School of the Absurd
Friday 28 September 2007 @ 9:57 am

School of the Absurd
Responsible debate and crass propaganda.
September 27, 2007
By Victor Davis Hanson

Have American academics lost their collective minds?

This week, Columbia University allowed Iran’s loony President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be a lecturer on its campus.

In the circus that followed, Ahmadinejad weighed in on everything from Israel to homosexuals, and came off, as expected, like a petty bigot. All the same, by his very presence on an Ivy League stage, Ahmadinejad showed the world that a top American university considers his odious views worth showcasing.

Ahmadinejad has denied the first Holocaust and all but promised a second one. His country’s government is on its way to having a nuclear bomb, sends Iranian terrorists into Iraq to kill American soldiers and customarily jails journalists, and expels politically active students from their universities.

But all that apparently still earned Ahmadinejad his publicity coup — and occasional applause from the Columbia audience.

Yet in this time of war, Columbia won’t allow our own Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) on its campus.

One wonders whether Columbia would have invited Hitler as well. Don’t laugh — a foolish dean did indeed announce two days before Ahmadinejad’s visit that he would have likewise invited the Nazi fuhrer to speak.

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Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
Monday 17 September 2007 @ 10:33 am

Mark Steyn

This year I marked the anniversary of Sept. 11 by driving through Massachusetts. It wasn’t exactly planned that way, just the way things panned out. So, heading toward Boston, I tuned to Bay State radio talk-show colossus Howie Carr and heard him reading out portions from the official address to the 9/11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, who is apparently the governor of Massachusetts: 9/11, said Gov. Patrick, “was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States.”

“Mean and nasty”? He sounds like an oversensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry’s sent back the aubergine coulisagain. But evidently that’s what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days – the shot heard around the world and so forth. Anyway, Gov. Patrick didn’t want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he continued, “was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other.”

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