Friday, September 21, 2007
Asymmetrical homophobia
Columbia University, led by my once-upon-a-time law professor Lee Bollinger, has again invited Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak, and again right-thinking people are outraged. There are numerous arguments pro and con, but those in favor reveal more about academia's received wisdoms than their proponents probably intended to disclose. Michael Barone points out, for example, that the invitation to Ahmadinejad destroys the current favorite rationale for banning ROTC from Ivy League campuses:
Columbia doesn't host ROTC or (I think) military recruiters on campus, because it would be just too offensive to do so, because the military obeys the law passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Bill Clinton which bars open homosexuals from serving in the military. OK.
But Columbia does host Ahmedinejad who heads a government which executes homosexuals for the crime of being homosexuals.
So it's obnoxious beyond belief to exclude homosexuals from military service, but it's not obnoxious beyond belief to hang them from the neck until dead.
I'm inclined to think that Congress and the military should rethink their policy of barring homosexuals from military service. It's a long argument, which I'll omit from this post. But I don't have any trouble joining the 99.99% of Americans who oppose execution of homosexuals for homosexual acts. And who think it's a barbaric act, incapable of being supported by any decent argument.
Why does Lee Bollinger think a man who heads a regime that executes homosexuals--not just excludes them from military service, but hangs them by the neck until dead, in public ceremony-- should be honored with an invitation to speak at Columbia?
Of course, nobody serious believes universities when they justify excluding the military because of its employment practices. After all, they banned ROTC long before anybody -- even on the academic left -- gave a rat's ass about employment discrimination against homosexuals. They did it then for reasons that today are so politically unpopular that universities cannot even say them out loud -- that they object to the mission of the American military, not just in the current war, but between wars and for all time. So what have these universities done? Rather than repeal the anti-military policies when the original reasons for them fail, they have conjured up an entirely new objection. If Congress changed the law to permit the openly gay to serve, does anybody believe that Columbia and other schools that have banned the military would suddenly change their policies? We can be assured that they have a long list of alternative arguments to trot out when the law finally does permit overt gays to serve.
18 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Sep 21, 12:59:00 AM:
Maybe all those former hostages should show up to burn some idaian flags and demand reparations from iran
By 
Neil Sinhababu, at
Fri Sep 21, 01:23:00 AM:
Being allowed to recruit on campus is a bigger deal than being allowed to visit a memorial, right? Even if we let Mahmoud go to the WTC memorial, there's no way we let him recruit for the Iranian Army on campus.
By , at
Fri Sep 21, 01:33:00 AM:
That is no surprise. The former President of Harvard is disinvited from speaking at the University of California because he had expressed some opinions ( while also saying that the jury was open on how correct they would turn out to be)that offended feminist professors, but Columbia invites President DinnerJacket, whose regime is a nightmare for women.
I hope that President DinnerJacket gets treated at Columbia the way the Minutemen spokesman got treated at Columbia last year. Better instead that he get treated the way he treated the embassy hostages back in 1980.
By , at
Fri Sep 21, 05:10:00 AM:
Columbia has such a vaunted history of free debate.
Consider the following
Via FloppingAces
In September 1986, I began graduate study at SAIS. Shortly thereafter, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and a graduate of Columbia’s Barnard College had to decline her invitation to speak on campus because of left wing protests that threatened to disrupt the event if she spoke.
Twenty years later, In October, 2006, we saw how leftists at Columbia rioted to shut down the event where the border security group “Minutemen” were speaking. For a reminder, see this brief video of the riot that ensued.
Iran under the leadership of radicals like Ahamdinejad is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans.
No doubt, the same left wing fascists who brazenly shut down free speech from “controversial speakers of different views” will embrace the appearance of the lunatic Ahmadinejad.
Via Powerline
From Death By 1,000 Paper Cuts, on Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York:
In a world of perfect karma, Ahmadinejad would be captured by American “students” and held hostage for over a year, paraded before TV cameras and threatened almost daily with death.
The “international community” would be OK with this as long as we didn’t send him to Guantanamo Bay.
Would someone please tell me how they are going to square all that.
By TigerHawk, at
Fri Sep 21, 09:25:00 AM:
Neil: "Heh." That is some excellent Scrappleface thinking.
By Miss Ladybug, at
Fri Sep 21, 10:34:00 AM:
Maybe someone should put that on a sign for when they protest: "Amanutjob hangs homosexuals for fun" or how about "Amanutjob stones victims of rape"?
By , at
Fri Sep 21, 10:40:00 AM:
I think that all those who were held hostage should all send a letter of protest to the president of COLUMBIA an to MAYOR BLOOMBURG
By , at
Fri Sep 21, 12:20:00 PM:
I hope the people of New York, block the streets so this Iranian cannot get to Ground Zero or to Columbia U.
Just stand in the street and create total gridlock...
By Eric, at
Fri Sep 21, 11:32:00 PM:
I am a Columbia Class of 2007 graduate. My major was Poli Sci - IR.
I thought it was wrong, and counter to the spirit of the university, for the fascistic radical leftist campus activists at Columbia to engineer the "shut down" of the Gilchrist event. By much the same token, I support Ahmadinejad coming to SIPA to speak. It's not an endorsement of Ahmadinejad, it's an opportunity for Columbians who are and will be engaging political/diplomatic issues on the world stage to familiarize and learn.
Moreover, when I was a soldier before I was a Columbian, I was an MI troop. What was our job about? Respecting the enemy ... learning about and from the enemy ... to defeat the enemy.
By the way, though one topic is not related to the other, I was also an ROTC advocate in the 2002-05 student-led campaign to restore ROTC at Columbia that ultimately was defeated in the University Senate.
Read about it:
http://advocatesforrotc.org/columbia/history2006.html
By Miss Ladybug, at
Sat Sep 22, 01:29:00 AM:
Eric~
I agree that one should study the enemy, but you don't give him a platform at a "respected and prestigous" American university. Would they have invited someone such as the Grand Dragon of the KKK to speak? I don't think so - by offering that platform, you give the speaker legitimacy, something someone like that doesn't deserve.
By Gary Rosen, at
Sat Sep 22, 02:34:00 AM:
Please, let's not trot out the "free speech" argument to justify inviting Nutjob to speak at Columbia. Politicians - especiallly heads of state - have all the free speech they want through the media. An appearance at a university isn't about "free exchange of ideas", it's a photo op, or in this case a propaganda op.
By Eric, at
Sat Sep 22, 07:51:00 AM:
My alma mater is respected and prestigious for much the same reason that Tigerhawk's alma mater is respected and prestigious - the expected contribution and impact of its graduates. The Ivy League image of the university is part of the package, of course, but that's not the end purpose of the university. The end purpose is to train leaders and operators.
In the Global War on Terror, upon what point have we faulted ourselves? Despite loud and violent anti-American, anti-West clamoring by the terrorists for a decade, we arrived on 9/11 with an inexcusable lack of preparation, insight, and perspective on what was actually happening in the world beyond the comfort zone of our world order.
Never again.
If Alma Mater must take a hit to its image in order for the upcoming American generation of leaders and operators at Columbia to be better prepared to champion our interests in the world, defeat our competition, and not repeat sins of the past, then so be it.
I very much hope members of the Hamilton Society, Columbia's campus group for ROTC cadets and USMC officer candidates, attend the event.
Hamilton Society at Columbia University:
http://www.advocatesforrotc.org/columbia/hamilton.html
By Miss Ladybug, at
Sat Sep 22, 12:42:00 PM:
Any problem American universities have with properly preparing the next generation of "leaders and operators" isn't a lack of letting people like the current Iranian president come speak on campus. I would say it is the far too pervasive aversion to ideological diversity. This terrorist is welcome, but Gilchrist of the Minutemen or Muslims speaking out against Islamic Radicalism are not? Let's start seeing a more balance ideology and far fewer attempts at indoctrinating impressionable college students to left-wing ideology - I've seen it myself while working on my M.Ed. In a writing class (learning how to teach writing to elementary students), my prof had us visit another classroom with an undergradate level instructor for a purported lesson on incorporating "multiculturalism" into our teaching. What we got was an introduction to the internet-based video game in which you are to hunt down illegal aliens, at which point I got up and let the room, I was so p!ssed. I took my writing journal with me and started writing. My prof found me in the hallway and I told him why I had left. It's a lot easier for someone like me - a mature adult - to not put up with something like that. But what about some young 18-19 year old freshman?
By Eric, at
Sat Sep 22, 08:01:00 PM:
This comment has been removed by the author.
By Eric, at
Sat Sep 22, 08:05:00 PM:
Miss Ladybug,
I certainly don't mean to imply that it was acceptable for fascistic radical leftist campus radicals to engineer the "shut down" of the Gilchrist event. I was against their action on 2 levels. First, as a Columbian, what my misguided classmates and their ex-campus comrades did to our classmates and their guests ran counter to the collegial and intellectual ethos of our university. Now, I know what you'll say to that ... which leads me to my next statement. I was disappointed on an empathetic level because I was a campus activist (founder/co-founder of Columbia's campus military veterans group, campus non-partisan patriotic group, and campus ROTC-return movement), and I know the hard that goes into these extracurricular activities. I felt awful that campus radicals would so cruelly seek to ruin our classmates' efforts to add to the marketplace of ideas at Columbia. The spirit of the academy is an ideal and one that can be a challenge to advance, moreso when some members of the community have no interest in learning beyond their cultish beliefs and even go so far as to disrupt other people's learning.
Still, I support the Iranian President speaking at SIPA. This event is being held in our poli sci grad school, and as I said, my degree was in Poli Sci - IR. On an IR level, this is a valuable learning opportunity, especially for Columbia grads who will move on to deal with these issues, and folks like Ahmadinejad, for the highest stakes. That's more important than balancing the ideological left/right equation in campus politics. For the 18 and 19 year old impressionable students? Again, I hope any Columbia 18 and 19 year old who will one day champion US interests in a competitive world, eg, our ROTC cadets and Marine officer candidates, will find their way into the event in order to size up the competition. As a college student, my most memorable educational experiences were the first-hand experiences, eg, Argentina's First Lady, Cristina Kirchner (she happened to be visiting the UN, and one of my profs at the time was an Argentine economic advisor) and interacting with Baghdad University students real-time via satellite a month before and after the 2003 invasion.
By Dawnfire82, at
Sat Sep 22, 08:09:00 PM:
As an MI soldier, you ought to understand the value of propaganda and that respecting an enemy's capabilities has nothing to do with respecting his ideas and values.
Giving the head of state from a hostile nation that is currently killing our soldiers a platform, cameras, and microphones to say whatever he wants, when people who try to do that in HIS country are hanged, is 1) strategically stupid, and 2) morally wrong.
By Eric, at
Sat Sep 22, 08:33:00 PM:
Dawnfire82,
As a former MI troop, specifically an MI troop serving in the ROK, we spent a lot of our time trying to learn about the enemy. Our job was to understand the enemy well enough to game him out. In fact, when we did our field training exercises, we went so far as to play the enemy. And I don't mean running around as OpFor wearing inside-out BDUs, bear suits and watch caps, and attacking the TOC at dawn (though I had fun with that, too), but actually gaming out enemy OB, locations, movements and other activity, to include the impact of political developments.
We did the best we could with what we had to work with. We'd get the daily briefs and once a month or so, people from my shop would take trips to the "White House" at Yongsan for these USFK and ROKUS level intel briefs, and bring back some cool CDs with us back to the shop. But a lot of it was pretty sketchy. Intel is critical, and solid intel is hard to come by. When you're trying to get into the head of the enemy, his propaganda has intel value. Some of my favorite stuff when I was with 2ID was the nK propaganda we'd get within Camp Casey. Mostly, it was leaflets showing what a party it was on the other side, but there was the one time we found actual honest-to-goodness books of nK propaganda scattered around the base. Good stuff, plus it was good to know that we obviously had nK agents running around our area.
And here we have an enemy leader coming right into one of our nation's premiere open-source educational institutions. That's too good of an intel opportunity to pass up. I just hope our people take advantage.
By , at
Sun Sep 23, 12:05:00 AM:
Instapundit has an interesting suggestion to sabatoge Ahmadinejad:
Have a scantily clad female kiss him, and had photo/video of that sent to Iran.
