The decision of Columbia University president Lee Bollinger to provide Ahmadinejad with a platform to speak yesterday at Columbia demonstrates all the lethal hubris of the western liberal who refracts everything he sees through the distorting prism of western liberal values on the basis that there cannot be any other way of looking at the world. Bollinger’s introductory remarks, in which he denounced Ahmadinejad to his face for all the crimes of which he is indeed guilty, has been hailed by other similarly deluded commentators as a moral and tactical triumph. Indeed, in his remarks Bollinger congratulated himself in anticipation of just such a triumph:

It is consistent with the idea that one should know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament. In the moment, the arguments for free speech will never seem to match the power of the arguments against, but what we must remember is that this is precisely because free speech asks us to exercise extraordinary self- restraint against the very natural but often counter-productive impulses that lead us to retreat from engagement with ideas we dislike and fear. In this lies the genius of the American idea of free speech.

Such arrogance betrays an equivalent ignorance. It does not for a moment occur to Bollinger – indeed, his frame of reference makes it impossible for him to grasp this – that the very fact of giving Ahmadinejad such a prestigious platform will play very differently in Iran, where Bollinger’s remarks will not be reported at all; and that Ahmadinejad’s whole performance will play very differently throughout the Islamic world, a fact which Ahmadinejad himself will adroitly manipulate to his advantage. This is well recognised at the Belmont Club, which witheringly comments:

Both Bollinger and Ahmedinajad broadcast their messages on a platform which grabbed the attention of the world. But what was said on that platform will be selectively quoted and amplified in a process that favors Ahmedinajad’s signal over Bollinger’s. The amplifying circuitry of the media will ensure that an anti-Israel, anti-American message will get more than a fair airing. Few will read the exchange verbatim. If Bollinger thinks that a few barbed questions, a few provocative statements; that a little defiance can compensate for giving the Iranian dictator an opportunity to emit a signal which is even now being tweaked and boosted to fit established talking points, he is mistaken. The medium is the massage. What works in the classroom doesn’t always work on the larger world stage.

Meanwhile at the American Thinker Amil Imani points out the dangers of underestimating Ahmadinejad by dismissing him as some kind of certifiable lunatic:

There is nothing really ‘unhinged’ about Ahamadinejad’s thinking, statements and actions. They are internally consistent. He is simply a fanatic who is wedded to an extremely dangerous exclusionary system of belief. Humanity must learn that dismissing him as a lunatic will result in great suffering, as it did with Hitler. Tragically, Ahmadinejad is the embodiment of several million people who are hinged exactly like him and who are willing to give their lives, and take with them as many lives as required in the service of their belief. In this age of Weapons of Mass Destruction a man with huge sums of petrodollars can serve as the catalyst of total annihilation.

Prudence would err on the side of being an alarmist than a complacent dismissive. Ahmadinejad and his ilk are not interested in any negotiation, any compromise or any live-and-let-live final solution. They are determined to be the soldiers of Mahdi come-what-may. They have no problem with the total destruction of the world. They are headed for a life of eternal bliss in Allah’s paradise. They hardly care, even rejoice, if the rest of humanity is subjected to a tragic death in the nuclear, biological and chemical wasteland of planet earth. Humanity cannot afford and must not ignore the emergence of the final threat to its very existence on this planet.

For all these reasons, the appearance of Ahmadinejad at the UN today – indeed, his whole American visit – is an American strategic error of the first magnitude. It merely advertises the suicidal weakness of the west which does not even understand its mortal enemy — who understands its own weakness only too well.