A number of thoughtful people were shocked by the lengthy hazing Columbia President Lee Bollinger administered to Iran’s Ahmadinejad Monday in introducing him at the school. Chris Matthews said, "Who is this guy?" then laughed at the length of the gauntlet and said that Ahmadinejad ought to take Bollinger on the road with him, as he made the Iranian president look good.
At a forum the same day at Hopkins’s SAIS for Trita Parsi’s wonderful new book on Iran— Treacherous Alliance, two journalists made the same point. Michael Hirsh, a senior editor at Newsweek, said with irony, "I think it’s generally a good idea … not to tell [a guest] that they’re not welcome… Then you look crazier than Ahmadinejad, which is what he ended up looking." Hirsh said that Prezbo (as he is known at Columbia) created "sympathy" for Prezjad. M.J. Rosenberg of Israel Policy Forum said that he felt "so embarrassed" by Bollinger’s laying out "the American bill of particulars" against Ahmadinejad that he had trouble focusing on the speech.
What embarrassed me is that we are now acting as if the entire world agrees with us, and we no longer are trying to play to an audience… I don’t remember that ever going on in this country. Honest to God, I know Israel well, that would not go on at Tel Aviv University. This seemed almost Soviet to me. Everyone has to carry the government’s line. To the rest of the world, we looked silly. I felt crummy as an American watching.
On Hardball, Pat Buchanan laughed that Bollinger was trying to please his "donors." Having spent weeks at the school working on a story earlier this year, I think there’s truth in that. Columbia’s world is a very Jewish one, and its biggest backers would seem to be party-liners, include New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who created the building that contains Hillel on campus. Bollinger is an eminent free-speech scholar, who distinguished himself leading the University of Michigan, when he originated creative affirmative-action policies. His speech so hurt him that I would like to think that it will mark the high point of the Israel lobby in the U.S. How painful to see a good man so nakedly corrupted.
