I admit I was wrong. Indeed very wrong, about some tiny possibility of Iran trying to bury the past and work for some sort of rapprochement with the United States after almost three decades of hostile relations.
What happened at Columbia University on Monday (Sept. 24) was more than enough to put me and very many who think that Iran-US relations can be repaired with help from beyond political corridors, in our proper place. Fears of the skeptics, well versed in American arrogance and ignorance, and pushing for a full and irreversible end to any contact with the Yankees, were confirmed.
This time around it was not the likes of Bush, Cheney, the Rummies or other fanatic anti-Iran neocons dreaming about obsolete ways to bend or destroy Iranian dignity by using derogatory language against one of our senior authorities. Of course, the introductory language that Columbia’s head, Lee Bollinger used while introducing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the high-profile audience was more worthy of himself and the present White House occupant.
This is what Bollinger said in the intro which will remain a permanent fixture in the minds of informed Iranians including very much those folks who had hardly been great fans of the president:
“I am only a professor, who is also a university president. Today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.“
He, however, did not give the date and other details about when the “civilized world“ sent him on mission to speak on its behalf or carry its heavy burden.
Now if these are the best and brightest from the “most powerful“ country, and this is academia of one of the prestigious centers of higher learning across the world, one can only imagine the mindset of its greedy politicians and corrupted spin doctors.
That the senior American teacher was playing to the gallery of Zionist Jews and their neo-Christian helpers in the Bush White House is not unusual, given the fact that in the US money has a way of getting things done. What was strange, shocking, but not surprising, was how a person of Columbia caliber gives himself the liberty to address an elected leader of a country in this uncivilized manner.
By attacking our president with such grotesque language, Bollinger might have been applauded by some and even got himself a few minutes of fame (Iran-bashing is a lucrative business in the decaying west). His crass exploitation of fact may also land him some better paid job in the future. But his name, for valid reasons, will be added to the black list of cheap opportunists and self-appointed thinkers out to make something from nothing.
And what was Ahmadinejad’s response? As the cameras zoomed on his face, it was apparent that the president had been hurt. At that moment, he may even have cursed himself for taking the high-voltage risk of accepting the university’s invitation to speak in a fresh effort to lay out his roadmap for building a better world with the help of informed debate.
In his decent, cool and calm manner, that many a times surprises his strong political opponents at home, the president said what he had heard from the unkind host was a “political statement“. He noted that it was an “insult to the intelligence of the audience“ because the lethal charges had been hurled even before he had spoken or taken questions from the students and teachers.
The Columbia encounter with all its repugnance did have a positive side which its big wigs very likely may not have envisioned. Ahmadinejad scored further points with Muslim-Arab public opinion as a hero standing up to western arrogance and defending the rights of the downtrodden this time on enemy turf. It would be fair to also say that in a matter of an hour or so the number of people supporting the president’s foreign policy increased by several million in and outside Iran.
Now more than ever before, it’s visible that arrogance and ignorance have become an ally of the white west and that things will and must get worse for the western racists out to rule the world.
This week intellectual decency in the west sank to new lows and intellectual bankruptcy gathered extra points. Policymakers in Tehran should not be deluded in their search for some ’accommodation’ with this or that Uncle Sam’s administration. There is no more reason why our statesmen should waste the nation’s resources and sit at the same table to make things easier for the US in Iraq or anywhere else. Conventional wisdom would argue that we do otherwise.
May be we were swimming in a sea of illusion thinking Iran and America can sort out their problems and may have some common grounds. We really never had. The US was, is, and will remain a dangerous enemy. This is the simple political arithmetic I failed to understand over the past quarter century.