Free Speech for Some?

There's a huge furor over the Iranian President's visit to the United States while he attends the United Nations. It seems there's even more outrage because of Columbia University's invitation to the political leader to speak on campus today.

Now I'm not a fan of Ahma-dork-ejad myself, and I often want to spit in that smiley anti-Semitic face of his. But I'm a little pissed at a comment I caught from a student in the IHT today that sums up the way many folks are behaving:

I personally don't think he should have been invited to campus, but now that he's here, I see it as an important opportunity for free speech and for us to denounce his views.

Okay...it's an exercise in free speech to protest somebody. So why shouldn't that person be invited to speak at your university? A common reason I'm hearing on the radio, television, and various online news outlets is the concept of "honoring" him by "giving him a platform." Who really thinks that a single appearance at one university is more of a platform than the constant attention from news networks? But I like the response of Columbia's president to the media (from the article):

But the Columbia University president, Lee Bollinger, said that the invitation was meant not to endorse the Iranian president but to give students a better chance to understand an adversary's views - "to watch them to see how they think, to see how they reason or do not reason; to see whether they're fanatical, or to see whether they are sly," he told ABC.

I think that's fair. Besides, when would students otherwise have the opportunity to face a world leader and ask hard questions, or protest within a few hundred feet? I think what Columbia did was bold. Ahmadinejad didn't come to the US just for the speech at Columbia. The school took advantage of an existing visit and thought it would be educational and insightful to hear from a figure who most consider villainous. If people can't see the value in that, their loss.

Comments

[Jacob Kelly]

Here Here!