Saif Ammous has his comprehensive exam (a big deal, apparently) next Tuesday at Columbia. He’s told me he won’t respond to my comment on the big thread below, nor anyone else’s, till he gets that done. Good luck, Saif.
I met Ammous a few months back at a lecture at Columbia. First the Iranian Ambassador to the U.N. spoke, then Scott Ritter. (It was Columbia’s effort to compensate for the fact that the school had prevented President Ahmadinejad from speaking there.) I was standing against a wall when Ritter described what a nuclear war with Iran would look like, and Ammous gave me a devilish look and said, "I gotta get that on youtube." Over the last few months, I’ve seen him at other lectures and social events, everything from Arab Night at an Upper West Side restaurant to lecturing on Arab development at the 92d Street Y, in a pinstriped suit and pink tie.
One of the pleasures for me of getting to know Ammous is seeing intellectual distinction, and social sophistication too, in The Other. This is what liberal globalists asked for, it’s the best thing about Clintonism. Bringing Arab intellectuals into the west and engaging them, and hearing them out. I want to seduce these people. I want them to fall in love with western freedoms. But I recognize there’s an exchange, we learn to honor their concerns, especially when they’re calling us on liberal principles. That exchange seems to me the only way out of the mess we’re in….
