Will Liberals Please Stop Finding Ahmadinejad So Damn Fascinating?
Kesher Talk's Alcibiades (who has one of the blogosphere's best, if creepiest, monikers) follows up on Columbia University's Ahmadinejad invitation / cancelation of invitation. Turns out, the invitation to this decade's Hitler wannabe came from Lisa "how was I supposed to know that getting perks from Saudi Arabia isn't OK" Anderson, Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. It's cool though - it's not like New York has a reason not to like Islamist fanatics or anything. Or like Columbia and its associated schools can't find other terrorist apologists to speak to their students.
This Ahmadinejad thing is really actually getting kind of bothersome. Can we focus - just for a minute - that this 'interesting' and 'fascinating' guy is actually a genocidal lunatic? He has openly - openly - threatened to nuke 40 percent of the world's Jewish population. It's not like there's a debate about this. Academics are oohing and ahhing over a man who is literally a modern-day Hitler in every sense of the word. How are people not more outraged by this? Mike Wallace interviewed and had a laugh with an unapologetic nuke-seeking anti-Semite, and everyone on the left was like 'wow - that's so sophisticated':
"I felt more assured of his intelligence and comprehension than I've ever felt about Bush"
Or the obligatory faux bravado of declaring that you're brave for saying something that everyone reading you agrees with:
I like the guy. Maybe not what one is supposed to say, but I've read quite a bit about him [and] he is very educated and personable. I take what I hear from the U.S. propaganda machines with less than a grain of salt.
(It's 'more' not 'less' than a grain of salt, but whatever... this guy has read quite a bit!) And finally:
He certainly has some of the same comments and questions of bush that we do.
Yes, yes he certainly does sound like the Democratic base, doesn't he?
UPDATE: Yeah, so about Columbia:
We last saw James Russell when he hosted Andrew Bostom's talk at Harvard. Here he is talking about being a Jew in Columbia's Middle East Department and beyond: Professor Talks of Jihad -- on the Battlefields and in the Classroom... "Two senior professors in my department explained that I could not expect, as a Jew, to be kept as a tenured professor in the Middle East department," he said. Now, three years later, Russell, a tenured professor at Harvard University, speaks brazenly against anti-Semitism in academia.
Juan Cole used to be the president of the US Middle East Studies Association (MESA). We're not saying that he had anything to do with this, we're just saying that there seems to be a deep strain of anti-Semitism in Middle East departments. Departments that elected Juan Cole to be the face of their national organization.
UPDATE 2: Iran won't commit to the arms embargo on Hezbollah. No information yet as to how this will affect France's position that Iran is a stabilizing force in the Middle East.
This Ahmadinejad thing is really actually getting kind of bothersome. Can we focus - just for a minute - that this 'interesting' and 'fascinating' guy is actually a genocidal lunatic? He has openly - openly - threatened to nuke 40 percent of the world's Jewish population. It's not like there's a debate about this. Academics are oohing and ahhing over a man who is literally a modern-day Hitler in every sense of the word. How are people not more outraged by this? Mike Wallace interviewed and had a laugh with an unapologetic nuke-seeking anti-Semite, and everyone on the left was like 'wow - that's so sophisticated':
"I felt more assured of his intelligence and comprehension than I've ever felt about Bush"
Or the obligatory faux bravado of declaring that you're brave for saying something that everyone reading you agrees with:
I like the guy. Maybe not what one is supposed to say, but I've read quite a bit about him [and] he is very educated and personable. I take what I hear from the U.S. propaganda machines with less than a grain of salt.
(It's 'more' not 'less' than a grain of salt, but whatever... this guy has read quite a bit!) And finally:
He certainly has some of the same comments and questions of bush that we do.
Yes, yes he certainly does sound like the Democratic base, doesn't he?
UPDATE: Yeah, so about Columbia:
We last saw James Russell when he hosted Andrew Bostom's talk at Harvard. Here he is talking about being a Jew in Columbia's Middle East Department and beyond: Professor Talks of Jihad -- on the Battlefields and in the Classroom... "Two senior professors in my department explained that I could not expect, as a Jew, to be kept as a tenured professor in the Middle East department," he said. Now, three years later, Russell, a tenured professor at Harvard University, speaks brazenly against anti-Semitism in academia.
Juan Cole used to be the president of the US Middle East Studies Association (MESA). We're not saying that he had anything to do with this, we're just saying that there seems to be a deep strain of anti-Semitism in Middle East departments. Departments that elected Juan Cole to be the face of their national organization.
UPDATE 2: Iran won't commit to the arms embargo on Hezbollah. No information yet as to how this will affect France's position that Iran is a stabilizing force in the Middle East.
