I may not have been thrilled by the Bollinger/Ahmadenijad debate, but Columbia's president seems to have won over The New York Sun, which is interesting.
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More Bollinger
25 Sep 2007 10:05 am
Comments (13)
But not surprising, because his take on Iran could have been torn directly from the pages of the Sun.
I can't believe it was published.
You realize that this is the New York Sun we're talking about, right?
The people who take the strongest moral stands on issues are almost always the people who understand morality the least.
1) People don't realize the extent to which our corporate news media exist to manipulate their minds.
2) Notice how the vast majority of the news reporting was devoted to covering attacks on Ahmadinejad, to covering various rebukes laid on him, and to jeering at selected excerpts from his speech?
3) BUT note how the news media DELIBERATELY refused to report what Ahmadinejad ACTUALLY SAID?
4) THIS is how the news media deceives and manipulates us -- NOT by outright lies (or at least,not usually.) But by selecting only small pieces of reality and greatly hyping and presenting them in misleading context. By REFUSING to report major facts.
5) The New York Times and New York Sun printed many pages on this matter. And in all that coverage, they refused to tell us what Ahmadinejad actually SAID.
6) How can our democracy work when the information our citizens need -- and our national discourse -- is controlled by a few wealthy men who have nothing but contempt for our citizens. Newpaper and media owners who show, by their actions, that we are a herd of sheep to be gulled, conned, and led into disaster after disaster for the profit of private agendas.
7) The New York Sun ,after its articles, pretends to list Reader comments. In reality, this is a sham -- it presents the illusion of a public discussion . Because anyone who submits comments to the Sun finds that it only shows comments which follows its ideological script. That is not a newspaper -- that is a deceitful propaganda operation.
If you check the web, you will find it hard to find a transcript of what Ahmadinejad actually said.
To its credit, the Washington Post has such a transcript -- although you have to dig for it. The link is not on the front page with its article about the event.
Here it is:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/24/AR2007092401042.html?nav=hcmoduletmv
News flash, Don: it's always been like that, and likely always will be to some extent. The people who want real info have to dig for it. "Democracies" -- a term which does not entirely accurately describe the United States -- don't in fact live or die by how much accurate information is or is not disseminated to the masses. We turn power over to a few people who are entrusted to maintain stability and further the majority's prosperity. There will always be people with a better handle on the facts than the majority, and the political victors are always those who tell a better story. Just be thankful alternative news outlets are on the rise.
I should note that the NY Times does appear to give a transcript of Ahmadinejad's talk --not in its main articles but in an online blog. However, a careful comparison of the blog entries with the transcript at the Washington Post shows that the Times is not reporting what Ahmadinejad said -- it is reporting its characterization of what he said.
For example, the NY Times completely leaves out Ahmadinejad's complaint that the US government has been sponsoring terrorists groups who have been attacking Iran for decades -- who have killed large numbers of officials in the Iranian government.
Similarly, the NY Times blog's account also leaves out Ahmadinejad's argument that scholars who try to investigate what happened in the Holocaust are threatened with imprisonment in Europe.
Here in the free USA, of course, they simply are not published and they lose their jobs.
I do have to give George W Bush credit --he has a sense of humor. His statement last night that Ahmadinejad's talk at Columbia shows the strength of our freedom was hilarious.
Given the news media's censorship, Ahmadinejad would have had a better chance of being heard by the American people if he had went out in the middle of the Rockie Mountains and yelled at the trees.
If a foreign leader gives a speech and no one reports it, did the speech ever occur?
And Columbia President Bollinger's frenzied attack on Ahmadinejad --after inviting Ahmadinejad to speak -- was clearly driven by the threat of State and federal leaders to cut $Millions in grants to Columbia.
Which must have made Ahmadinejad feel right at home.
He must have felt a warm glow of satisfaction upon seeing that academics are treated in the USA the same way they are treated in Iran -- trotted out to give a veneer of scholarship to predetermined policies -- and slapped around if they get the slightest bit out of line.
Re Don Williams
Attached is another link which purports to be a transcript of Mr. Amadinejads' remarks at Columbia, Un.
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/202820.php
Bollinger's a serious person but also a realistic academic politicia n. He had strong parochial incentives to try to win somebody over, not improbably including a few people - see the picture of the crowd in front of Butler Library on the front page of today's Times - whose views aren't so different from the Sun's.
Bollinger's a serious person but also a realistic academic politician
This is true, but it is even more true if you remove the qualifier "academic."
Bollinger is a fairly weighty player in NY politics, especially with the proposed Manhattanville expansion. Yesterday Bollinger became the face of America's rejection and defiance of Iran. His name is in every newspaper in the country (and in most of the world too). This is a huge political coup for him both on the local and the national stage. I think he has some aspiration to enter politics, and this confrontation was destined to be line one of his political resume.
Now, from a less cynical viewpoint, I think Columbia came off fairly well in the whole production. I think a lot of opponents of the speech expected Bollinger and the rest of the audience to engage in a quiet and respectful "dialog" with Mahmoud, and when this turned out to be not the case, Bollinger and (most of) his audience turned out to be the defiant face of American rejection of Iran.
I don't think the threats to cut off university funding are much more than blustery bravado (though if they came to anything substantive, that'd be a fairly damaging development in university-government relations). Whatever you think about the merits of inviting to Ahmadenijad (I go back and forth on it), this was a win for Columbia, and a huge win for LeeBo.
Comments closed October 09, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
The portion describing him as a "'morally equivalent' educator" is gibberish and I can't believe it was published. What is he morally equivalent to?
Posted by washerdreyer | September 25, 2007 10:25 AM