Giving Iranian a platform to speak was the right move

President Bush went before the United Nations last Tuesday and delivered a message to the many nondemocratic countries that could be summed up thus: Let freedom reign.

Bush’s speech was bolstered by a demonstration of the true meaning of freedom — in the appearance of Iran’s mercurial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at Columbia University the day before.

The university was harshly criticized for inviting Ahmadinejad to speak, and there are politicians on Capitol Hill who are threatening to withdraw federal funding for Columbia. The critics are wrong.

Had the invitation been withdrawn, the Iranian president would have become a cause celebre for the very nations that President Bush was preaching to during his U.N. speech. Indeed, Ahmadinejad would have used the act of censoring him as an example of America’s hypocrisy.

Instead, his appearance at one of this nation’s premier institutions of higher learing not only proved to the world that free speech is a foundation of democracy, but that the Iranian leader is a nut — to put it undiplomatically.

Case in point: During a question-and-answer period, Ahmadinejad was asked about Iran’s treatment of women and gays, particularly about the brutality against homosexuals. He shrugged off the question by saying, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country. We don’t have that phenomenon.”

The audience openly laughed at such a ridiculous contention.

As for women, the president said they are held in high esteem. Tell that to the females who afraid to walk the streets of Tehran unless they are covered from head to toe, or those who are deprived of important jobs despite being qualified for them.

‘Petty cruel dictator’

There’s another reason the appearance by the Iranian leader at Columbia was not only proper, but important: It gave university President Lee Bollnger the opportunity to look him in the eye and tell him what most fair-minded, thoughtful people throughout the world think of him, namely, that he is a “petty cruel dictator” with a “fanatical mindset.”

“Today, I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for,” Bollinger said.

It was truly a moment of high drama and a lesson to the Iranian leader about free speech. It is a safe bet that he has never been spoken to in such a fashion by anyone in his country, let alone someone in academia.

What occurred last Monday on the campus of Columbia set the stage for President Bush’s address about the desire of people everywhere to be free and of his criticism of repressive regimes such as those in Zimbabwe, Sudan and Cuba.

He urged the world organization to take steps to enforce the Univeral Declaration of Human Rights, which he called the “landmark achievement in the history of human liberty.”