Columbia University has now supplanted its competitors in the upper echelons of higher education as the bellwether of intellectual dishonesty.

In fact, the lead may be insurmountable, unless of course the ghost of Stalin starts to hold vigil on the streets of Cambridge to debate the importance of purges in efficient communistic administration.

By now everyone knows that Columbia has invited Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on its campus, a Holocaust denier, religious Islamist fundamentalist, and proud advocate of Jewish destruction. Just last year the leadership of Columbia University viewed such positions as less offensive than the United States’ military’s recruitment policies.

In short, Jewish genocide is less offensive than “don’t ask, don’t tell”.

Really?

Apparently. Columbia University might as well start a symposium on the subject and invite Jeremiah Munsen to discuss his views on the inferiority of other races and the proper role of Africa in international relations. It’s just free speech, right?

Which is a trap door. Free speech is not the real issue. Institutions all the time decide that certain opinions are too far outside the acceptable realm of discussion, whether it is the forbidding of ROTC recruitment on campus, or the denial of a former Harvard president to speak to a state university governing board because he dared comment that women simply didn’t like science as much as men do. Do not be fooled that Columbia is acting as a neutral forum. If they found Ahmadinejad’s statements and policies distasteful, he would have already been disinvited. American academia has long snuffed out the torch of free speech on its campuses.

Add to that a Columbia University dean John Coatsworth’s sua sponte admission that Adolf Hitler would have been welcome prior to the beginning of World War II (pre or post the invasion of Sudetenland, we’re not sure), and we have quite the mess. The rationale there, I suppose, is that we wouldn’t have been at war with Germany yet, or more invidious, that anti-Semitism is simply okay (I suppose someone should tell the dean Mein Kampf was published sixteen years before American involvement in the war). The lynch pin according to the dean is that he would have to be subjected to a discussion, which seems more label than substance. There will be no substantive discussion - Ahmadinejad will stick to his genocidal, anti-American talking points like he has in every interview he has conducted.

Either way, we are de facto at war with Iran, and Columbia is playing the perfect patsy, giving Iran’s leader an American platform to crown his well-orchestrated media circus. It is not debatable that Iranian monies and weapons have been provided to the anti-government forces in Iraq. I know at this point it’s too late to demand that our academics reach a pro-American consensus. At the very least one of our top universities could muster enough willpower to stand up to an avowed religiously intolerant, genocidal racist.