Initial Thoughts on the Speech

The questions posed were legitimately good ones -- better than I thought they would be. Of course, as I could have predicted, Ahmadinejad -- a skilled politician -- parried them all. In that sense, it was a waste of time.

And while I strongly objected to Columbia University inviting him to speak, they surprisingly didn't throw him soft balls. Yet -- sadly -- they allowed him to avoid actually answering any of the tough questions ...

It seems Bollinger's rhetoric about how it's good for academia to debate these questions, yada, yada, yada, seems to have been sincere, though misguided. At least, it appears, Columbia was inadvertently used for propaganda purposes (as opposed to being intentionally used).