BDS at Columbia

Just perusing the usual sources, I ran across an article at The Weekly Standard this afternoon by John McCormack entitled “Columbia’s Concern” about a group of professors at Columbia University who’ve expressed their “concern” about the tone of University President Bollinger when he had the opportunity to question the president of the Islamic Republic, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back on September 24th. Their letter to the university president reads in part;

3) The president’s address on the occasion of President Ahmadinejad‘s visit has sullied the reputation of the University with its strident tone, and has abetted a climate in which incendiary speech prevails over open debate. The president’s introductory remarks were not only uncivil and bad pedagogy, they allied the University with the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, a position anathema to many in the University community.

4) In the name of the University, the president has publicly taken partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East in particular, without apparent expertise in this area or consultation with faculty who teach and undertake research in this area. His conflation of his own political position with that of the University is unacceptable.

At the New York Sun link is also a list of the numerous professors who signed this letter back on Novemebr 12th, in case anyone is interested. The real intellectual vacancy here is the line that accuses Bollinger of aligning with the Bush Administration simply by asking tough questions of the half-pint mahdi-worshipper. Excuse me?

Well, over at the Huffington Post, Alan Dershowitz explains it;

It all seems so inconsistent unless you understand what the real agenda is, and then everything becomes completely clear and totally consistent. The agenda is Israel. If you’re against Israel — as Matory, Foner, and their ilk are — then they want you to have complete freedom to speak against the Jewish state (as they certainly should and do). If, on the other hand, you’re perceived as pro-Israel (or pro-American, for that matter), then suddenly you have no right to free speech. It is so transparently cynical that I’m amazed that any reasonable person actually falls for it.

Well, Alan, were not talking about reasonable people. Eric Foner is the guy who wrote “He’s the Worst Ever“, the Washington Post piece last December explaining why Leftist history professors want to impress upon us that President Bush is the worst president in our history – the article the Left drags out everytime they want to show us their authority for making such an idiotic claim – it ends with this line;

It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050. But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history.

McCormack writes that about 60 Columbia professors have come to Bollinger’s defense;

Bollinger’s defenders appear to have most liberal foreign policy observers on their side, according to Andrew Grotto, a senior national security analyst at the left-wing Center for American Progress. Grotto says it’s simply a fact that Iran is “financing and cooperating” with “certain Shia insurgent groups” in Iraq. “I’m not aware of any serious debate that Iran is not meddling in Iraq,” he says.

“Serious” is the operative word in that sentence, of course. Grotto is a critic of the Bush administration, but he says, “We need a serious debate about Iran policy, and we can’t have that unless we’re pretty straight on the facts.” Grotto also thinks it’s unproductive for people to argue that “if Bush says it, it must be false.”

So I guess Columbia nor the entire Left are completely awash in BDS. But to simply state that criticism of the Islamic Republic should not be allowed because it is a political position is incredibly intellectually vacant. Has Foner or his fellow boneheads seen what goes on in Iraq and Iran? Or are they just being willfully blind.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Politics, Terror War