His Colum­bia engage­ment gives him what he wants — legit­i­macy — and his hosts look rude to Islamic eyes.

by Tim Rut­ten
LA TIMES

One of the world’s truly dan­ger­ous men, Iran­ian Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad, left New York a clear win­ner this week, and he can thank the arro­gance of the Amer­i­can acad­emy and most of the U.S. news media’s stud­ied indif­fer­ence for his victory.

If the blood-drenched his­tory of the cen­tury just past had taught Amer­i­can aca­d­e­mics one thing, it should have been that the total­i­tar­ian impulse knows no accom­mo­da­tion with rea­son. You can­not change the total­i­tar­ian mind through dia­logue or con­ver­sa­tion, because total­i­tar­i­an­ism — how­ever inge­nious the super­struc­ture of faux ideas with which it sur­rounds itself — is a crea­ture of the will and not the mind. That’s a large les­son, but what should have made Ahmadinejad’s appear­ance at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity this week a wholly avoid­able deba­cle was the school’s knowl­edge of its own, very spe­cific history.

In the 1930s, Colum­bia was run by Nicholas Mur­ray But­ler, to whose name a spe­cial sort of infamy attaches. But­ler was an out­spo­ken admirer of Ital­ian fas­cism and of its leader, Ben­ito Mus­solini. The Colum­bia pres­i­dent, who also was in the fore­front of Ivy League efforts to restrict Jew­ish enroll­ment, worked tire­lessly to build ties between his school and Ital­ian uni­ver­si­ties, as well as with the pow­er­ful fas­cist stu­dent orga­ni­za­tions. At one point, a vis­it­ing del­e­ga­tion of 350 ardent young Black Shirts ser­e­naded But­ler with the fas­cist anthem.

But­ler also was keen to estab­lish con­nec­tions with Nazi Ger­many and its uni­ver­si­ties. In 1933, he invited Hans Luther, Adolf Hitler’s ambas­sador to the United States, to lec­ture on the Colum­bia cam­pus. Luther stressed Hitler’s “peace­ful inten­tions” toward his Euro­pean neigh­bors, and, after­ward, But­ler gave a recep­tion in his honor. As the emis­sary of “a friendly peo­ple,” Luther was “enti­tled to be received with the great­est cour­tesy and respect,” the Colum­bia pres­i­dent said at the time.

It was such a trans­par­ently appalling per­for­mance all around that one of the anony­mous authors of the New York Times’ “Top­ics of the Times” col­umn put tongue in cheek and looked for­ward to the occa­sion when “the Nazi lead­ers will point out that they were all along opposed to any mea­sures capa­ble of being con­strued as unjust to any ele­ment in the Ger­man pop­u­la­tion or as a threat to peace in Europe.”

Arro­gance, though, is invin­ci­ble — even to irony.

Three years later, But­ler sent a del­e­ga­tion of Colum­bia dig­ni­taries to par­tic­i­pate in anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tions at the Uni­ver­sity of Hei­del­berg. That was after Hei­del­berg had purged all the Jew­ish pro­fes­sors from its fac­ulty, reformed its cur­ricu­lum accord­ing to Nazi edu­ca­tional the­o­ries and pub­licly burned the unap­proved books in its libraries.

It would be inter­est­ing to know if any con­sid­er­a­tion of these events — and all that fol­lowed a decade of engage­ment and dia­logue with fas­cism — occurred before Colum­bia extended a speak­ing invi­ta­tion to a man who hopes to see Israel “wiped off the face of the Earth,” has denied the Holo­caust and is defy­ing the world com­mu­nity in pur­suit of nuclear weapons. Per­haps they did and per­haps that’s part of what moti­vated Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s pres­i­dent now, to deliver his extra­or­di­nar­ily ill-advised wel­com­ing remarks to Ahmadinejad.

Bollinger clearly had an Amer­i­can audi­ence in mind when he denounced the Iran­ian leader to his face as a “cruel” and “petty dic­ta­tor” and described his Holo­caust denial as designed to “fool the illit­er­ate and the igno­rant.” Bollinger’s remarks may have taken him off the hook with his domes­tic crit­ics, but when it came to the inter­na­tional media audi­ence that really counted, Ahmadine­jad already had car­ried the day. The invi­ta­tion to speak at Colum­bia already had given him some­thing total­i­tar­ian dem­a­gogues — who are as image-conscious as Hol­ly­wood stars — always crave: legit­i­macy. Bollinger’s denun­ci­a­tion was icing on the cake, because the con­stituency the Iran­ian leader cares about is scat­tered across an Islamic world that val­ues hos­pi­tal­ity and its cour­te­sies as core social virtues. To that audi­ence, Bollinger looked stun­ningly ill-mannered; Ahmadine­jad dig­ni­fied and restrained.

Back in Tehran, Mohsen Mir­damadi, a lead­ing Iran­ian reformer and Ahmadine­jad oppo­nent, said Bollinger’s blis­ter­ing remarks “only strength­ened” the pres­i­dent back home and “made his rad­i­cal sup­port­ers more deter­mined,” Accord­ing to an Asso­ci­ated Press report, “Many Ira­ni­ans found the com­ments insult­ing, par­tic­u­larly because in Iran­ian tra­di­tions of hos­pi­tal­ity, a host should be polite to a guest, no mat­ter what he thinks of him. To many, Ahmadine­jad looked like the vic­tim, and hard-liners praised the president’s calm demeanor dur­ing the event, say­ing Bollinger was spout­ing a ‘Zion­ist’ line.”

All of this was bad enough, but the almost will­ful refusal of com­men­ta­tors in the Amer­i­can media to pro­vide their audi­ences with insight into just how sin­is­ter Ahmadine­jad really is com­pounded the prob­lem. There are a cou­ple of rea­sons for the media’s gen­eral refusal to engage with rad­i­cal Islamic revival­ists, like Ahmadine­jad. He belongs to a par­tic­u­larly aggres­sive school of rad­i­cal Shi­ite Islam, the Haghani, which lives in expec­ta­tion of the immi­nent com­ing of the Madhi, a kind of Islamic mes­siah, who will bring peace and jus­tice — along with uni­ver­sal Islamic rule — to the entire world. Seri­ous mem­bers of this school — and Ahmadine­jad, who was a bril­liant uni­ver­sity stu­dent, is a very seri­ous mem­ber — believe they must act to speed the Mahdi’s com­ing. “The wave of the Islamic rev­o­lu­tion” would soon “reach the entire world,” he has promised.

As a fun­da­men­tally sec­u­lar insti­tu­tion, the Amer­i­can press always has had a hard time com­ing to grips with the fact that Islamists like the Iran­ian pres­i­dent mean what they say and that they really do believe what they say they believe.

Finally, there’s the fact that the neo­con­ser­v­a­tive rem­nants clus­tered around Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney are beat­ing the drums for a pre­emp­tive mil­i­tary action against Iran before it becomes a nuclear nation, as North Korea already has, thereby con­strain­ing U.S. pol­icy in north­west Asia. After being duped by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion into help­ing pave the way for the dis­as­trous war in Iraq, few in the Amer­i­can media now are will­ing to take the Iran prob­lem on because they don’t want to be com­plicit in another mil­i­tary misadventure.

Fair enough — but that anx­i­ety doesn’t exempt the press from being real­is­tic about who Ahmadine­jad really is and the dan­ger he really does pose to all around him.