Related Posts

Columbia and Ahmedinejad

Here’s Stanley Fish’s take on the Ahmedinejad controversy at Columbia. I agree that there are other politics around Middle East Studies at Columbia that Bollinger needs to address. However, I disagree that Bollinger should have taken it down a degree. Columbia is a major world player from its overseas campuses, international fellowships, and just by nature of being in NY with an international student body. The World Leaders Forum functions because of Columbia’s proximity to the UN. I think Bollinger’s statement was poorly worded, his words ill-chosen. I think he should have expressed the sentiment, but expressed it better. Ahmedinejad…

ACTION ALERT: Support CBS

Recently CBS aired a piece on peace options in the Israeli-Palestinian debacle. I thought the segment was fair and universally irritating, doing the job our press is supposed to do: tell the stories, based on reality, that make-up conflict, not make-up stories, based on a desired reality, to tell a conflict. J Street is telling me that they are getting slammed for doing their job. You can see clips of the show and sign a petition supporting CBS on their site. I altered the language of their form letter, and have pasted my version below, for others to use. The…

In The Daily Beast, Niall Ferguson Says: Bomb Iran | Politics | Religion Dispatches

Go Haroon. I really don’t understand how people take Ferguson’s opinion seriously. His basic argument is that reasons for not going to war are bad, therefore we must go to war. Maybe we’ll all get ponies and unicorns this time. In The Daily Beast, Niall Ferguson Says: Bomb Iran | Politics | Religion Dispatches. Iran’s government has much to answer for. But the people who judged Iraq so badly, and so inhumanely, do not have the moral right to preside over that trial. That someone could so blandly suggest that we are on the “eve of creative destruction,” and that…