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Higher Learning
There was something about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University last month that really bothered me.
It ate at me and ate at me until it nearly drove me crazy.
I couldn’t decide whether the Iranian leader reminded me more of Groucho as the ruthless dictator Rufus T. Firefly in “Duck Soup,” or a Hitlerian Moe Howard, boss of Moronia, in “I’ll Never Heil Again!”
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have agonized so much; it wasn’t even close. The diminutive Ahmadinejad, with his sloping forehead and jet-black hair, is definitely a Moe. The whole time he was in America I halfway expected him to break out into face slaps, eye pokes and hair pulls.
Of course, it’s not really fair comparing Ahmadinejad to the Stooges. Curly, Moe and Larry would insinuate themselves into a civilized situation, with sophisticated people, and then dismantle everything sacred and holy by their mere presence.
To say that Ahmadinejad’s sojourn in the halls of Ivy League academe somehow soiled our institutions of higher learning is sadly wrong. If anything it was the opposite — this obstreperous little man was brought even lower by his association with America’s nincompoopish educators.
The fact that Columbia University would even invite Ahmadinejad — a Holocaust denier, human rights violator, atomic bomb seeker and probable terrorist sponsor killing American soldiers — was an obscenity.
And yet, it was probably only the tip of the depravity iceberg.
The invitation to such a bigoted and dangerous man, against the loud protests of the sane, may be more an indication of leftist pedagogical hostilities to Jews than any real desire to see a loathsome nut make an international fool of himself from their platform.
The latest grenade lobbed from the Academy at the Jews was Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby.” This work of occult fiction by two of America’s most distinguished professors cast the Jews as omnipotent string pullers, bossing around pharaoh-like presidents and media moguls to achieve their own evil ends.
Mearsheimer and Walt were at least more creative than Emory University’s former President Jimmy Carter, who simply compared Israel to an apartheid state.
In my own recent informal conversations with academics I have heard them admit that they believe the Jews wield inordinate political power and that they “control” the media.
America’s elitist educational institutions have long histories of their hostilities to Jews. That’s a fact well-established in the shameful quotas they once used to keep Jews out, and yet these latest developments seem even more openly brazen, mean-spirited, hateful and dangerous.
These institutions and individuals have become paranoiacs, a disease that has blinded them to the real threats in the world today.
Like Ahmadinejad they denounce a “Zionist regime” that is in fact a thriving democracy. Like Ahmadinejad they fear Jewish influence in America but never mention what oil money buys at the Capitol Hill bazaar. To them the old Jewish blood libels have 21st-century resonance, but the ancient concept of offensive jihad, bringing so much misery to the Muslim world today, is basically ignored.
To invite Ahmadinejad to speak in one of the last great remaining Jewish cities in the world was a slap in the face to everything civilized.
But it was quite understandable.
When Ahmadinejad rose to speak, he said: “I am an academic myself.”
That sentence was like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky, unexpectedly revealing a penetrating truth at an improbable place.
Posted by on 10/12/07 at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)
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