Democracy and Freedom of Speech and Why We are Free

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said, on the question concerning the executions of
homosexuals in Iran stated the following today (9/24/2007) at Columbia University:
"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We don't have that like in your country. ... In
Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this"

Of course they have no homosexuals in Iran. That is true! They killed them all and
the lucky ones were able to flee! Iran also denies that there is a problem with HIV
although there are a few documented cases, eventually those infected, women,
men, children, will probably also be put away or killed.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, like Hitler, Eva Peron and many other brutal leaders,
share common denominators - they were peasants, poor ignorant in their humble
beginnings and as they rose to power they preyed upon the greater numbers of people
who supported them - the poor and the working classes they came from.
These people have no love or compassion and are motivated solely by power & greed!
Many other great leaders who came from the poor and working class also have
lead people with - out of their suffering came love and compassion,
examples they set and taught - Abe Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, the
mountain men in the early American Revolution who stood against English aggression,
they turned their power into something more important - freedom for all.

Many out there, myself included, felt that he should not be allowed to speak at all.
Then I remembered what this country is about, the freedom of speech and upon listening closely to
every word Lee Bollinger said in his opening introduction of the President of Iran today,
I realized why we the people, in the United States of America, can truly embrace "democracy" and
stand behind that basic freedom our founding fathers fought for.
I found the complete opening introductory of Columbia University's President's speech online
and feel that we may once again remember and reflect why we are truly Americans.
We have had to fight for healthcare for our HIV needs and we have more than most around the
world. We must never forget what we, the people, are about.
We also must remember why we are still alive - because of that freedom!
Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts and this speech with you.
Jim Thurman September 2007

President Lee C. Bollinger's Introductory Remarks at SIPA-World Leaders Forum
with President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Sept. 24, 2007
I would like to begin by thanking Dean John Coatsworth and Professor Richard Bulliet for their work in
organizing this event and for their commitment to the role of the School of International and Public Affairs and
its role in training future leaders in world affairs. If today proves anything it will be that there is an enormous
amount of work ahead for all of us. This is just one of many events on Iran that will run throughout this
academic year, all to help us better understand this critical and complex nation in today’s geopolitics.

Before speaking directly to the current President of Iran, I have a few critically important points to emphasize.
First, since 2003, the World Leaders Forum has advanced Columbia’s longstanding tradition of serving as a
major forum for robust debate, especially on global issues. It should never be thought that merely to listen to
ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist
those ideas or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of
freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To
hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible. Second, to those who believe that this event never
should have happened, that it is inappropriate for the University to conduct such an event,
I want to say that I understand your perspective and respect it as reasonable.

The scope of free speech and academic freedom should itself always be open to further debate. As one of
the more famous quotations about free speech goes, it is “an experiment, as all life is an experiment.” I want
to say, however, as forcefully as I can, that this is the right thing to do and, indeed, it is required by existing
norms of free speech, the American university, and Columbia itself. Third, to those among us who experience
hurt and pain as a result of this day, I say on behalf of all of us we are sorry and wish to do what we can to
alleviate it. Fourth, to be clear on another matter - this event has nothing whatsoever to do with any “rights” of
the speaker but only with our rights to listen and speak. We do it for ourselves. We do it in the great tradition
of openness that has defined this nation for many decades now. We need to understand the world we live in,
neither neglecting its glories nor shrinking from its threats and dangers. 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. Lastly, 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.........
THE BRUTAL CRACKDOWN ON SCHOLARS, JOURNALISTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATES
Over the last two weeks, your government has released Dr. Haleh Esfandiari and Parnaz Axima; 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 Teheran, under house arrest, and he still does
not know whether he will be charged with a crime or allowed to leave the country.

Let me say this for the record, I call on the President today to ensure that Kian Tajbaksh will be free to travel
out of Iran as he wishes. Let me also report today that we are extending an offer to Dr. Tajbaksh to join our
faculty as a visiting professor in urban planning here at his Alma Mater, in our Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning and Preservation. And we hope he will be able to join us next semester. 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 September 5th alone. 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 Dr. 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. In this very room last year we learned something about Velvet
Revolutions from Vaclav Havel. And we will likely hear the same from our World Leaders Forum speaker this
evening – President Michelle Bachelet Jeria of Chile. Both of their extraordinary stories remind us that there
are not enough prisons to prevent an entire society that wants its freedom from achieving it. 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 Baha’i 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 Gangi, 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.
And while my colleague at the Law School Michael Dorf spoke to Radio Free Europe [sic, Voice of America]
viewers in Iran a short while ago on the tenets of freedom of speech in this country, I propose going further than
that. 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?·

THE DENIAL OF THE HOLOCAUST
In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as a “fabricated” “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.   You should know that Columbia is a world center of
Jewish studies and now, in partnership with the YIVO Institute, of Holocaust studies. Since the 1930s, we’ve
provided an intellectual home for countless Holocaust refugees and survivors and their children and
grandchildren. 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 group 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 US 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 destabalize 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, General David Petraeus reported that arms
supplies from Iran, including 240mm rockets and explosively formed projectiles, are contributing to “a
sophistication of attacks that would by no means be possible without Iranian support.” A number of Columbia
graduates and current students are among the brave members of our military who are serving or have served
in Iraq and Afghanistan. They, like other Americans with sons, daughters, fathers, husbands and wives serving
in combat, rightly see your government as the enemy. Can you tell them and us why Iran is fighting a proxy war
in Iraq by arming Shi’a militia targeting and killing U.S. troops? ·

FINALLY, IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM AND INTERNATIONAL SANCTIONS
This week the United Nations 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 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? Let
me close with this comment. 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 do expect you
to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do. Fortunately, I am told by
experts on your country, that this only further undermines your position in Iran with all the many good-hearted,
intelligent citizens there. A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this
country (as in your meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations) so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that
this led to your party’s defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more. 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.

Note: A complete video of the SIPA-World Leaders Forum with the President of Iran will be available on the
Web at www.worldleaders.columbia.edu.