New York – A report in the semi-official Iranian news agency, Mehr, claims that a delegation of professors from Columbia University are planning a trip to Tehran to apologize to President Ahmadinejad for critical remarks made by Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, when Mr. Ahmadinejad visited Morningside Heights last year.
Join our WhatsApp groupSubscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
The report, which could not be confirmed and did not name any professors, said “the main goal of the visit is to meet the Iranian president and officially apologize to him.”
Several Columbia professors yesterday denied the report.
When Mr. Ahmadinejad visited Columbia in September, Mr. Bollinger called the Iranian a “petty and cruel dictator” who lacked the “intellectual courage” to offer real answers on denying the Holocaust who persecuted women and scholars in Iran. Those comments prompted some criticism from Columbia students and faculty. [nysun]
He is a bad dude. He is a rusha. They should never have invited him in the first place.
Then after they invited him, and received all the pressure from so many people, they trashed him.
Though he is a terrible person, it was also terrible to invite him and then trash him in public. Better to cancel the invitation the last minute than to rudely trash a guest.
They were wrong. Even when one is wrong to a rusha, he is still wrong.
The fact that the victim was/is a rasha does not change the fact that Columbia university violated the very principles of menshlechkeit. If you don’t like someone, you don’t invite him. You do not invite someone, and then in front of the press, publicly attack him.
I do not say we should like him, he is bad news.
I do not say we should placate him, one should not placate evil.
But we should do what we can to avoid increasing his antisemitism.
If anything, despite how much we do not like him, maybe it is better to (not placate him) try to win him over. Not to, G-d forbid, join him at any stupid Holocaust denier conferences, but to try to bridge the gap and teach him that Jews are not evil beings, and that even if he is hell-bent on destroying the State of Israel, and if he ever succeeds in doing that, he need not kill civilian Jews in the process.
Who knows, playing nice and making friends MAY save Jewish lives.
Making his hatred deeper certainly will never help anyone or anything.
When one lays with pigs,, they stink. These professors cant even see what they are doing, they are covered in mud from that pig.
they’re going to apologize to him!?!!?!?!?!?!?!!?
I would not be surprised in the least if some of the professors who want to apologize to Iran’s fuhrer are self-hating Jewish bleeding-heart liberals/radicals. They are no better than the Neturei Karta traitors who fawned over him in at his Holocaust-denier’s conference a year ago in Tehran.