Nothing that happened during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance at Columbia in any way changes the moral calculus involved in the question of whether the Iranian president should have been invited to speak at an American university: he should not have been, and the university’s decision to do so, and the reasons it gave for that decision, were dubious and hypocritical.
But the event itself defied expectations. We—those of us who are appalled at the thought of someone such as Ahmadinejad being given any respectful treatment in America—thought that Bollinger would put in a timid and even obsequious performance, while Ahmadinejad, who has rightfully earned a reputation as a master manipulator of his useful-idiot western interlocutors, was expected to deliver a rousing condemnation of the Bush administration, American foreign policy, and Israel.
But instead, Bollinger administered a verbal beating to Ahmadinejad the likes of which I cannot recall a head of state ever receiving—and Ahmadinejad, instead of hewing to his usual repertoire of propaganda, meandered through an almost totally incoherent pop-theology sermon that culminated in an awkward and ineffective attempt at dodging the audience’s questions. It was a dud, a performance of total sophomoric windbaggery. The exact opposite of what everyone expected to happen ended up taking place.
Bollinger’s performance was particularly satisfying precisely because the person on the receiving end of his condemnation was the Iranian president, a political leader who represents a revolutionary Islamic government that has enshrined as a fundamental premise the conviction that America, along with being the great source of evil in the world, is a brittle facade of a superpower, and is thus worthy only of derision. The ideology of the Iranian Revolution holds America in contempt—an intense contempt that systematically has been vindicated, in the eyes of the Iranian leadership, by America’s three-decades-long refusal to punish Iran for its many killings and provocations (in the words of Martin Kramer, “The contempt arises from the fact that the United States has radiated irresolution and weakness in the face of challenges put up by Middle Eastern assailants”).
Ahmadinejad, more than any other jihadist leader (including Osama bin Laden himself), has come to exemplify this swaggering contemptuousness. This is why, I think, it was so spectacular and unexpected to see an American academic—a person who by all estimates is a standard-bearer of the modern academy’s worst tendencies toward relativism, appeasement, and dialogue-worship—stun Ahmadinejad with such vigorously disrespectful words. Bollinger did something inadvertently brilliant by doing this: he turned the tables on Ahmadinejad; suddenly it was an American spokesman expressing blunt contempt for Iran, and directly to the president’s face no less. Ahmadinejad surely was taken aback by this treatment, and he perhaps even emerged from the auditorium at Columbia with a tinge of doubt as to the barrenness of America’s wellsprings of self-confidence.
Will Bollinger’s words have any lasting effect on the confrontation between America and Iran? I doubt it. But perhaps he deserves applause for salvaging the Ahmadinejad invitation from the shameful farce that it seemed destined to be. And if video of Bollinger’s words ends up circulating widely inside Iran, providing much-needed succor to the Iranian people and undermining the regime’s credibility, then so much the better.
