Afam:

If we must be objective then one will maintain that Lee Bollinger simply expressed his opinions on the president of Iran just as the president of Iran effortlessly expresses his opinions on world issues.

Fairness demands that everyone reserves the right to say anything and it will only help if the listeners are also given enough reasons to support or oppose anything said by anyone.

Also, considering the fact that Iran will not host a meeting where other powerful Western leaders can come and express their views openly without any intimidation whatsoever it makes sense to assume that the president of Iran should have understood that he was in an unfriendly territory.

I would oppose Lee Bollinger if he made such remarks at the UN, but in a school where he is the president I don't think he was wrong even though he could have done without the rude remarks.

Bottomline is that one can be quite rude and quite right at the same time.

Enjoy!

Afam,
Now your reply should be the perfect model for Davidylan.

You made your point without bias.

I apologize for all my intellectual shakara and bravado, they were meant for posters like Davidylan who won't let me be me.


Davidylan, forgot that the Muslims are totally aware of what they are angry about in the Middle East since the first World War to date.

Britain had thoughts of using poisoned gas on Iraq long before 1991:
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good, and it would spread a lively terror, " (Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after the First World War).

Imagine the atrocities the Imperialists have committed in the Middle East and Africa in the past centuries.
Terror begets terror.
They are reaping the harvest of their seeds of wrath as clearly reported by Leuren Moret.

Their homosexuals even brought HIV/AIDS into the world after the notorious era of their Flower Children who sowed the corrupt seeds of the pandemic.

@ Orikinla, yet more of your usual thesis that is essentially saying nothing. In less than 2 paragraphs, Afam tore your entire nonsense to shreds, i agree he put it in a less aggressive manner than i did and for which i appologize but in essence your theory is out of the window.

Yes your father was a combatant during world war I, it does not make you more knowledgeable about the holocaust.

davidylan:

@ Orikinla, yet more of your usual thesis that is essentially saying nothing. In less than 2 paragraphs, Afam tore your entire nonsense to shreds, i agree he put it in a less aggressive manner than i did and for which i appologize but in essence your theory is out of the window.

Yes your father was a combatant during world war I, it does not make you more knowledgeable about the holocaust.

Davidylan,
You don't need to resort to insults to prove your points. And that was how Afam's post proved to be more rational than your own.

Personally, what most of the people on Nairaland who indulge in petty personalities forget is that I love corrections. And what you do not know is the fact that, I go back to ask some members of Nairaland to correct my mistakes and errors.

I want you to disassociate yourself from those who have personal gudges against me and actually joined Nairaland to attack me.
As the saying goes:
hell has no fury as a woman spurned.

And others felt slighted that they lost the opportunity to date one of the hottest babes on Nairaland to Orikinla as the dandies in Nollywood lost sweet Caroline Ekanem to Theophilus Danjuma's brother.

We no dey slack.
We see hot babe, we do not waste time to go for her.
And not just composing ordinary love notes and poems.
Action speaks louder than word.
I had to cross the turbulent sea of the awesome Atlantic ocean and passed through the danger zone of Port Harcourt to Calabar to win the heart of the Nairaland babe. And many of the pseudo-suitors online who lost are still sulking over it.

That said, let me update you on the topic of this thread. And the following report confirms my point that the president of Columbia University was acting out the script of his own ulterior motives and agenda.

[size=14pt]Columbia U. president on the hot seat By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press Writer Fri Sep 28, 5:18 PM ET

NEW YORK - Columbia University President Lee Bollinger keeps finding himself in the middle of campus turmoil.

He enrolled at Columbia's law school in 1968, when the campus was convulsed by anti-war protests. He was a dean at the University of Michigan during a struggle over the school's speech code. Later, as the university's president, he defended its affirmative action policies all the way to the Supreme Court.

Now, as president of Columbia University, he is on the hot seat again — both for allowing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus and for insulting him when he arrived.

Even Bollinger has wondered lately whether he could have done without all the grief over hosting a man who has said that Israel should be wiped off the map and questioned the existence of the Holocaust — especially in a heavily Jewish city.

"Sometimes I ask myself, 'Wouldn't it have been nicer if this didn't happen?' And I have to say, 'Yes,'" he said in a telephone interview from Paris, where he was attending an international alumnae event. "It would have been a nicer September."

But, he added: "I regard this as a playing out of ideas that I've thought about for my entire professional career."

The son of a newspaper publisher in Oregon, Bollinger gravitated toward higher education after earning his law degree at Columbia. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Warren E. Burger, then taught at the University of Michigan Law School, where he became known as an expert on free speech.

As dean of Michigan's law school, he testified before Congress against the nomination of Robert Bork and angered conservatives for banning FBI recruiters at the law school.

Later, as president of the University of Michigan, he rose to national prominence as a lead defendant in a lawsuit that challenged college affirmative action programs.

The case resulted in a Supreme Court ruling upholding the legality of racial and ethnic background as a criteria in college admissions, and Bollinger's role in the fight cemented his reputation as a supporter of liberal causes.

So it seemed like a perfect fit when he left Michigan for Columbia, long a hotbed of liberal activism.

But from nearly the start of his tenure — he was appointed just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — he found himself in the midst of controversy.

Bollinger had been on the job for a little more than a year when an anthropology professor, Nicholas De Genova, caused an uproar by telling an anti-war crowd that he hoped the U.S. invasion of Iraq would lead to "a million Mogadishus," a reference to the city in Somalia where 18 American soldiers were killed in 1993.

A year later, the university had to respond to a documentary, produced by a pro-Israel group, that accused a group of professors in the Middle East studies department of being anti-Semitic. Columbia has a large number of Jewish students and alumni.

Last fall, Columbia was in the spotlight again when a group of students stormed a stage to silence a speech by Jim Gilchrist, the founder of a group opposed to illegal immigration.

Through it all, Bollinger staked out a middle ground, of sorts.

He chastised De Genova publicly, but didn't try to fire him. He launched a committee to investigate the claims of anti-Semitism, but it exonerated the professors of misconduct. Several students were warned or censured over the Gilchrist incident, but the discipline was mild.

Over the years, the incidents have led to a drumbeat of conservative criticism that Columbia has coddled anti-American academics.

Some liberal academics had complaints of their own, charging that Bollinger's failure to fiercely defend his professors amounted to a failure to stand up for academic freedom.

All of this led up to this week's extraordinary campus visit by Ahmadinejad, which had New York's tabloids practically demanding Bollinger's head, and ended with the spectacle of Bollinger calling Ahmadinejad a "petty and cruel dictator" to his face.

Some critics said that by giving Ahmadinejad a prestigious platform like Columbia, Bollinger strengthened the Iranian's position at home. Others said Bollinger's harsh words for Ahmadinejad may have hurt future U.S. diplomatic efforts.

In the midst of the furor, some state and federal lawmakers even threatened to cut off funding.

Bollinger doesn't see these disputes as anything unusual for an intellectually robust college campus.

"Every single year I've been a faculty member, a dean, a president, there have been very significant free speech and academic issues. It's just the nature of institutional life," he said.

Bollinger said he's not worried that the uproar could invite a backlash causing some alumni to withhold money or the New York City Council to withhold its needed approval of Columbia's controversial plan to expand into a Harlem neighborhood.

"All we can do is say, 'We are committed to a principle of wide open discussion about issues," he said.
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Orikinla, calling your initial treatise "nonsense" was putting it very mildy. i dont see where i insulted you in my last post except many of you are not comfortable with being corrected.

What has Bollinger's personality or history got to do with this event? Another shadow chasing article that does nothing to address the issue at hand.