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NEW YORK (MNA) – An academic delegation of Columbia University professors and deans of faculties plans to visit Tehran to officially apologize to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. The delegation plans to express regret for the insulting remarks Columbia University President Lee Bollinger directed at Ahmadinejad on September 24 in his introductory speech, the Mehr News Agency correspondent in New York reported. Since the incident, the deans and professors from the faculties of history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, philosophy, and Islamic studies have criticized Bollinger’s behavior toward Ahmadinejad. A member of the delegation, who requested anonymity, said the main goal of...

Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, was confronted yesterday by discontented professors who gathered more than 100 faculty signatures for a document criticizing his leadership. Their “statement of concern,” read to him at a faculty meeting, outlined a grab bag of charges, some relating to governance of the university and some concerning Middle East issues that have repeatedly troubled the campus, in particular his challenging introductory remarks when the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, visited this fall.

Psychiatric Association Releases Final Report on "Lee Bollinger's Disease" By William S. Smith : 03 Oct 2007 (SATIRENEWSSERVICE) The World Psychiatric Association (WPA) today issued its long-awaited, massive study on Intelligentsia Derangement Disorder (IDD). Known popularly as Lee Bollinger's Disease, IDD is characterized by profound disruption in cognition involving the most fundamental human attributes: language, thought, perception and desire for self preservation. The disease has been found in epidemic proportions on university campuses. The WPA study, which included extensive case histories of every single academic in the United States and Western Europe, reports that 99.99999% of all, non-economist social science...

The President of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, really gave it to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He really did. He called Ahmadinejad a "petty and cruel dictator" and many other harsh names. All richly deserved. And it is likely that President Bollinger felt that he had done a good thing. In fact, however, as many of us predicted, it was Ahmadinejad who won. The very moment the Iranian Holocaust-denier was given a university platform, he won. Even the deserved insults gave Ahmadinejad a victory. Most people do not like their leaders publicly insulted abroad, even if they agree with most of...

There is a suicidal mania that tends to grip the American media and academia from time to time, and it has happened again with the American visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the poster boy for state sponsors of terrorism. It's bad enough that Ahmadinejad was among friends when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in late September, but when major American newspapers, several American TV networks, including CBS's 60 Minutes, the National Press Club, and a major Ivy League university give a significant propaganda victory to a man who is arguably the most dangerous man alive, there's a...

Patriots need to learn to two words -- "treason" and "traitor." The American people need to hear the truth - that the left has gone far beyond dissent. It betrays America at every turn. Its hatred of our nation - our history and underlying ethos - is visible in word and deed. It slanders the republic, lies about our past, undercuts our warriors, revels in American deaths and consorts with the enemy in time of war (aid and comfort, and all that). These reflections are prompted by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University, in the course of his...

Isn't it always? But enough about Iran, let's talk about me! The same university that shouted down an American anti-illegal-immigration activist and the same university culture that just deemed former Harvard honcho Larry Summers too misogynist to be permitted on campus is now congratulating itself over its commitment to "academic freedom." True, renowned Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo is not happy. "They can have any fascist they want there," said professor Zimbardo, "but this seems egregious." But, hey, don't worry: He was protesting not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presence at Columbia but Donald Rumsfeld's presence at the Hoover Institution.... Lots of prime...

1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pronounced mah-MOOD ah-mah-dih-nee-ZHAD) was born Oct. 28, 1956, three years after the CIA-sponsored coup that installed the pro-Western leader Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Iran's leader. A Shiite Muslim, he and his wife, a professor, have two sons and a daughter. 2. When he was an infant, Ahmadinejad's family moved from the village of Aradan to Tehran. It was at this point that the family changed its name from Saborjhian, which translates to "thread painter" (the lowliest job in Iran's traditional carpet-weaving industry), to the more religious Ahmadinejad ("race of Muhammad" or "virtuous race"). 3. Ahmadinejad is...

Too bad Dr. Lee Bollinger, who has a law degree, forgot an essential cross-examination principle: Never ask a hostile witness a question you don't already know the answer to. If he'd remembered that bit of courtroom wisdom before he invited Iran's president to Columbia University, perhaps jihadists around the world wouldn't be laughing at America right now. Bollinger is the president of Columbia, which invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a question-and-answer forum on campus this week. The showdown was supposed to expose the Iranian propagandist, but it turned out to be the biggest public relations disaster in the history of American...

TASE HIM, BRO!September 26, 2007 Democrats should run Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for president. He's more coherent than Dennis Kucinich, he dresses like their base, he's more macho than John Edwards, and he's willing to show up at a forum where he might get one hostile question -- unlike the current Democratic candidates for president who won't debate on Fox News Channel. He's not married to an impeached president, and the name "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad" is surely no more frightening than "B. Hussein Obama." And liberals agree with Ahmadinejad on the issues! We know that because he was invited by an American university...

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have faced ridicule in the United States by suggesting there were no homosexuals in Iran, but he won praise at home on Wednesday for taking his country's case to "the Lion's Den." Generally, politicians and media in the Islamic Republic -- even some who have previously criticized the president -- described Ahmadinejad's visit to New York as a triumph and denounced the university president who called him "a petty and cruel dictator." But one pro-reform newspaper said that, although the president told his U.S. audience he respected academics, that was not always how it seemed at...

Columbia University president Lee Bollinger exercised his free speech rights by giving guest lecturer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a good tongue lashing. It is doubtful his words swayed the Iranian despot – “OK, OK, the Holocaust happened, and I will dismantle my nuclear program just as soon as I get back home!” - but with his tough talk “Bollinger had clawed his way back to semi-respectability in polite society by insulting his guest - not the usual practice in polite society, but consider the depth of the hole Bollinger had dug for himself by insisting on being a good academic liberal,” as...

On Monday, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger slightly redeemed himself and his institution by charging President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with "[exhibiting] all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator." Yesterday, President George W. Bush, speaking to the UN, stood up for human rights around the world. "In Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Iran, brutal regimes deny their people the fundamental rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration," Bush said. Yet here too there was a disconnect. The speech seem to have been written almost as if the jihadi bid for global dominance did not exist. How is it possible to speak...

A backlash against the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, who on Monday delivered a harsh rebuke to President Ahmadinejad, is coming from faculty members and students who said he struck an "insulting tone" and that his remarks amounted to "schoolyard taunts." The fierceness of Mr. Bollinger's critique bought the Iranian some sympathy on campus that he didn't deserve, the critics said, and amounted to a squandered opportunity to provide a lesson in diplomacy. Mr. Bollinger opened a two-hour program during which the Iranian president spoke and answered questions at the Roone Arledge Auditorium in Morningside Heights by calling Mr....

TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- Seven chancellors and presidents of Iranian universities and research centers, in a letter addressed to their counterpart in the US Colombia University, denounced Lee Bollinger's insulting words against the Iranian nation and president and invited him to provide responses for 10 questions of the Iranian academicians and intellectuals. The following is the full text of the letter. Mr. Lee Bollinger Columbia University President We, the professors and heads of universities and research institutions in Tehran , hereby announce our displeasure and protest at your impolite remarks prior to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent speech at Columbia...

In the end, the critics of Columbia University may have been both right and wrong. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at the Ivy League school on Monday at the invitation of its chief executive, the First Amendment scholar and celebrated liberal Lee Bollinger. When Mr. Bollinger announced that Mr. Ahmadinejad was to be the latest in a long line of world leaders to lecture at Columbia, he didn't seem to have anticipated that anyone would have a problem. If he had, he probably would have prepared a defence of the invitation that went beyond a simpleminded recitation of free speech...

IRANIAN President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to America this week to address the United Nations and found himself the center of an American media storm. The Iranian president is routinely demonized in the United States for allegedly “denying the Holocaust” and calling for the “destruction of Israel.” Ahmadinejad has also been criticized for oppressing Iranian citizens, persecuting women and dissidents including members of the Bahai’ faith and homosexuals. President Bush has used Ahmadinejad and Iran as a distraction to redirect American anger from the lies he used to justify invading Iraq and the increasing American casualties. Columbia University and its president,...

COLUMBIA University Presi dent Lee Bollinger yester day made some cutting crit icisms while introducing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - but that doesn't make the school's decision to offer a platform to the head of a violent terrorist state any less abject, squalid or shameless. "Abject, squalid, shameless" 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." And Columbia's event, like the 1933 Oxford resolution, sent (to quote Churchill again) a "very...

So, in the end, Monday the Iranian wild man Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got a dressing down from the man who had invited him -- in the name of free speech, you understand -- to speak at Columbia University. Likely, by time for the speech, Columbia President Lee Bollinger had no choice other than to perfume himself against the stench from a statesman who proposes to exterminate Israel, presides over one of the world's least free regimes and may, to boot, have a secret nuclear weapons program going. Bollinger had been getting unshirted hell from reasonable people displeased -- as why wouldn't...

NEW YORK (AFP) Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffered the rare humiliation of a public dressing down when he appeared at a top US university Monday, where he was labelled a "petty and cruel dictator." The firebrand president's appearance at Columbia University came a day ahead of his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, but his presence here has sparked bitter controversy, notably because of his outspoken stance on Israel. Booed, cheered and strongly challenged on his views on the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad seemed to take the challenges in his stride but complained of "unfriendly treatment" at the hands of the...

I watched President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University introduce Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the podium at Columbia University this afternoon. I also subsequently watched the madman himself speak (what passes for) his ‘mind’. President Bollinger delivered a fairly powerful address, but its impact for me was greatly tempered by the fact that I believe he was playing to a world audience, attempting to defray much of the justified criticism of his decision to invite Iran’s president to speak on his campus. Much of what he said was diluted by his, and his university’s, history of -- and continuing notable deference...

Columbia University disgraced itself this week beyond repair. Defending his decision to invite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to his campus, Columbia's President Lee Bollinger said he would confront the Iranian leader with a series of "sharp challenges" to his "alleged" support for terrorism, genocide, Holocaust denial, involvement in killing American servicemen and women in Iraq and human rights abuses during his speech on Monday. John Coatsworth, the Dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, expanded on Bollinger's theme of the school's limitless devotion to debate saying, "If Hitler were in the United States and wanted a platform from...

COLUMBIA FIASCO David Horowitz www.frontpagemag.com/9/24/2007 Lee Bollinger has demonstrated why we can't trust liberals to defend the West. Bollinger gave a half way decent speech attacking Ahmadinejad in a reasonably polite way, but having invited the dictator in the first place managed to set himself up as the ungracious host. This paved the way for a speech which didn't answer any of the questions Bollinger had put to him, began with a sermon against hate (this by a preacher of Hitlerian hate), and then a lecture in behalf of free speech, tolerance and scientific knowledge, and then in reference to...

Editor's note: This piece by Matthew Continetti appeared in the October 14, 2002, issue of National Review. Lee Bollinger, the recently installed president of Columbia University, is used to praise. Newsweek labeled him an exemplar of a “new, visionary breed of college presidents.” In The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann wrote that “if you were called upon to invent a perfect university president, you couldn’t do better” than Bollinger. And in an article entitled “A Renaissance Man at Columbia’s Helm,” the Christian Science Monitor cooed that beneath the college president’s “gentle voice and unassuming manner lies a powerful legal counterpuncher.” Why...

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Columbia University President Lee Bollinger excoriated Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday, going through a long list of documented actions and remarks by the firebrand Iranian leader and his government. "Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," Bollinger said to applause from many of the 600 people in the room for a speech from the Iranian leader. He cited the Iranian government's "brutal crackdown" on dissidents, public executions, executions of minors and other actions. And Bollinger assailed Ahmadinejad's "denying" of the Holocaust as "ridiculous" and "dangerous propaganda." He called the...

The Trustees of Columbia University hired and evaluate the performance of President Lee Bollinger. The New York Sun assigns them a large measure of blame for a history of failure in monitoring and evaluating the leadership of Columbia University, culminating in the travesty of the visit of Iranian "President" Ahmadinajed to the campus today, just two days after Yom Kippur, the holiest day for the Jewish community. Here is a list of the Trustees. One prominent member is Eric Holder, who was appointed to serve as the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia by President Clinton. Then Clinton...

Barry Rosen, executive director of public and external affairs at Borough of Manhattan Community College, was a hostage in Iran from 1979 to 1981. He studied Iranian culture at Columbia University. I wonder what the Founding Fathers would think of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University tomorrow. They instilled the belief in all of us: Everyone has the right of free speech. But I believe they'd be in a quandary about this one. I'd certainly like to talk to James Madison, who drafted our Bill of Rights, and ask him whether Ahmadinejad deserves that right. Ahmadinejad is a reprehensible leader...

Institutional memory is short, so just a flashback to the Qadhafi speech at Columbia. The sad thing is that while faculty fall all over themselves to bring repressive dictators to campus, many dissidents from the same countries are ignored. Columbia has never invited chief Libyan democracy activist Fathi El-Jahmi, for example (his mailing address for the last two and a half years would be Libya's state prison system). Likewise, Richard Bulliet, Columbia's point man to arrange giving a platform to Ahmadinejad, does not extend invitations to people like Mansour Osanlou, the head of the Islamic Republic's first independent trade union...

Hunter warns Columbia University Cancel Invitation to Iranian President September 22, 2007 Mackinac Island, MI...Congressman Duncan Hunter issued a statement this morning from Mackinac Island directed to Columbia University. "To host the leader of Iran when he supports terrorists that are moving deadly roadside bombs across the Iraqi border to be used against American troops is a slap in the face for the entire 165,000 men and women in Iraq and to those that have served before them," said Hunter. "If President Lee Bollinger follows through with this hosting of the leader of Iran, I will move in Congress to...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is traveling to New York to address the United Nations' General Assembly this week and his trip has already run into controversy. President Ahmadinejad's request to visit Ground Zero was denied by the New York Police Department and now his scheduled address to Columbia University students and faculty as part of the school's World Leaders Forum on Monday has created a furore on campus. A law student Aviva Robbin is one of nearly a 100 students who have united on Facebook and have planned to protest against Ahmadinejad speaking on their campus. ''While we do value...

Having been summarily denied his wish for an officially sanctioned visit to Ground Zero, Iranian despot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is headed for Columbia University - where he's set to be welcomed with open arms. That Columbia would want to offer a platform to such a bloody handed villain - one who, to this day, presides over a country that's directly abetting the murder of U.S. soldiers in Iraq - says much about the state of Ivy League education. At the same time, the fact that it has an absolute right to do just that surely distinguishes America from Ahmadinejad's thugocracy. Indeed,...

Besides omitting Iran’s terror ties in their coverage Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s planned visit to Ground Zero in New York City, as Scott Whitlock noted in his earlier post, ABC and CBS, as well as NBC, failed to mentioned that Ahmadinejad is also giving a lecture at Columbia University. The lecture, sponsored by the University, is planned on September 24, the same day Ahmadinejad will be addressing the United Nations. As you might expect, there has been widespread criticism of this decision, not only from the Columbia University student body (a Facebook group  , but also in the conservative blogosphere (see Michelle Malkin's blog...

TWO DAYS AGO, Columbia University announced that next Monday, September 24, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will speak and participate in a question and answer session with university faculty and students at Columbia. According to the university statement, "This opportunity for faculty and students to engage the President of Iran came about after Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee at the Iranian Mission to the United Nations initiated contact with Columbia through a member of the faculty, Richard Bulliet, who is a specialist on Iran." So at the request of the Iranian government, Columbia University will host the president of a terrorist regime which...

Ahmadinejad to Speak on Campus By John Davisson SEPTEMBER 19, 2007 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, has accepted an invitation to speak at Columbia from School of International and Public Affairs interim dean John Coatsworth, according to a spokesman. The event is scheduled to take place on Monday, September 24--the same day that Ahmadinejad is scheduled to address the UN General Assembly--as part of the World Leaders Forum and will be sponsored by SIPA. "Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most, or even all of us will find offensive and even odious," University President...

To: President Lee Bollinger, Columbia University I thought of writing you a letter, but my experience with people as important as you is they seldom answer their mail. So I thought it better to make this a public letter. Those who agree with me can make copies of this and send them in. Let’s review. On 6 October, there was a planned speech by three representatives of the Minuteman Project, an organization which believes that immigration should be legal, and that illegal immigration should be stopped. They were invited by a recognized student group, and Columbia said it would take...

Freedom of expression is an essential part of University life, but it does not include intimidation. Columbia University's Statement on Academic Honesty -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Professor Joseph Massad] was teaching the class about the Jenin incidents [during the Palestinian resistance] and a girl raised her hand and tried to bring up an alternative point of view and before she could get her point across, he quickly . . . shouted at her, 'I will not have anyone sit through this class and deny Israeli atrocities.' Which pretty much limited the students' ability to even question him, or bring up an alternative point...

NEW YORK - Columbia University president Lee Bollinger plans "specific steps" soon in response to allegations that professors and lecturers at the Ivy League university made vitriolic and malicious comments against Israel in classes. Bollinger made the pledge in a Wednesday phone call to Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman. Bollinger didn't detail the character of the steps, but emphasized "the matter will be handled immediately." New York's Columbia University was recently embarrassed by reports that Middle Eastern professors are exploiting their academic standing to express extreme political views on Israel, using slanderous and defamatory statements. The allegations against the...

Bollinger's Blindness New York Sun Staff Editorial October 22, 2004 "I think something extremely important is happening on our campuses. They are now turned into sites for cultivation of critical judgment for responsible citizenship in what we hope will remain a free republic. Even as late as five years ago no one would have dared stand on the steps of the Law Library on Columbia Campus and condemn the military thuggery of people like Ariel Sharon. Innocent people in Jenin, Kandahar, Shalamcheh, or Baghdad are brutally massacred and no one would have dared to condemn these acts publicly. But not...

A committee appointed by the president of Columbia University for months has been quietly probing allegations of bias and intimidation by faculty, particularly in Middle East studies, The Jewish Week has learned. The panel convened by President Lee Bollinger comes at a time when Jewish students at the Ivy League university have complained that some Middle East classes are unbalanced and that faculty members have used their authority to promote anti-Israel activism. “We want to preserve a healthy atmosphere on campus,” said Vincent Blasi, a Columbia Law School professor who chairs the committee. “We want to make sure that classroom...

At an invitation-only alumni reception in Washington, DC, yesterday, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger defended his refusal to fire Nicholas deGenova, the controversial professor who called for a "million Mogadishus," while admitting the public outcry, including 15,000 emails, was hurting Columbia's reputation. In response to an angry alumnus' question about the controversy and its negative impact on Columbia's reputation and alumni donations, Bollinger said that deGenova's remarks, which occured during a faculty-organized "teach-in" and included a claim that "U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white supremacy," were "reprehensible," but claimed they were protected by the First Amendment. Bollinger...

Democrats, looking to capitalize on President Bush's decision to oppose the University of Michigan's affirmation action program, began a campaign Friday to make civil rights and equal education opportunities a major 2004 election issue. "Civil rights has always been the great unfinished business of America," Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy told a Capitol Hill Democratic forum. Democrats have been criticizing the GOP on civil rights issues since December, when Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi started an uproar with remarks praising the pro-segregation 1948 presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond. Then the Bush administration argued to the Supreme Court on Thursday against...