Peas in a Pod: The UN and Mad Jad

You may remember former Governor Mitt Romney’s firm letter to the UN regarding their witless invitation to Iran’s disturbed leader - the nut case who swears he has a halo and is busy building a special road for the 12th Imam - offering to have him address the General Assembly:

“If President Ahmadinejad sets foot in the United States, he should be handed an indictment under the Genocide Convention…”

“The United States and the world must take a strong stand against the terrorist Iranian regime and the time for action is now.”

Romney also thought that if the UN couldn’t understand something so elemental, then the U.S. should withdraw its support.

However, the UN, being what it is and where it is, will have its way. Ahmadinejad will address the Assembly on Sunday.

But that’s not the worst of it. Columbia University, one of the more problematic members of our already tarnished guild of higher learning, has also invited him to speak at the school which Horsefeathers calls “Madrassah on Morningside Heights.” After all, what would you expect of a school which has an (anonymously endowed) Edward Said chair in its department of Middle Eastern studies? Not to mention a bevy of anti-Semites in that department, particularly one Dr. Dabashi, whom I wrote about some time ago. This is a snip of his travelogue essay from back then. He describes the scene at the Israeli airport:

I sat on the edge of the counter and awaited my fate. I looked around me. The place had an uncanny similarity to an airport, but the garrison was a fully fortified barrack, with its battalion of security forces treating all the transient inmates with equal banality. It was not just coloured Muslims (note: Dr. Dabashi is Iranian. No darker than any of the other people there. Check out his picture on Electronic Intifada) like me that they treated like hazardous chemicals. It was everyone. “One,” as in our quintessential humanity, melted in this fearful furnace into a nullity beyond human recognition. What they call “Israel” is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their “soul.” What the Israelis are doing to Palestinians has a mirror reflection on their own soul -- sullied, vacated, exiled, now occupied by a military machinery no longer plugged to any electrical outlet. It is not just the Palestinian land that they have occupied; their own soul is an occupied territory, occupied by a mechanical force geared on self-destruction. They are on automatic piloting. This is they. No one is controlling anything. Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world…

- - - - - - - - -

…There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. No people can perpetrate what these people and their parents and grandparents have perpetrated on Palestinians and remain immune to the cruelty of their own deeds.

Note how radically his assessment differs from that of Deputy Chief Fultz of Ohio on his recent visit to “the entity”:

Asked of his impressions of Israel, Fultz said that the media “does not always display the problem as it really is,” and adding that he found “a beautiful country and a beautiful people” in Israel.

And the Columbia University speech is not the worst of it either.

The most despicable part of this whole thing is that someone is permitting this spewer of hatred to visit Ground Zero. From its lofty perch of serious journalism, The New York Times reports on the editorials in what it dismissively terms the city’s “tabloid” papers (as if the NYT’s obsessive repetitions of stories on Abu Ghraib hadn’t turned them into a tabloid long ago):

The city’s two leading tabloid newspapers put the story about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York on their front pages.

[…]

The Daily News, however, reports that there is little the city can do to stop Mr. Ahmedinejad from visiting ground zero on his own. A Secret Service detail is expected to accompany him throughout his visit to New York, which will include an appearance at Columbia University on Monday. The Daily News’s front-page headline comes straight from its editorial pages: “Our message to Iranian madman: If you even think of setting foot near Ground Zero, you can…GO TO HELL!”

The New York Post was equally adamant about criticizing the proposed visit. Under the front-page headline “ZERO CHANCE: City nixes evil Iran prez bid to tour 9/11 site,” The Post reports that city officials were caught off guard when a radio reporter first asked Mr. Kelly on Wednesday about Mr. Ahmadinejad’s visit. When it became clear that Mr. Kelly’s initial remarks had touched off a firestorm, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg swiftly intervened and made it clear that the city would not support the proposed visit, The Post reports.

The New York Sun, like The News, notes that the city might be powerless to stop Mr. Ahmadinejad from visiting. “The NYPD has little say over Mr. Ahmadinejad’s movements while he is here as long as he stays within 25 miles of Columbus Circle,” The Sun reports.

The Sun story is here. The Daily News is here.

This man leads a country that is a prime creator of chaos and death in the Middle East. His country funds the types of terrorists groups that created Ground Zero. He no more belongs at that site than Osama Bin Laden does.

Mayor Bloomberg, where are your masculine appurtenances? Did Rudy Giuliani take them along when he left office? You, sir, are the one with the authority to declare this latest outrage a public danger. If you wanted to, you could cancel this sacrilege.

I feel great sympathy for the 9/11 families who are going to be subjected to this travesty. It is so wrong that Bloomberg’s karma will be permanently out of whack if he permits Ahmadinejad this shameless slap in the face to the American people. For his own sake, I hope Bloomberg finds the necessary manliness to draw the line.


Thanks to RA for providing the phone number for Columbia University’s president phone number: (212) 854-9970. Please keep your message brief and courteous. And pointed.