Letter to Bollinger

I received the following letter that was sent to President Bollinger and thought it worth posting:

_____________________________________

September 23, 2007
Dear President Lee C. Bollinger,

Your decision to permit President Ahmadinejad to address your university must be respected in the interests of Free Speech, especially in the light of your declared intention to challenge him on some controversial issues. However, unless accompanied by a really adequate right of reply, free speech is abused when a prestigious platform is granted to propagate a highly controversial subject like holocaust denial.

Questions from the audience rarely allow for a meaningful discussion as members of the audience are seldom allowed the opportunity to express opinions and present facts which may contradict the answers presented by the principal speaker. Nevertheless the address by the Iranian president can prove to be a truly meaningful and educational experience if he and any in the audience who share his views will be required to argue their case in the face of the type of credible evidence available in the short interactive program "Lessons of Auschwitz" which can be downloaded from http://www.cbsnews.com/elements/2005/01/26/in_depth_world/interactivehomemenu669602.shtml .

As the above program is short and readily downloaded, I urge you to at least screen excerpts at the meeting.

It would be of great value too, if the audience and the Iranian President are given an opportunity to view, or at the least to read about, the highly relevant CBS 60 minutes documentary about archives containing stories of 17 million victims of the Nazi Holocaust, as described on the web at  http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/14/60minutes/main2267927.shtml

I wish you a successful event bearing in mind your wise September 19 statement

“It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible”.

I would very much appreciate a response.

Sincerely,
Maurice Ostroff