When Hate Triumphs

Hate triumphs...When the door is opened to evil.

Hate triumphs when silence allows it to take reign.

Two disturbing occurances at Columbia University in the last few days:

• a noose was found on a black professor's door
• Nazi swastika accompanied by a drawing on a bathroom door of a man wearing a skullcap (kippa) was drawn on a bathroom wall at Columbia

President Lee Bollinger of Columbia says the police are investigating both incidents. The common thread between these two is hatred - the same hatred to which Bollinger gave a platform recently when he allowed Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia. Hate triumphs...when the door is open to evil. Bollinger helped open that door.

Friends have recently argued that Ahmadinejad isn't Hitler; that the world of 2007 isn't the world of 1938; that Tehran is not Munich. And the answer was that no one believed, in 1933 or even 1938 that Hitler could do what he promised he would do...and today, people like Bollinger don't want to believe that Ahmadinejad could do what he is promising.

Columbia and the members of the United Nations failed an important test - and that allowed hatred to triumph. Ahmadinajed has the right, as leader of his country, to speak at the UN. Even Hitler, may his name forever be cursed, had that right.

What should the member nations have done? What should their representatives have done?   Give the man the platform - without the audience. European countries, the United States, etc. - should have walked out of the room. It's the universal way to show disapproval - happens half the time Israel talks (unless maybe they are all just going to the bathroom). That would have been the correct answer. Let him speak - to an empty room. That too could have been done at Columbia - what an incredible answer to hatred. Not on our university, Bollinger could have said. Not here, where we teach truth and honesty.

But Ahmadinejad did speak. He was given the honor and a full room and this week a noose was placed on a black teacher's door and a swastika was painted in a bathroom. Hate triumphs...when the door is opened to evil.