He accepted the invitation, but the talk isn’t going through, for what appears to be some combination of security concerns and concerns over bad publicity for Columbia.
Who in a position of authority at Columbia would daft enough to invite Holocaust denier/genocidal maniac/most notorious and powerful anti-Semite of the current age/etc. Ahmadinejad (who, by the way, I saw on t.v. claiming today claiming that the 35,000 people who protested his speech at the U.N. were actually one hundred paid Zionist stooges) to speak? Lisa Anderson, dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Where have a I heard Prof. Anderson’s name before? Ah, yes. Columbia President Lee Bollinger invited her to serve on a committee whose purpose was to whitewash investigate charges that some of Columbia’s Middle Eastern Studies professors (including, according to this article, at least one of her own former students) had engaged in unfair treatment of Jewish, Israeli, and pro-Israel students.
Res ipsa loquitur.
P.S. I’d like to believe it was just a coincidence that Ahmadinejad’s speech was originally scheduled for tomorrow, with the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah starting early that evening, thus making it impossible for a large percentage of Jewish students who would be going home for the holiday or otherwise preparing for it to protest.