Illegal Protest

Found this excellent post over at Red State blog. This is the epitome of anti-American liberal pig slop in my mind and in fact, I think the Department of Homeland Security should look into any University that apparently wants to welcome a President of a country sponsoring terrorism against our soldiers and one who wants to wipe America and Israel from the face of the earth. YET they think Jim Gilchrist is “divisive” and “sends the wrong message” WHAT FREAKING PLANET ARE YOU ON COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY??? SHAME ON YOU!

You can contact them here to let them know how you feel:

School of International and Public Affairs
420 West 118th Street
New York, NY 10027

Dean’s Office
14th floor, MC 3328
New York, NY 10027
212- 854-5406
(fax)

Department of International and Public Affairs
1318 IAB, MC 3323
New York, NY 10027
(fax)

Columbia University President Bollinger

535 West 116th Street, 202 Low Library, Mail Code 4309, New York, NY 10027
phone: , fax: 212.854.9973
Office hours: Weekdays, 8am-6pm

Statement on Ahmadinejad’s visit by President Bollinger says:

On Monday, September 24, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is scheduled to appear as a speaker on campus. The event is sponsored by the School of International and Public Affairs (see SIPA announcement), which has been in contact with the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. The event will be part of the annual World Leaders Forum, the University-wide initiative intended to further Columbia’s longstanding tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate, especially on global issues.

In order to have such a University-wide forum, we have insisted that a number of conditions be met, first and foremost that President Ahmadinejad agree to divide his time evenly between delivering remarks and responding to audience questions. I also wanted to be sure the Iranians understood that I would myself introduce the event with a series of sharp challenges to the president on issues including:

• the Iranian president’s denial of the Holocaust;
• his public call for the destruction of the State of Israel;
• his reported support for international terrorism that targets innocent civilians and American troops;
• Iran’s pursuit of nuclear ambitions in opposition to international sanction;
• his government’s widely documented suppression of civil society and particularly of women’s rights; and
• his government’s imprisoning of journalists and scholars, including one of Columbia’s own alumni, Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh (see President Bollinger’s prior statement).

I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas—to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason. [ well we saw how true that was didn’t we?]

I would also like to invoke a major theme in the development of freedom of speech as a central value in our society. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

That such a forum could not take place on a university campus in Iran today sharpens the point of what we do here. To commit oneself to a life—and a civil society—prepared to examine critically all ideas arises from a deep faith in the myriad benefits of a long-term process of meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs and hateful words with wiser words. That faith in freedom has always been and remains today our nation’s most potent weapon against repressive regimes everywhere in the world. This is America at its best.

Published: Sept. 19, 2007

Oh really? They support free speech? Well that’s NEWS TO ME!

Here is his statement on why Jim Gilchrist is not welcome at Columbia University:

Oh that’s right - there is none… really..

But here is a statement from the Columbia Political Union on the cancellation of Jim’s return appearance:

Statement on Gilchrist event

Submitted by CPU Staff on Tue, 09/18/2007 - 1:47am.Up until last night, The Columbia Political Union had been considering putting together an event with Jim Gilchrist. We had hoped that it might be possible to have him and others involved in the events of last October on the same stage, engaged in a civil but challenging discussion. Aware that this is a complex issue, about which many people feel strongly, we felt that it was necessary to consult with other student groups and individuals on campus before making any decisions.

After several productive conversations with other student leaders and our advisors, and after lengthy discussions among our Executive Board members, it has become clear that this event cannot take the form we had originally hoped it would and could not effectively accomplish the goals we had hoped it might.

The CPU Executive Board voted last night not to go forward with this event. [ chicken shits!]

We had envisioned this event as part of the Friendly Fire speaker series. This series was created by Dr. Eisenbach, who, in the late spring of last year, asked the CPU to take over its planning and administration, with him remaining involved as the host and moderator. The CPU accepted this proposal and asked Dr. Eisenbach to join our Board of Advisors, an invitation that he accepted. He and the CPU have been working together throughout this exploratory process.

The CPU continues to aim to foster political dialogue and discussion in the Columbia community; to work effectively with individuals and groups representing a full spectrum of political viewpoints; and to act as a leader in this effort of constructive dialogue among student groups.

Having Ahmadinejad to Columbia is like having HITLER speak at a US University at the beginning of World War II. Who are they going to invite next? Fidel Castro? Kim Jong Il? Hugo Chavez? Why not have a special program and invite ALL the dictators who wish to see our country destroyed all in one week? Wouldn’t that be special?

Columbia University, you are guilty of TREASON against this country. And yet, and YET the President, Lee Bollinger, has the NERVE to write THIS that is CONTRARY to the ACTIONS of Columbia:

This is not complicated: Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus. Others have rights to hear them. Those who wish to protest have rights to do so. No one, however, shall have the right or the power to use the cover of protest to silence speakers. This is a sacrosanct and inviolable principle.

It is unacceptable to seek to deprive another person of his or her right of expression through actions such as taking a stage and interrupting the speech. We rightly have a visceral rejection of this behavior, because we all sense how easy it is to slide from our collective commitment to the hard work of intellectual confrontation to the easy path of physical brutishness. When the latter happens, we know instinctively we are all threatened.

We are WAITING to see Columbia University show that it can live up to it’s own expectations and give equal time to a patriotic citizen such as Jim Gilchrist of the Minuteman Project as it does to a terrorist nation’s DICTATOR.