If you thought Lee Bollinger’s introduction of Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, to speak at Columbia University in September, was among the most ignorant, unprofessional, and uneducated displays to be spewed by a prominent educator, you’re not alone.
If you are struggling to understand how such illiterate and racist remarks could come out of a major figure in a major educational institution, the article below will probably not help you make sense of what you heard.
However, if you want to understand Bollinger’s comments in some perspective, and understand the lack there of, on the Columbia president side, then this great article by renowned Columbia, Iranian-American Professor Hamid Dabashi, is well worth reading:
The only reason that the world at large should care about the contankerous exchange between an irresponsible and sensationalist president of a beleaguered and increasingly illegitimate Islamic Republic and the racist president of an Ivy League university in the United States is that in the brief encounter between the two dwells the symptoms of a much more frightful malignancy now afflicting our globe–the fact and phenomenon of an Empire least equipped to rule the world and yet flaunting a vulgar audacity to issue pronouncements about its ills and afflictions–at once creating, promoting, and supporting undemocratic regimes in its domain of influence (from the Saudis to the Taliban) and yet unable to deal with their criminal consequences, while at the same time having the audacity to give itself the moral authority to be the arbiter of truth in the world, carrying the white man’s burden to set the course of history aright.
…
A close reading of Bollinger’s statement when introducing Ahmadinejad is today the closest text analogue of what exactly happens when the legitimate criticism of the atrocities of the Islamic Republic quite imperceptively degenerates into the propaganda warfare against a soverign nation state, to be waged by the self-proclaimed moral authority of the United States, and from there further mutating into the oldest racist assumptions of the white man’s burden to civilize the world. Reading Bollinger’s statement is to witness a closely-knit packing of assertions of fact about the horrors of the Islamic Republic, combined with the most ridiculous clichés of the neocon propaganda machinery, wrapped in the missionary position of a white racist supremacist carrying the heavy burden of civilizing the world.
Furthermore, Iranian university chancellors wrote Mr. Bollinger a letter calling him on the double standards and lack of professionalism.
[Tarboush tip: Mike A7A]
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“White Man’s Burden?” Is this the best you can come up with? You subscribe to a philosophy in which “white people” are not allowed to criticize “dark people”, and yet accuse others of “racism”?!
Strange that I did not find on your site an article about the Iranian students, who – risking jail and torture – demanded of their president and their government the right to the same academic freedoms enjoyed by students in the “imperialist” West. I think it’s pretty clear which side of this you’re on, or who you are willing to silence with charges of “racism” to get your way.
I suppose next you’ll claim there really are no gays in Iran, and that homosexuality is a Zionist plot.
Posted by Kabob Al-Makshouf | October 21, 2007, 12:15 amjust like aids!
Posted by Anonymous | October 21, 2007, 12:47 amhow are the remarks “illiterate” or “racist” in any sense of the words? I don’t get how one can admit that Ahmedinejad consistently spews offensive, nonsensical hatred, and at the same time, express extreme confusion at the fact that Lee Bollinger call him out on it. Was Bollinger unprofessional? Sure, it’s a valid point. But to introduce words like racism and white man’s burden into the discussion is completely ridiculous and seems like an underhanded way to shift the focus off of the hateful and threatening remarks espoused by Ahmedinejad himself. What Bollinger said may indeed have been unprofessional, but they were hardly the statements of an ignorant and uneducated man. The veracity of what Bollinger said cannot be disputed. The only question was whether or not his statements were made in an appropriate forum.
Posted by Anonymous | October 21, 2007, 5:46 pm