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Iranian president dukes it out at Columbia

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
Workers World - Oct 4, 2007 issue
http://www.workers.org/2007/world/columbia-1004


An invitation or an ambush?

Iranian president dukes it out at Columbia

By Deirdre Griswold
New York

If the appearance of Irans president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at Columbia
University in New York on Sept. 24 proved anything, it is that the
high-priced educational institutions of the United States are an
integral part of the political establishment that directs the
imperialist foreign policy of this country.

The event was intended to be a trap, a photo op to rev up anti-Iran
propaganda to a white heat and give President George W. Bush a cover
for the Pentagons plans to attack that oil-rich country.

The tabloids in New York tried to crank up a lynch-mob spirit. The
evil has landed, was the huge front-page headline of the Daily News,
along with a photo that caught Ahmadinejad with his eyes half closed.

Columbias president, Lee Bollinger, had been harshly attacked,
especially by supporters of Israel, for extending an invitation to the
Iranian president. But they loved it when he spent 14 minutes insulting
Ahmadinejad in what was supposed to be an introduction to this guest
speaker. In the guise of giving a welcoming speech, Bollinger went
completely over the line, calling the elected Iranian president a
petty, cruel dictator who was either brazenly provocative or
astonishingly uneducated.

Outside, what amounted to an anti-Iran rally was taking place on the
Columbia campus, to the delight of all the corporate news media.

Did it work? Only if you go by what the media said about the meeting.
And that, of course, is all that most people in the United States get
to hear about it.

But transcripts and the video that have made it onto the Internet show
that Ahmadinejad was sharp, calm but combative, and restored some
measure of reality to the event when he finally got a chance to talk.
He also got support from some of the students.

After being pilloried by the head of the university"who, by the way, is
also a member of the Federal Reserve Board of New York, a sign of his
standing among the financial elite"Ahmadinejad right away replied, to
applause, that in Iran a guest would never be treated that way: We
actually respect our students and the professors by allowing them to
make their own judgment, and we dont think its necessary before the
speech is even given to come in with a series of claims and to attempt
in a so-called manner to provide vaccination of some sort to our
students and our faculty.

He went on to reply to the questions raised"something very few heads of
state, especially those from the imperialist powers, ever do.
Ahmadinejad and Iran have been accused of denying the Holocaust
happened and of trying to build nuclear weapons. The imperialist
powers, led by the United States but including Britain and now France,
are actually threatening war against Iran, supposedly because of its
nuclear program. A huge armada of U.S. warships sits off its coast.

Asked his position on the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad did not deny it
happened, but questioned what had happened to the Middle East since
then in its name. It happened in Europe. The Palestinian people had no
role to play in it. ... Why is it that the Palestinians must pay the
price, innocent Palestinians? he asked. For 5 million refugees to
remain displaced or refugees abroad for 60 years"is this not a crime?
Is asking about these things a crime by itself?

Asked if he wanted to see Israel destroyed, the implication being that
Iran was poised for a war against the Zionist settler state,
Ahmadinejad referred to the territory as Palestine, and replied, Let
the people of Palestine freely choose what they want for their future.

The Israeli regime has expelled millions of Palestinians and wont let
them return to their homeland, where they would become the majority. If
democracy really existed there for all the people, including the
Palestinians now forced into dismal refugee camps, a secular state of
Arabs and Jews could have replaced the theocratic state of Israel a
long time ago.

On Irans nuclear development, Ahmadinejad stressed that its purpose
was to provide peaceful power, that his country has been a member of
the International Atomic Energy Agency for over 33 years, and that
member states have the right to peaceful nuclear fuel technology. But
he also pointed out the extreme hypocrisy of Washington on this issue.
If you have created the fifth generation of atomic bombs, he said,
and are testing them already, what position are you in to question the
peaceful purpose of other people who want nuclear power?

The next morning, in his speech to the UN General Assembly, Ahmadinejad
laced into certain powers that pretend to be exclusive advocates of
human rights while Setting up secret prisons, abducting persons,
trials and secret punishments without any regard to due process,
extensive tapping of telephone conversations, intercepting private
mail, and frequent summons to police and security centers have become
commonplace and prevalent. Everyone understood who he was talking
about; the U.S. and Israeli delegates boycotted the speech.

It wasnt long ago that Pentagon saber-rattling was so feared that few
of the once-colonized countries of the world seeking sovereignty and
peaceful development dared challenge U.S. imperialism in public. Like
the resistance in Iraq and the emergence of nationalist regimes in
Latin America, the Iranian leaders visit to the U.S. underscored that
the times they are a-changing.

And theyre changing inside the U.S., too. The liberal news Web site
commondreams.org on Sept. 25 ran a short piece on Ahmadinejads visit
by Ru Freeman that excoriated Bollinger for acting appallingly and
disgracefully, and concluded that the president of Iran possesses a
grace that neither his host nor the hecklers at Columbia University nor
the press in this country nor, I might as well state the obvious, the
president of this country can claim.

By that evening, 116 e-mails had been posted commenting on Freemans
article"and they overwhelmingly criticized Bollingers treatment of the
Iranian president and the arrogance of U.S. authorities in general. One
writer summed it up: How come Bollinger never managed the courage to
direct those words towards our own petty, cruel dictator? 

Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and
distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without
royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net

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