Columbia University’s bizarre decision to offer a platform to Ahmadinejad, the Iranian head of a violent terrorist state, was “abject, squalid, and shameless.” This is how Winston Churchill described the resolution passed by Oxford University’s prestigious Debating Union in 1933 – the year Adolf Hitler came to power – that “this House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country.”
The Columbia mis-adventure, like the 1933 Oxford resolution, sent (quoting Churchill again) a “very disquieting and disgusting message” to friends and foe alike.
Unfortunately, many Americans do not understand that message. Their blindness goes to the heart of the Left v/s Right divide in our country; much like the one 1930s Britain that split men like Churchill from the appeasers of Europe’s dictators.
On one side of the divide, there is outrage and incomprehension that anyone could extend an invitation to a sworn enemy of the United States to speak on an American campus (a campus, by the way, that bans its own military ROTC!); the head of the world’s biggest terrorism sponsor in a city that was 9-11’s principal target; a Holocaust-denier welcomed at a university that has so many Jewish students and alumni. (One would only hope this is remembered when it is time to write that donation or tuition check!)
On the other side, there is bewilderment that anyone could possibly be offended. Therein lies the problem!
The Loony-Left in this country concluded long ago that this is not a war between Islamic extremist fascism and Western civilization, but a fight between Islamic “militants” and President Bush, with the Left favoring the “militants.” The attack of 9-11 never changed the Loonies’ view that the real menace to world peace is the Bush Administration; what former Senator J. William Fulbright called “the arrogance of American power” – much as the British leftists in the early ‘30s assumed that the real cause of war wasn’t men like Hitler and Mussolini, but capitalism and arms merchants.
Sadly, too many men and women at Columbia (and on other US campuses) see the War on Terror as something that they are free to judge and criticize as if it doesn’t involve them at all.
Adolf Hitler got the clear message of the 1933 Oxford Union debate: We will not oppose you. Ahmadinejad is bound to use his speech at Columbia to a hall of “open-minded” Americans as a major public-relations victory. How tragic that the Looney-left and the loonier media should hand him such a coup!
As Churchill said, “There is no place for compromise in war. That invaluable process only means that soldiers are shot because their leaders in council and camp are unable to resolve.”
He added, “In war the clouds never blow over; they gather unceasingly and fall in thunderbolts.” It was the falling thunderbolts of Nazi bombs that finally convinced the appeasers of the ‘30s that they had been wrong. New York City has already gone through its Blitz. What more will it take here, today?
