitment to pursue the truth.  We do not have access to the levers of
power.  We cannot make war or peace.  We can only make minds.  And to
do this we must have the most full freedom of inquiry.

Let me now turn to Mr. Ahmadinejad.

THE BRUTAL CRACKDOWN ON SCHOLARS, JOURNALISTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATES

Over the last two weeks, your government has released Dr. Haleh
Esfandiari and Parnaz Axima; and just two days ago Kian Tajbakhsh, a
graduate of Columbia with a PhD in urban planning.  While our community
is relieved to learn of his release on bail, Dr. Tajbakhsh remains in
Teheran, under house arrest, and he still does not know whether he will
be charged with a crime or allowed to leave the country.  Let me say
this for the record, I call on the President today to ensure that Kian
Tajbaksh will be free to travel out of Iran as he wishes. Let me also
report today that we are extending an offer to Dr. Tajbaksh to join our
faculty as a visiting professor in urban planning here at his Alma
Mater, in our Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and
Preservation.  And we hope he will be able to join us next semester.

The arrest and imprisonment of these Iranian Americans for no good
reason is not only unjustified, it runs completely counter to the very
values that allow today's speaker to even appear on this campus.

But at least they are alive.

According to Amnesty International, 210 people have been executed in
Iran so far this year - 21 of them on the morning of September 5th
alone.  This annual total includes at least two children - further
proof, as Human Rights Watch puts it, that Iran leads the world in
executing minors.

There is more.

Iran hanged up to 30 people this past July and August during a widely
reported suppression of efforts to establish a more open, democratic
society in Iran.  Many of these executions were carried out in public
view, a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights, to which Iran is a party.

These executions and others have coincided with a wider crackdown on
student activists and academics accused of trying to foment a so-called
"soft revolution".  This has included jailing and forced retirements of
scholars.  As Dr. Esfandiari said in a broadcast interview since her
release, she was held in solitary confinement for 105 days because the
government "believes that the United States . . . is planning a Velvet
Revolution" in Iran.

In this very room last year we learned something about Velvet
Revolutions from Vaclav Havel. And we will likely hear the same from
our World Leaders Forum speaker this evening - President Michelle
Bachelet Jeria of Chile. Both of their extraordinary stories remind us
that there are not enough prisons to prevent an entire society that
wants its freedom from achieving it.

We at this university have not been shy to protest and challenge the
failures of our own government to live by these values; and we won't be
shy in criticizing yours.

Let's, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President you exhibit all
the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.

And so I ask you:

Why have women, members of the Baha'i faith, homosexuals and so many of
our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country?

Why in a letter last week to the Secretary General of the UN did Akbar
Gangi, Iran's leading political dissident, and over 300 public
intellectuals, writers and Nobel Laureates express such grave concern
that your inflamed dispute with the West is distracting the world's
attention from the intolerable conditions your regime has created
within Iran?  In particular, the use of the Press Law to ban writers
for criticizing the ruling system.

Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for
change?

In our country, you are interviewed by our press and asked that you to
speak here today.  And while my colleague at the Law School Michael
Dorf spoke to Radio Free Europe [sic, Voice of America] viewers in Iran
a short while ago on the tenets of freedom of speech in this country, I
propose going further than that. Let me lead a delegation of students
and faculty from Columbia to address your university about free speech,
with the same freedom we afford you today?  Will you do that?

THE DENIAL OF THE HOLOCAUST

In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the
Holocaust as a "fabricated" "legend."  One year later, you held a
two-day conference of Holocaust deniers.

For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda.

When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply,
ridiculous.  You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly
uneducated.

You should know that Columbia is a world center of Jewish studies and
now, in partnership with the YIVO Institute, of Holocaust studies.
Since the 1930s, we've provided an intellectual home for countless
Holocaust refugees and survivors and their children and grandchildren.
The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human
history.

Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments about
the "debate" over the Holocaust both defy historical truth and make all
of us who continue to fear humanity's capacity for evil shudder at this
closure of memory, which is always virtue's first line of defense.

Will you cease this outrage?

THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL

Twelve days ago, you said that the state of Israel "cannot continue its
life."  This echoed a number of inflammatory statements you have
delivered in the last two years, including in October 2005 when you
said that Israel should be "wiped off the map."

Columbia has over 800 alumni currently living in Israel.  As an
institution we have deep ties with our colleagues there.  I personally
have spoken out in the most forceful terms against proposals to boycott
Israeli scholars and universities, saying that such boycotts might as
well include Columbia.  More than 400 college and university presidents
in this country have joined in that statement.  My question, then, is:
Do you plan on wiping us off the map, too?

FUNDING TERRORISM

According to reports by the Council on Foreign Relations, it's well
documented that Iran is a state sponsor of terror that funds such
violent group as the Lebanese Hezbollah, which Iran helped organize in
the 1980s, the Palestinian Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

While your predecessor government was instrumental in providing the US
with intelligence and base support in its 2001 campaign against the
Taliban in Afghanistan, your government is now undermining American
troops in Iraq by funding, arming, and providing safe transit to
insurgent leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr and his forces.

There are a number of reports that also link your government with
Syria's efforts to destabalize the fledgling Lebanese government
through violence and political assassination.

My question is this:  Why do you support well-documented terrorist
organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the
Middle East, destroying lives and civil society in the region?

PROXY WAR AGAINST U.S. TROOPS IN IRAQ

In a briefing before the National Press Club earlier this month,
General David Petraeus reported that arms supplies from Iran, including
240mm rockets and explosively formed projectiles, are contributing to
"a sophistication of attacks that would by no means be possible without
Iranian support."

A number of Columbia graduates and current students are among the brave
members of our military who are serving or have served in Iraq and
Afghanistan.  They, like other Americans with sons, daughters, fathers,
husbands and wives serving in combat, rightly see your government as
the enemy.

Can you tell them and us why Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq by
arming Shi'a militia targeting and killing U.S. troops?

FINALLY, IRAN'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM AND INTERNATIONAL SANCTIONS

This week the United Nations Security Council is contemplating
expanding sanctions for a third time because of your government's
refusal to suspend its uranium-enrichment program.  You continue to
defy this world body by claiming a right to develop peaceful nuclear
power, but this hardly withstands scrutiny when you continue to issue
military threats to neighbors.  Last week, French President Sarkozy
made clear his lost patience with your stall tactics; and even Russia
and China have shown concern.

Why does your country continue to refuse to adhere to international
standards for nuclear weapons verification in defiance of agreements
that you have made with the UN nuclear agency?  And why have you chosen
to make the people of your country vulnerable to the effects of
international economic sanctions and threaten to engulf the world with
nuclear annihilation?

Let me close with this comment.  Frankly, and in all candor, Mr.

President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to
answer these questions.  But your avoiding them will in itself be
meaningful to us.

I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so
much of what you say and do.  Fortunately, I am told by experts on your
country, that this only further undermines your position in Iran with
all the many good-hearted, intelligent citizens there.  A year ago, I
am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this
country (as in your meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations) so
embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party's
defeat in the December mayoral elections.  May this do that and more.

I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I
feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express
the revulsion at what you stand for.  I only wish I could do better.

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