It’s always struck me as odd that even history’s most odious mass-murdering dictators now and then take the time to enjoy a little American popular culture. Adolf Hitler was fond of King Kong and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as every good Trivial Pursuit player knows. Kim Jong-Il watched but did not particularly enjoy Team America: World Police. Uday Hussein, exhibiting the kind of taste you’d expect from a man-boy who used solid gold toilet seats, called Scarface his favorite.
I would wager that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is more of a books man, and not only because he likes to hang out at the school that Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren once called home. I say this because he seems to have cribbed his latest bright idea from Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Once upon a time, Mr. Ahmadinejad expressed his odious mass-murdering ambitions in calls for the destruction of Israel. Now he wants to move Israel to Alaska—much the same fate, in the view of this heliotropic reporter—which is precisely what happens to the “Frozen Chosen” in Chabon’s novel.
Ahmadinejad condemned “the atrocities of the Zionist regime against the oppressed Palestinian people,” the IRNA news agency reported Friday.
According to the regime’s mouthpiece, the president suggested holding a referendum on the transfer of Israel’s Jews to Europe, Canada or Alaska.
“Let a referendum be held in Palestine. It is our clear proposal to European countries,” Ahmadinejad said during the International Quds (Jerusalem) Day rallies in Tehran.
“Let all Palestinians including Muslims, Christians and the Jews attend the referendum,” he added.
IRNA said Ahmadinejad repeated an earlier suggestion to Europe on the “settlement of Zionists in Europe or in big lands such as Canada and Alaska so they would be able to own their own land”.
Here we have a perfect example of those “views” which, however “challenging” or even “repugnant,” we must “confront” in the name of “free speech.” The hubbub surrounding Lee Bollinger’s invitation of Mr. Ahmadinejad to Columbia—and his bizarre and counterproductive dressing-down of the presumably indifferent lunatic—has mostly passed, but the issue is worth keeping on the front burner. Consider the case of Stanford, where Donald Rumsfeld’s hotly protested appointment to the Hoover Institution has been framed as a free speech issue. In fact it’s a free thought issue, since no one at Stanford will ever have to hear Rumsfeld’s opinions about anything. (The Hoover Institution, for that matter, isn’t even under the control of the university.)
Why bring this up again? Because the Ahmadinejad affair, which says so much about American political culture, says a lot about academic culture, too. If Donald Rumsfeld is the professor everyone hates because he’s a tough grader, Mr. Ahmadinejad is a walking gut course. One could debate Mr. Rumsfeld on a million points, but Mr. Ahmadinejad is the question that has already been answered to everyone’s satisfaction. There is no possibility of moving Israel to Alaska: It’s not worth “dialoguing” about. We know there are homosexuals in Iran, just as we know there aren’t unicorns there: Why “confront” this view? Just look at the triviality of the student response to Ahmadinejad’s presence to see that none of this is really about thinking, less so about acting. It’s about the frisson of the bizarre—a real live madman!—which, sadly, is all that can be said about so much of today’s academic experience.