Max Cohen & David Judd

ahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trip to Columbia has long since come and gone, and many Columbians may think that there is nothing more to say about it. By this point, we are all aware of the controversies over Lee Bollinger’s scathing introductory remarks as well as Ahmadinejad’s rambling speech and, shall we say, counterintuitive comments about homosexuals in Iran. And while the mainstream media barely covered it at all, more Columbians remember well the many student groups that gathered on Low Plaza for a forum/protest sponsored by an ad hoc “Columbia Coalition” on the day of the speech. We all either heard these groups’ opinions, read about them in the Spectator, or perhaps delivered them ourselves into the microphone. There is seemingly no reason then to relive the Ahmadinejad craziness. Hasn’t enough been said already?

We think not. Many progressive student groups had remarkable difficulty determining how to respond appropriately, caught between conflicting principles. Groups framed Ahmadinejad’s speech in very different ways: in terms of free speech, academic freedom, human rights, diplomacy, anti-war activism, geopolitics. Many are still unsure whether they came to the right decision. The overall feel of the left response was haphazard and disunited. What made coherence so difficult? Why, after so much effort, were left-wing messages still lost in the confusion? How can we find a common basis for a more unified response in the future?

Columbia’s queer student organizations were put in a particularly difficult position by Ahmadinejad’s visit, both before and after. The short notice that was given to student groups of Ahmadinejad’s speech was exacerbated by all of the necessary planning for the rapidly approaching Queer Awareness Month events taking place throughout October. A major event was also taking place on September 20 for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Columbia Queer Alliance. Amidst all this, Peter Gallotta, CC ’09 and the president of CQA, was approached by the Spectator on Wednesday, September 19, and asked to sign onto a major statement to be published the next day expressing support for Ahmadinejad’s visit while decrying “the extremely short notice” given to student leaders.

Though the statement was fairly innocuous, the appearance of Gallotta’s name alongside those of the presidents of the College Republicans, LionPAC, and Hillel created concern that CQA’s message would be co-opted by right-wing groups. This was by no means far-fetched, as evidenced by the way right-wing groups nation-wide have seized on gay rights as a rationale for demonizing Iran and Islam. Indeed, David Horowitz (CC ‘57) and his ultra-right wing “Terrorism Awareness Project” used Islam’s alleged discrimination against gays as a tool to promote awareness of ‘Islamo-Fascism’ and indict the left for hypocrisy at Columbia just weeks after Ahmadinejad’s visit. But even before the event many of Hillel’s posters around campus showed images of two Iranian teenagers, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, being executed for engaging in homosexual acts. CQA, like many other groups on campus, did not wish to have their message co-opted by the Columbia right.

Yet the response from the right wing was not CQA’s biggest concern. According to Aries Dela Cruz, GS ‘08, CQA was primarily caught between two undesirable outcomes: presuming to speak for the entire queer community, either at Columbia or in Iran, or not saying anything at all, thereby abjuring their responsibility as an activist group to respond to a critical event. Thus the central question throughout the weekend was not how to frame CQA’s response, but rather whether to have one at all. On Thursday night, work halted on a potential statement, which ultimately was altered and expanded in order to become a personal opinion piece by Dela Cruz in the Spectator the following Monday. This article denounced Iran for its atrocious human rights record, calling it “a zealous government that is based not on the principles of reason but rather the tyranny of religion” while also criticizing some “extreme conservative and reactionary factions” on campus for invoking these abuses “to propel their own agendas.”

By Friday, CQA as a whole was less intent on putting out an official statement or participating in the Monday forum. The Spectator statement had already caused too much distress. “We were trying to regain ground,” said Dela Cruz. Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News team had attempted to get a CQA board member to come on his show after having seen the organization mentioned in the Spectator, an invitation CQA considered but then chose to decline, and it seemed that more statements would similarly backfire. Though a majority of the board was willing to participate in the forum despite these concerns, a minority still had misgivings. The Alliance had decided that it would only take actions based on consensus to guarantee everyone a voice, and opted against participating so long as some members were opposed.

Over the weekend CCAW had pulled out of the forum and everyone assumed that CQA would still be sitting it out. Yet opinions were changing rapidly, and ultimately Aaron Krieger (CC ‘10), a member of the Columbia Coalition and Gayava*, convinced Dela Cruz and others that since CQA, in its prior incarnation as the Homophile League, had been at the forefront of gay liberation in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it would not befit the organization to decline to participate in a matter of social activism like the forum. And so it was decided that CQA would draft a statement to be sent out and read on Monday.

The Columbia Coalition Against the War learned about Ahmadinejad’s planned speech on Wednesday from the Bwog coverage, but didn’t immediately jump into action. CCAW focused on how the event would affect the possibility of war with Iran; as Iranian American CCAW member Deena Guzder, SIPA ‘08, writes, “any such attack would be absolutely catastrophic in terms of lives lost and animosity generated. Only a morally-depraved... politician would even suggest a preemptive attack... after witnessing the chaos we catalyzed in Iraq.” CCAW members generally supported Ahmadinejad’s invitation, some on free speech grounds, and others as a move towards dialogue rather than war with Iran.

Karina Garcia (CC ‘08), a member of Latino/a activist group Lucha and an ally of CCAW, defended the latter position. She compared the invitation of Ahmadinejad with last year’s invitation of Jim Gilchrist, then-leader of the anti-immigrant Minuteman Project, which she opposed at the time with direct action: “The difference between Jim Gilchrist and Ahmadinejad is that Ahmadinejad is a popularly elected leader.” She believes that while Gilchrist was trying to obtain legitimacy by a Columbia platform which would move him into the mainstream and further his vigilante campaign, Ahmadinejad is already a mainstream figure in his own country. “We have to look at the gains from both visits...Gilchrist wanted legitimacy... [but] with Ahmadinejad—here’s a chance to hear from a guy the US is planning to invade.”

On Thursday night, CCAW learned about the rally planned for Monday, and immediately began discussing a response in a hurried round of late-night phone calls. A draft “Open Letter to Progressive Opponents of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” went out over the CCAW organizing list at 1am Friday morning, expressing CCAW’s critique: “A rally where each speaker denounces Ahmadinejad’s reactionary policies and just a few call explicitly for military action will still be perceived, on campus and around the U.S., as pro-war. The right-wing media... will spin it... Conservative organizations... have already signed on... the more people who attend it and the more organizations that endorse it, the more powerful this disastrous message will be.” CCAW called on progressives to avoid the rally. The final version of the letter, nearly unchanged, went out a few hours later.

The Columbia Coalition, however, was none too pleased with this letter. Coalition organizer Ori Sosnik (CC ‘09) felt that the letter was “based on speculation, not information.” For example, CCAW didn’t yet know that the protest on Broadway and the rally on Low were separate events with very different intentions. The College Democrats, defensive about being perceived as enablers for the pro-war right, denounced CCAW that same Friday afternoon as engaging in a “campaign of misinformation.” (They later publicly apologized.) However, at least a few other student groups shared CCAW’s view at the time: Filasteen, Students for a Democratic Society, Lucha, and the International Socialist Organization all agreed to sign on to the CCAW letter within the next 36 hours.

It became apparent late Friday night that, despite CCAW’s efforts, many progressive student groups were going to participate in Monday’s rally. At a long and contentious meeting that emerged out of a degenerating party, CCAW chose to issue a second statement with three goals: to argue for rally speakers to take an anti-war stance; to issue a call for a distinct anti-war “picket by the side of the Low Plaza rally;” and to clarify its earlier position. While acknowledging that “many will disagree with our strategic position and will choose to speak,” CCAW made explicit that its concerns did not depend on the specifics of the Monday rally, but on the national political climate. Whatever the intentions of Columbia organizers, CCAW stated “we are in the midst of an Islamophobic campaign by everyone from the New York Post to John McCain to demonize Ahmadinejad, occurring in a broader context where the next target for the Bush administration is Iran. A rally with a clear message of hostility to Ahmadinejad but only a muddied message on the means by which we must oppose his reactionary policies will play into this campaign.”

As of Sunday morning, CCAW was still planning not to speak at the forum the next day, to avoid an implicit endorsement. But a meeting between a few CCAW representatives and Columbia Coalition organizers resulted in a lopsided email vote to change that position. Guzder, who attended the Sunday morning meeting, explains that “given the tense political climate and possibility of more senseless aggression, I [thought] it [was] critical to provide an alternative narrative that emphasize[d] friendship and reconciliation.” CCAW as a whole was soon persuaded by this logic: if the platform is there, take advantage of it. SDS had already informally come to a similar decision, while Lucha, at its Sunday evening meeting, quickly chose to follow its allies’ lead. By the time of the Monday forum, all the campus antiwar groups had shifted in focus from convincing others not to endorse to mobilizing the largest possible antiwar contingent.

The Muslim Students Association, however, chose not to speak at the rally. According to its president, Adil Ahmed (CC ‘09), “We were offered a chance to speak, but there really was no point. No religious/cultural organizations really took part. Our voice did not mesh in well with the others. Hillel contributed, but they were extremely anti-Ahmadinejad speaking. As a group, we all believed any invited guest has the right to speak.” Shlomo Bolts (CC ‘10), a member of the Amnesty International board who eventually spoke on Monday as an individual, points out that “the MSA was in an even more awkward position than CCAW & Lucha. They would have had to explain their faith, in front of a potentially very hostile audience.... MSA has diverse views in its membership. They can’t say that Ahmadinejad either does or does not represent Islam, because they’d lose either way.”

Yet the MSA was not exactly hostile to the rally. Ahmed emphasized that “interesting” exploration of the complexity of the MSA’s relationship to Ahmadinejad and its views on free speech “could not be articulated that quickly,” suggesting that in a different format or with more preparation time, the MSA might have spoken. But the MSA’s primary concern, aside from expressing sympathy with those “negatively affected or offended by Ahmadinejad,” was to get a commitment from the University “to protect us from any Islamophobic behavior” occurring as a backlash to the Ahmadinejad visit.

In marked contrast to CQA, CCAW, and MSA, the College Democrats, according to media director Jonathan Backer (CC ’10), thought that joining the Columbia Coalition’s forum was a “no brainer.” When asked if he was concerned that right wing groups would hijack the forum and turn it into a protest, Backer replied that the “really great thing” about the forum was that it could be a protest for some, and simply a forum for others. He continued by reiterating that the Democrats’ board came to a unified decision early on to participate.

The Democrats certainly came to a consensus faster than CQA and many other organizations. They chose, as Backer put it, to focus on the “dual issues of free speech and Clintonian engagement with a pariah state.” Backer wished that more groups on campus had looked at the invitation of Ahmadinejad primarily “from a free speech angle” rather than focusing solely on specific human rights violations or a potential build-up to war. The Democrats framed their response in broadly applicable principles; Backer said that inviting Ahmadinejad “was very much the same issue” as inviting Gilchrist: “That’s the role of academia.”

The rally on Monday, September 24, was split into two halves, before and after Ahmadinejad’s speech. The first half had a far larger attendance, of perhaps 600 students versus about 75 in the second. Sosnik observed that while there was “quite a diversity” among the speakers, there was a “consensus” that “Ahmadinejad does terrible things, but nevertheless he should be allowed to speak.” The Spectator noted in its coverage of the event that “demonstrators appeared to be mostly divided into two camps... a pervading pro-Israel sentiment [and] a large contingent of anti-war protesters.” Sosnik noted similarly that “there seemed to be a wide variety of responses to speakers in terms of facial expressions and body language, but they were localized to areas of the plaza,” among them “a big Hillel contingent, [and] definitely a big antiwar-type group.”

The organizers declared the forum an overwhelming success. Sosnik thought “it went very well... Everyone who wanted to speak publicly was able to speak publicly, which was one of our major goals. People of different opinions were expressing their opinions side by side and to each other in a very civil way.” There was little heckling, and “you really had that energy from the crowd” that “we should listen to everyone even if we disagree.” Krieger adds that for him, “the lack of national media attention on the forum itself was proof of how successful it was,” since attention was on the participants and the dialogue, not the event itself.

CCAW members had a more ambivalent response to Monday’s event. Guzder said, “I think the forum/rally was dominated by people wanting to voice their grievances based on identity politics rather than assess the situation critically. A teach-in about Iran’s history, political structure, relationship to the U.S., and projected future would have been more informative and less sensationalist. I regret there was so little national media coverage [of antiwar voices at the event].”

Forum organizers had an equally ambivalent response to CCAW’s role. According to Sosnik, the Columbia Coalition’s great fear was that CCAW’s “first statement might scare away progressive groups.” Since that fear didn’t materialize, he “doesn’t know if [the statement] was a good or a bad thing. It definitely tilted the debate, [and] affected the campus discussion.” Bolts**, from an outside perspective, summed up: CCAW “pointed out a real danger, that the rally be perceived as pro-war, but it didn’t end up happening. In retrospect maybe [the statements] were alarmist, or maybe they did their job, by assuring that there would be antiwar speakers and that people would be aware of the issue.”

One statement at the forum did get some media attention. Originally intended to be just three sentences, by Monday the CQA statement had ballooned into five paragraphs. The statement began by emphasizing that “CQA is not the collective voice of the queer community,” moved on to condemn human rights abuses, and ended with a warning to media organizations that terminology such as ‘homosexual’ and ‘gay’ are western cultural idioms which are not always appropriately used to describe those with same-sex desires outside of the west. The statement was meant to be innocuous and “a statement of unity,” which according to de la Cruz made it seem a tad “like it was platitudes and generalizations;” certainly nothing to get up in arms about.

And yet the statement became incredibly controversial once Ahmadinejad’s denial of homosexuality hit the airwaves. Andrew Sullivan excoriated CQA in a post entitled ‘The Queer Left Backs Ahmadinejad’ on his Daily Dish blog at the Atlantic, accusing the student organization of agreeing with Ahmadinejad that there are no gays in Iran. Ccalling CQA’s statement a Foucauldian “pomo knee jerk,” Sullivan set off a firestorm within the queer blogosphere. Ironically, one self-described conservative gay man who contacted Dela Cruz said that he was disturbed by CQA’s statement because its “preoccupation with cultural differences and terminology  entirely negated the condemnation,” yet was relieved by Dela Cruz’s Monday article for its “so bravely and eloquently condemn[ing] the actions of the Iranian government.” Dela Cruz expressed some astonishment that a platitudinous message of unity should cause so much conflict, only for what he considered to be a much more radical statement which partially criticized conservatives to assuage the fears of a right wing reader.

As the MSA had feared, it too was the target of backlash. On September 26, graffiti was found in SIPA calling for “Mecca, Medina, Tehran, Baghdad, Jakarta, and all the savages in Africa” to be “nuked.” Without a response from administrators, and along with the visit of Horowitz a few weeks later, this contributed to a climate in which Muslims at Columbia felt far from safe. Finally, after what Ahmed described as “hours and hours of meetings with deans and other administrators,” an e-mail from the Columbia administration “hop[ing] that Islamophobic comments and acts will not continue on this campus” was sent out on October 24.

However, even with an appearance on Fox News, the Democrats avoided controversy in the aftermath of Ahmadinejad’s visit. They had stuck with generalities. CQA was criticized for its specific terminology about same-sex desires in Iran, and CCAW had to try defending Iran’s sovereignty without defending Ahmadinejad. The Democrats framed their response in terms of principles which could equally apply to visits from anyone from Ahmadinejad, Gilchrist, and Horowitz to controversial Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein. But is failing to attract attention really the best we can do?

The national spotlight on Columbia around Ahmadinejad’s visit offered an opportunity for left-wing groups, but it’s not clear that it was fully utilized. While the forum may have been the only efficient option given the timeframe, for no group was it ideal; the Columbia left will need to find ways to express a clearer and less diluted progressive message when, as is inevitable, Bollinger next invites Kim Jong-il.