Ahmadinejad: Defender of Gay Rights?

On Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will speak and participate in a question and answer session with students and faculty at Columbia University. Pundits, students, and New Yorkers of all stripes are in an uproar that Ahmadinejad is being given a platform. At first, I was of the mindset that his speaking would have little effect one way or the other and would probably do no harm, but upon reflection (and after speaking with my friend, human rights activist and escaped slave Simon Deng), I have come around to the view that for an American institution of higher learning to host a head of state whose open desire is the destruction of another people is too tolerant of something fundamentally unacceptable.

If I believed those hosting him were taking a truly critical position and genuinely viewing this as an opportunity to challenge an enemy, I’d be in favor of it, but alas I know enough about extreme leftist naivete to suspect that this will serve as yet another means of imposing moral equivalency on a situation that in actuality demands a clear-eyed recognition that we have deadly, vicious enemies.

What’s striking, too, is the moral blindness here. In 2005, Columbia University’s President, Lee Bollinger, joined the faculty effort to uphold the ban of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) from Columbia, so students who want to serve their country must travel to other universities to do so. The reported reason for the ban was that the ROTC’s ban on open homosexuality violates Columbia’s anti-discrimination policy.

So, does the fact that Ahmadinejad is welcomed on campus and ROTC is banned mean that Ahmadinejad approves of gays?

In reality, this is no laughing matter, as it is the policy of Ahmadinejad and the mullahs to hang homosexuals in the public square. Take a look at Columbia’s guest’s handiwork.

This entry was written by and posted on September 23, 2007 at 2:16 am and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: , . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>