Romney and Khatami

Romney and Khatami

Professor Alan Dershowitz is a logical thinker and writer. His argument
to allow Khatami to speak at Harvard is a good one. (Alan Dershowitz,
"Universities and tolerance," Boston Globe, September 9, 2006)
The issue that brought media attention was Governor Romney's refusal to
employ state police to provide security for Khatami's visit. Harvard, a private
corporation, often invites unpopular speakers with little press coverage.
The issue ignored by Dershowitz is why should taxpayer funds be used to
provide security? Harvard has an endowment of $26 billion, more than enough
to provide their own security details.
Romney made the correct decision. If there is insufficient funds to provide
police protection to Boston neighborhoods flooded with violence why should the
same police be provided to protect an advocate of violence? If Cambridge police
and Boston police have nothing to do why not do eliminate illegal weapons from
the community? Why not learn to distinguish the good guys from the bad?
Harvard could hire the hundreds of constables who seize autos from owners
who don't keep up payments. Private security firms employ hundreds of former
police officers to provide security for events like Khatami visit.

--
Roy Bercaw, Editor
ENOUGH ROOM
Cambridge MA USA


Universities and tolerance
Boston Globe
By Alan Dershowitz
September 9, 2006

THE KENNEDY SCHOOL of Government at Harvard University should not cancel the
scheduled speech by former president Mohammad Khatami of Iran. Universities must
never submit to censorial pressures by individuals or groups that disagree with,
or are deeply offended by, a speaker's ideas.

This does not mean that those who invited Khatami to deliver a lecture on the
``Ethics of Tolerance in the Age of Violence" -- a subject on which, based on
his lifetime of intolerance, he has nothing to contribute -- made a wise
decision. Would they have invited David Duke to lecture on racial harmony or the
late Meir Kahane to educate our students on the proper way to protest? I doubt
it.

Khatami is somewhat different, of course, having been president of Iran
(whatever that means ). But he is no longer in a position to influence Iranian
policy or to answer hard questions about, for example, Iran's current nuclear
program or its latest purge of secular faculty members. He could, perhaps,
explain why the ``ethics of tolerance" did not inspire him to do anything when
hundreds of dissident students were arrested and tortured during his tenure.

Derek Bok, acting president of Harvard, is right when he says that ``a wide
exchange of views" is essential to a university. But there are only two tenable
positions a university may take in this regard: the first is that they have no
substantive standards for who should be invited -- in other words any speaker
who wishes to engage in ``a wide exchange of views," and who is invited by any
student or faculty group, must be entitled to stand on the Harvard podium. Under
this ``taxi cab" approach -- a cab driver must accept any rider who can pay the
fare -- Duke and Kahane would have to be invited to speak if there were students
or teachers who wanted to hear them, regardless of who might be offended. The
second alternative is to have substantive standards -- such as academic
achievement or political prominence -- that are applied rigorously and equally,
without regard to whether the speaker is left or right, offensive to Jews or to
Arabs, etc.

Most universities fall into the uncomfortable middle. They have implicit
standards, but they refuse to articulate them or apply them with what I call
``ism equity." The truth is that Duke is not getting invited to Harvard any time
soon, but Khatami has been. Is the only reason for this difference that Duke is
a failed politician who lost his bid for election in Louisiana, while Khatami
was ``elected" (appointed? anointed?) in Iran? I don't think so. The difference
may relate, at least in part, to the relative unacceptability in this university
community of their substantive views. Duke would offend more members of the
Harvard community than Khatami would. If this is even partly true, it is
indefensible.

If offensiveness were ever to be recognized as a basis for distinguishing among
the acceptable and unacceptable, then any group could exercise the equivalent of
a ``heckler's veto." If offensiveness to some groups were to be deemed more
deserving of consideration than offensives to other groups, that would be unfair
discrimination. For example, if a speaker offensive to Muslim students were
permitted to speak, while a speaker offensive to Hindu students were not
permitted, that would constitute bigotry against Muslims. But if offensiveness
to any group were sufficient to ban a speaker and if ``ism equality" prevailed,
then in this age of the thin-skinned and easily offended, only the most
inoffensive and boring speakers would be heard.

Both Duke and Khatami are racists with extremist and violent designs for
repressing political dissent and ethnic opposition. Only Khatami, though, has
had a chance to put his designs into effect. Khatami, however, is seen as a
virulent enemy of the US administration, and therein may lie some of the
discrepancy in receptiveness afforded by the Kennedy School.

I won't catalog Khatami's long history of hateful deeds and proclamations. I'm
eager to hear Khatami's explanation for his and his country's treatment of
women, homosexuals, secularists, Baha'i, and student reformers. And I am
confident that Harvard's student body will have the courage to ask Khatami the
sorts of questions that mainstream media interviewers have either avoided or
have let Khatami evade with empty platitudes.

At the end of the day, Khatami will speak at Harvard, because Americans believe
in and enjoy the sorts of academic liberties and openness to ideas that Khatami
himself did so much to squash when he was in power. That's as it should be. I
only hope that those in the Kennedy School who invited Khatami did so out of a
genuine commitment to unqualified open dialogue, rather than the belief that
offensiveness to some groups is more deserving of solicitude than is
offensiveness to others, or worse yet, substantive agreement with some of
Khatami's oppressive worldview.

Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard University. His most recent
book is ``Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways."