As I'm sure you are all aware, on Monday Iranian President Ahmadinejad made a speech on-campus at Columbia. Whilst I do have plenty to say about this, I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow account of exactly who said what and when. There are plenty of media reports available, including the following:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/906472.html
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/906778.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7010962.stm
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brian_whitaker/2007/09/no_homosexuality_here.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-columbia25sep25,0,1726100.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials
http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/09/there_are_no_homosexuals_in_ir.html

To read a full transcript of Columbia President Lee Bolinger's challenge to Ahmadinejad go here:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/07/09/lcbopeningremarks.html

To look at my photographs from the event, go here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=69100&l=3ca19&id=222304758

Rather, I wanted to give people a sense of what the students and those involved with Columbia made of all of it, as well as offering a few comments on some of the misreporting in the press. The first thing that should be noted is that many, many Columbia students were angry first and foremost because it was all but impossible for any of us to actually get tickets to see Ahmadinejad's speech. The university administration engineered proceedings to ensure that by the time ordinary students had any idea that Ahmadinejad was coming to speak the tickets were long gone. Only those 'in the know' stood any chance.

Opposition to Ahmadinejad's visit began immediately after the story broke. Posters depicting the execution and torture of homosexuals and children appeared all over campus from Friday. By Monday, Revolution, the on-campus Socialist group, had censored most of these posters with stickers claiming that the images "offended public decency." This is somewhat ironic given that it was the Socialists who time and again invoked freedom of speech in order to defend Ahmadinejad's appearance. It should also be pointed out that what offends public decency is not photographs of brutality and murder, but brutality and murder itself. This is especially so when we consider that these posters depicted public executions, perhaps the greatest affront to public decency (and, incidentally, prohibited by numerous conventions and treaties to which Iran is a signatory). Incidentally, as Human Rights Watch have noted, Iran has more children on death row than any other country in the world.

It is important to emphasise that there were two different kinds of protest against Ahmadinejad's visit. The first was simply a protest against Ahmadinejad himself and the policies of his regime. This was the position held by the vast majority of Columbia students. The second, sometimes related, protest was against Ahmadinejad's right to speak at all. The whole of America appears to be debating this question as well: were Columbia right to invite Ahmadinejad? Clearly many people think not, and a small but vocal campaign has begun with the aim of forcing Bollinger to quit. I certainly fell into the first category and, probably, the second as well. Freedom of speech cannot encompass Holocaust denial. This brings me onto the issue of what exactly Ahmadinejad actually said in response to questions about his denial of the Holocaust.

The media across the world have widely reported that he accepted the validity of the Holocaust as an historical fact. This, however, is a very dangerous and naive representation of what Ahmadinejad actually said. He did indeed begin his speech by stating that the Holocaust took place. How could he not? As Bollinger said of Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial, "When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated." There was never any chance that Ahmadinejad would stand up in one of the world's leading universities and explicitly deny the Holocaust. He did, however, continually call for more research into the subject. Crucially, when it was pointed out that the Holocaust was a fact, he replied that there were "also facts in mathematics which were believed to be true for over 800 years until more research proved them to be false." The sentiment is clear and undeniable: like the false "facts" of mathematics, more research will eventually disprove the "fact" of the Holocaust. His argument is hardly subtle, yet the fact that not one single newspaper or broadcaster (to my knowledge) pointed this out is somewhat troubling.

Many people, both on- and off-campus, have criticised the tone of Bollinger's introductory remarks. Clearly Bollinger felt himself backed into a corner. But when he referred to Ahmadinejad as a "petty and cruel dictator" and stated that he doubted that Ahmadinejad had the "intellectual courage" to answer his questions (which he didn't. In fact, Ahmadinejad once again consistently failed to answer any difficult questions with anything approaching a straight answer) over 1000 students gathered on the lawn in front of Butler Library jumped to their feet and started cheering and clapping. Civility certainly has its place, but a confrontation with a murderous, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Semitic dictator is not it. And if Bollinger achieved nothing else, at least he rattled Ahmadinejad. This was not the smirking, arrogant Ahmadinejad we usually see. Rather, it was the performance of a man who knew that he could not adequately address the questions put to him. Yesterday, away from his carefully-crafted and controlled media image, Ahmadinejad was revealed to be an intellectually inadequate failure.

In the end, was it all worth it? Once all the excitement had died down it was hard to not to feel somewhat deflated. What has been achieved? Yes, Ahmadinejad was humiliated; perhaps he even got a glimpse of how the hundreds of political (but not, of course, homosexual; Iran, we were reliably informed, "does not have this phenomenon") prisoners languishing in Iranian jails feel, but I doubt it. Words, however damaging, tend not to have the same effect as torture and execution. Moreover, what was this humiliation, this small victory, worth when there has been such a singular failure to report it accurately? Instead, what do we read in our newspapers and see on the television? More of Ahmadinejad's anti-Israeli posturing. Many, many people - Jews, homosexuals, women, Iranians - were gravely offended by Ahmadinejad's visit and speech. Yesterday, the name of Columbia University was in every newspaper across the world, but it's hard to tell whether that is something we, and I, should be proud of. There is much, much more to be said about all of this, but for now I have to go to sleep.

P.S. Last night, after all of this nonsense, I went to see the band Beirut play as part of the Wordless Music Series. The evening took place in a beautiful church near to the Lincoln Centre and began with a wonderful French musician named Colleen. She was followed by Katya Mihailova on piano and Colin Jacobsen on violin. The pair played pieces by Chopin, Scriabin, Debussy, and Part, before ending with what Jacobsen described as a "Bartok jam session." Beirut were simply sublime. The Eastern European tinge to their music sounded perfectly at home amidst the pews of the old church. The whole evening was a reminder of what makes New York so special, namely the opportunity to see and hear amazing spectacles you could never find anywhere else.

Ein Schaffender Spiegel

Today I read 550 pages of Christopher Clark's mammoth Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947. Despite the (exhaustive) brilliance of Clark's book, I have returned home with one predominant thought, namely that the Hohenzollern's could really have benefited from a book of boy's names. To illustrate: the period of Prussia's greatest expansion began under Frederick William, known as the Great Elector. He was succeeded by King Frederick I; he in turn was succeeded by Frederick William I; his son was Frederick II (Frederick the Great); Frederick II begat Frederick William II, who in turn was succeeded by Frederick William III. And can anyone hazard a guess at the name of his successor? Frederick William IV. And on it goes. At one particular amusing point - and the book is full of them, as well a 770 page epic should be - Clark is delineating the causes of the Prussian-Danish war of 1864. He begins his account by noting that the conflict is somewhat difficult to understand, primarily because virtually every single actor was named either William or Christian. Anyway, Clark's book is frighteningly good and well worth reading, though full appreciation - not to mention fact-retention - might necessitate a rather more leisurely pace than I could afford.

Things I miss from back home: Heinz salad cream (for making tuna); decent canned tuna; proper fish and chips (a rich booty for the individual who can transport, intact and warm, a delicious deposit of fish, chips, batter, and salt to my plate); hearing the morning-song of the birds (ironic, that, given that they woke me up at 5:30am every morning for an entire year); Match of the Day; people who understand why a ODI tournament victory over India would not be a foregone conclusion; ryvita; Alpen; new CDs being released on a Monday. And friends, family etc.

Good things about New York: my new friends; the Columbia library; the unbelievably tasty corn on the cob; the easy availability of virtually every single kind of food you could ever imagine right on my doorstep (though they can't make a curry worth a damn, to coin an Americanism); the endless gigs and cultural opportunities; the apartment-comparison game; Columbia's swimming pool; the frequent random and comic occurrences; The Onion.

I'll end with a quote from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason which has been making more and more sense since I began reading Heidegger:

"To invent new words where the language already has no lack of expressions for given concepts is a childish effort to distinguish oneself from the crowd, if not by new and true thoughts yet by new patches on an old garment."

Spoken like a true Prussian. Sapere Aude!