No, thanks: I’ll think for myself.

I would appreciate it very much if all the well-meaning folks (and the not-so well-meaning ones, too) out there who don’t want me to hear what people like Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have to say would do me the favor of letting my double-major college-educated, Master’s degree-earning, two teaching certificate- using coconut think for itself. 

Thanks muchly for that.

I have been struggling with just what to think about this since the president of Columbia University invited the world’s foremost Holocaust denier and nuclear saber-rattler a chance to speak at Columbia’s podium on Monday.  No, I didn’t want him to show up to lay a wreath at Ground Zero in New York while he was in town, but, frankly, it bugs me when American politicians go there for a cheap and quick photo-op, too.  I’m glad that didn’t happen.  And I do understand how deeply offensive people find Ahmadinejad ’s views to be.  I am very offended by them, too.  Holocaust deniers are, by their very nature, for want of a better, more Quakerly word, stupid.  Which on this blog here means “ignorant by choice.”  Giving time and a space to hateful people so they can spew their hate may seem like a wasteful exercise, and no thinking person really likes to hear those ideas expressed, either. 

But then I decided, and the answer to my quandry should have been easy.  See, I am an American.  And unlike the average Iranian, I have the right to hear things that might offend my government, and more importantly, views which might offend me.  Because I can think for myself.  That’s one of the things that going to college is supposed to teach you.

When I was an undergrad back in the late 1970s, I attended a very liberal college, Temple University in Philadelphia.  One of the many great things about attending Temple was the array of speakers who came on to our campus (funded by our student fees and by grants) to express their interesting, controversial, and sometime inflammatory views.  While I was there, for example, I saw  cartoonist Stan Lee, who was great.  I also saw “Hanoi Jane” Fonda (so branded by the Right, including my late father, in her pre-exercise video days), and Bernadette Devlin, a former member of the British Parliament and an open supporter of the provisional IRA.  At the time of Devlin’s appearance on campus, people were being shot and blown to bits on the streets of Northern Ireland on an almost daily basis, and Devlin’s fiery rhetoric posed a problem for the administration at Temple: should she be allowed to speak, given the state of “the Troubles” and the possibility of a violent response to her words?

Yes, she should.  And she did speak.  And she made people mad and things got loud.  But that’s all that happened, because we were all adults in that room.

And I left that room with a better understanding of what was going on in Northern Ireland.  I learned something.  Even though it made me squirm.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may, as he’s being portrayed in the Corporate Media, indeed be an unstable madman in a cheesy golf jacket.  He may be doing bad things to make the war in Iraq worse.  He may pose the single biggest security threat our country faces in the world today (other than the Bush/Cheney regime).  His ideas about Jews and the Holocaust may be ignorant, reprehensible, hate-filled, and disgusting.  They may fly in the face of reality, what we lovingly call “facts.”  But he is also the leader of a country with which we may soon find ourselves at war.  Our sons and daughters may sometime within the next year be sent off to kill the sons and daughters (and mothers and fathers) of Iran.  In spite of the slobbering, insensitive, absurd, and ridiculous nature of his rantings, I want to hear what he has to say.

And I have the right to hear it.

And I resent having people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and the editorial and headline writers at The New York Daily News – the same people who are pushing us towards war with Iran – telling me that I can’t.  Because if we do go to war with this man’s country, it’ll be my sons and my nephews and my students who will be drafted to fight it.

I respect the people who travelled to New York City yesterday to stand outside the United Nations and the hall at Columbia where Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke, to loudly voice their opposition to his views.  I respect those in the hall at Columbia who hooted and hissed when he made some of his more ridiculous comments.  And it was fine by me that the president of Columbia, who sent this invitation in the first place, gave the Iranian president a little slice of his mind before he let the man speak.  He had that right as well.  If I’d been in the hall, I might have even stood up and turned my back on the man while he spoke, as we once did to war criminal Henry Kissinger.

But I would have let him speak.  And I still would have listened. 

Because I am an American.  And THAT is supposed to mean I can.