Let him speak, he's crazy!

Iran's "president" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just finished his talk at Columbia University and interview on CBS at 60 Minutes and the result? A win for rational thought and liberty!?!

Defenders of Columbia university president Lee Bollinger, including his own, as well as his conservative critics have, in my opinion, been missing the point. We should invite Ahmadinejad, Hitler, and whatever other influential whackjobs or despots that we can so long as they consent to freedom of discourse, which Iran's president did. Why you ask? Because they're wrong. They're wrong, and they only way to strip from the the veil of respectability is to let them expose their own insance beliefs and be forced to defend them.

That's the beauty of watching Ahmadinejad squirm when the audience laughed at his claim that his nation has no homosexuals. People will be sympathetic and even affectionate towards a man like that so long as they can only see him at him most polished and only when they see what he wants them to see. The great thing about people like that are that they are isolated and surrounded by supporters and actually have immense confidence in their own nonsense and are often perfectly willing to walk onto a stage in front of a semi-hostile audience and look the part of the fool, which he certainly did.

There's no danger in that unless you think that his ideas are better than your own. Did Bill Kristol from the Weekly Standard have some fear that Ahmadinejad was going to come here and score a huge public relations win? Yes he did and said so quite explicitly. The mistake that Kristol makes is that he should have had no fear whatsoever. He should have be salivating at the chance that Iran's president was about to throw away most of his respectability and instead act as a profound illustration of the backwardness and barbarism of the Iranian state.

We should always be willing to challenge nonsense and the best way to do that is to give it the biggest stage possible and challenge it on every single point. Expose if for what it is. Don't give crazy people a soapbox but give them a stage big enough for their ego's to override their cautious good judgement by making them think that the chance to address a large audience is worth the risk of their views being exposed. That's what happened to Ahmadinejad and he certainly looks the worse for wear. I doubt that anyone walked out of that speech thinking "wow, we should really listen to that guy" and if they did they were already too far gone to concern ourselves with.

Now, I'm no defender of Columbia universities and it's own cowardice, intellectual abusiveness, and regular embrace of leftist nonsense but this time they not only did the right thing, but the best possible thing.