Islamofascist Chic at Columbia University
Charles Johnson
Wed Sep 19, 2007 at 3:43 pm PDT • Views: 504
From our “The Lunatics Are in Charge” file: they withdrew the invitation last year, but this year Holocaust-denying Islamofascist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will speak at Columbia University.
Because Columbia is nobly supporting the principles of free speech and debate, of course. Not to mention, suicidal blindness and irresponsibility.
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.
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.
Frank says: