. . . . The Communist has of course renounced our institutions, which is perhaps all right, but has done something very much more; he has renounced the bond — whatever it is: but fragile though it is, it is there, make no mistake about it — that holds together Republicans and Democrats, socialists and Manchesterians, syndicalists and elitists.... the Communist has renounced the bond explicitly and intentionally — renunciation in the first degree — and for the duration of that renunciation we cannot speak to him, because however deep we reach we cannot find a common vocabulary; we can no more collaborate with him to further the common understanding than Anne Frank could have collaborated with Goebbels in a dialogue on race relations.

... We all abuse the instruments of discourse, but we seek, under the massive roccoco superstructure of point and counterpoint, to say things to each other that come truly out of our minds and our hearts, because we feel that in deeply significant ways, we are related by that highly elastic, but not infinitely elastic, bond, that binds us to each other.

Such a man, then, whose explicit message we know beforehand, which message he must deliver undeviatingly, cannot communicate to us orally anything of political interest, the subject with which the Political Union properly interests itself. He is a fit object of curiosity for students of certain other subjects than politics. ... The court room at Tel Aviv was crowded with professors of the specialized social sciences: but they were not men who would have invited Adolf Eichmann to their college to defend the regime of Adolf Hitler.
...

The conclusion of Buckley's speech speaks to the choice which Bollinger made:

The servants of these ideologies are dislodged from the human situation, and yet —

And yet they are human beings themselves... And it is over their plight as human beings that we must, it strikes me, pause, for that is the problem supremely that you face, above all others — certainly above the political problem, it being conceded that you are immune to seductive passes at your intellectual and moral integrity and that the words, the wooden words, are words you knew before.

That problem is human. What will you do when Gus Hall, the human being, comes here to defend the cause of what you know ahead of time to be the cause of organized inhumanity? Will you show that "shudder of polite disgust"? Is this a new social skill we need to cultivate, in our time...? Did your son learn at his college how to give off a shudder of polite disgust?

Or will you applaud him when he is introduced? Yes, there will be applause — in recognition of his courage in facing a hostile audience. But the applause will be confused — will it not? — because you know very well that objective courage is not necessarily admirable... Is it not likely that among those of you who applaud there will be those who are in fact applauding their own courage in applauding a real live apologist for human atrocity? [...]

Some of you may feel the obligation to externalize your knowledge that you know he is here to defend the indefensible. You may jeer him...; some of you may treat him with that terrible coldness that is the sign of the intellectual foreknowledge that you cannot, at your level of attainment, take seriously the man who speaks and works for a kingdom which it is the very purpose of your education to know to despise. Why then bring him here, if no purpose can be served and if it can only result that you will humiliate yourselves and him? Because you are willing to humiliate yourselves in order to humiliate him?

Fight him, fight the tyrants everywhere; but do not ask them to your quarters, merely to spit on them, and do not ask them to your quarters if you cannot spit on them. To do the one is to ambush a human being as one might a rabid dog; to do the other is to ambush oneself, to force oneself, in disregard of those who have died trying to make the point, to break faith with humanity.

John Podhoretz:

. . . . A'jad had a point when he whined immediately upon the conclusion of Bollinger's words that he had been treated poorly.

Before Bollinger spoke, Dean John Coatsworth (who was universally considered a doctrinaire Marxist buffoon to avoid at all costs when I was a student and he was a professor at the University of Chicago) made a big show of talking about the civility the audience should show toward this invited guest. "Our responsibility is to listen with restraint," he said. Free speech requires us to show "patience and maturity," he said.

You may use all kinds of words to characterize Bollinger's statement, but "civil" wouldn't be one of them. He called his guest "astonishingly uneducated," denounced his "absurd remarks," called him the possessor of a "fanatical mindset," and concluded by saying he felt "all the weight of the modern civilized word yearning to express the revulsion at all you stand for."

All this is true. It's also a good reason not to extend the invitation in the first place, or to retract it once it has been foolishly extended. To invite someone to your institution and subject him to a brutal scolding by way of introduction is, when you think about it, more than a little weird. There's a little whiff of Ugly Americanism surrounding it.

Stanley Kurtz:

The debate that proceeded from Columbia's invitation forced some ugly truths about Iran into a more prominent place in American public discourse. My point is that it didn't end well. Buckley's speech convinced the Yale Political Union to do the right thing and withdraw Gus Hall's invitation. I would have preferred to see Columbia do the same. Instead, Columbia refused, leading to yesterday's spectacle.

Did it diminish Ahmadinejad? I think undoubtedly it did. But it diminished Columbia as well. Columbia students granted Ahmadinejad that "confused" applause Buckley spoke of — useful to Iran's propagandists. And Bollinger, knowing beforehand (and admitting as much at the end of his introduction) that a real debate with Ahmadinejad was impossible, invited him to Columbia anyway "merely to spit on [him]." We witnessed all of the phenomena Buckley talked about. It demeaned everyone involved.

Buckley refused an invitation from Yale to participate in a lecture series that included a communist functionary. But he did agree to appear at Yale to participate in a debate over whether the invitation to Gus Hall ought to be withdrawn. So in effect, WFB used the invitation to Hall as an occasion to force a right/left debate at Yale about the meaning of communism and the meaning of free speech. As I noted in my post, I agree that the invitation to Ahmadinejad was a mistake. My point instead is that the huge right/left public debate we’ve had in the media since the invitation is the equivalent of the real and legitimate debate that William F. Buckley forced onto Yale in 1962.