For her compassionate anti-apartheid stance in South Africa, Helen Suzman, now 90, became known as “Our Lady of the Prisoners.”
Following President Ahmadinejad’s rant at Columbia University, she commented:
“I am disgusted that its president, Lee Bollinger, should have provided a platform for Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who has more than once pronounced that Israel should be ‘wiped off the face of the earth.’ Does President Bollinger not know the difference between hate speech, which incites violence, and freedom of speech?” (The New York Sun)
Regarding the same incident, Bollinger is now taking arrows from 70 left-wing or anti-Israel faculty members, who are circulating a petition against him. They complain of a “crisis of confidence” in the president, criticizing him for his stern introduction of the Iranian president. These professors carp that he “allied the University with the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, a position anathema to many in the University community.” As the editors of the Sun rightly say, “The Bush administration is apparently more of an anathema to these faculty members than is the Holocaust-denying, American soldier-killing, terrorist supporting, nuclear bomb-building administration of Iran.”
Much is at stake in how Bollinger responds to being on the firing line.