Following is an edited transcript of Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger’s introductory remarks Monday at the school’s World Leaders Forum with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The entire transcript is available at chicagotribune.com/iran
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In universities, we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth. We do not have access to the levers of power. We cannot make war or peace. We can only make minds. And to do this we must have the most full freedom of inquiry.
Let me now turn to Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Brutal crackdown on scholars, journalists and human rights advocates
Over the last two weeks, your government has released Haleh Esfandiari and Parnaz Azima; and just two days ago Kian Tajbakhsh, a graduate of Columbia with a PhD in urban planning. While our community is relieved to learn of his release on bail, Dr. Tajbakhsh remains in Tehran, under house arrest, and he still does not know whether he will be charged with a crime or allowed to leave the country.
The arrest and imprisonment of these Iranian-Americans for no good reason is not only unjustified, it runs completely counter to the very values that allow today’s speaker to even appear on this campus. But at least they are alive.
According to Amnesty International, 210 people have been executed in Iran so far this year — 21 of them on the morning of Sept. 5. This annual total includes at least two children — further proof, as Human Rights Watch puts it, that Iran leads the world in executing minors.
There is more.
Iran hanged up to 30 people this past July and August during a widely reported suppression of efforts to establish a more open, democratic society in Iran. Many of these executions were carried out in public view, a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a party.
These executions and others have coincided with a wider crackdown on student activists and academics accused of trying to foment a so-called soft revolution. This has included jailing and forced retirements of scholars. As Esfandiari said in a broadcast interview since her release, she was held in solitary confinement for 105 days because the government “believes that the United States … is planning a Velvet Revolution” in Iran.
We at this university have not been shy to protest and challenge the failures of our own government to live by these values; and we won’t be shy in criticizing yours.
Let’s, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.
And so I ask you:
Why have women, members of the Bahai faith, homosexuals and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country?
Why in a letter last week to the secretary general of the UN did Akbar Ganji, Iran’s leading political dissident, and over 300 public intellectuals, writers and Nobel laureates express such grave concern that your inflamed dispute with the West is distracting the world’s attention from the intolerable conditions your regime has created within Iran? In particular, the use of the press law to ban writers for criticizing the ruling system.
Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change?
In our country, you are interviewed by our press and asked that you to speak here today. Let me lead a delegation of students and faculty from Columbia to address your university about free speech, with the same freedom we afford you today? Will you do that?
Denial of the Holocaust
In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as “fabricated” [and a] “legend.” One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers.
For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.
The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history. Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments about the “debate” over the Holocaust both defy historical truth and make all of us who continue to fear humanity’s capacity for evil shudder at this closure of memory, which is always virtue’s first line of defense.
Will you cease this outrage?
The destruction of Israel
Twelve days ago, you said that the state of Israel “cannot continue its life.” This echoed a number of inflammatory statements you have delivered in the last two years, including in October 2005 when you said that Israel should be “wiped off the map.”
Columbia has over 800 alumni currently living in Israel. As an institution we have deep ties with our colleagues there. I personally have spoken out in the most forceful terms against proposals to boycott Israeli scholars and universities, saying that such boycotts might as well include Columbia. More than 400 college and university presidents in this country have joined in that statement. My question, then, is: Do you plan on wiping us off the map too?
Funding terrorism
According to reports by the Council on Foreign Relations, it’s well documented that Iran is a state sponsor of terror that funds such violent groups as the Lebanese Hezbollah, which Iran helped organize in the 1980s, the Palestinian Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
While your predecessor government was instrumental in providing the U.S. with intelligence and base support in its 2001 campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, your government is now undermining American troops in Iraq by funding, arming and providing safe transit to insurgent leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr and his forces. There are a number of reports that also link your government with Syria’s efforts to destabilize the fledgling Lebanese government through violence and political assassination.
My question is this: Why do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and civil society in the region?
Proxy war against U.S. troops in Iraq
In a briefing before the National Press Club earlier this month, Gen. David Petraeus reported that arms supplies from Iran, including 240 mm rockets and explosively formed projectiles, are contributing to “a sophistication of attacks that would by no means be possible without Iranian support.”
Can you tell them and us why Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq by arming Shiite militia targeting and killing U.S. troops?
Iran’s nuclear program and international sanctions
This week the UN Security Council is contemplating expanding sanctions for a third time because of your government’s refusal to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. You continue to defy this world body by claiming a right to develop peaceful nuclear power, but this hardly withstands scrutiny when you continue to issue military threats to neighbors. Last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy made clear his lost patience with your stall tactics; and even Russia and China have shown concern.
Why does your country continue to refuse to adhere to international standards for nuclear weapons verification in defiance of agreements that you have made with the UN nuclear agency?
And why have you chosen to make the people of your country vulnerable to the effects of international economic sanctions and threaten to engulf the world with nuclear annihilation?
Frankly, and in all candor, Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. But your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us.
I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better.
