…of Nikitas3.com

As you watched Iranian “President” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia University on September 24, you were struck by a sense of deja-vu. Then it hits you, that this madman is the mirror image of Bob Denver of the 1960s TV sit-com Gilligan’s Island, where a boatload of hapless characters are stranded for several seasons on a deserted island for once-a-week small-screen levity.

And after Ahmadinejad’s half-hour speech and softball question-and-answer period, you were left wondering if we all had not been trapped on Gilligan’s Island in a thirsty daze of obtuse and obfuscating non-sequiturs coming from a master manipulator.

The buildup to the speech was telling, with repeated low-key and respectful praises about America’s commitment to freedom of expression. Barack Obama represented it well by saying he supported free speech but that the Iranian’s address “is not a choice I would have made.”

This is classic modern-day Democrats burning the candle at both ends (something they learned from Mahmoud Clinton), and it is the type of soft-soaping that goes on when anti-Americanism is on the loose. Because at Columbia, genuine American citizens who wish to speak freely, but who happen to bear the scarlet letter of conservative patriotism, routinely are run off campus. When a representative of the Minutemen border protection group spoke at Columbia earlier this year, he not only was heckled and jeered, but he was physically attacked.

Not so with Ahmadinejad. He was never heckled, was politely applauded by the Columbia elite, and was chastised with nothing more than a tinge of wan audience disapproval – even laughter – for failing to adequately answer questions that Condi Rice would have been drawn-and-quartered over.

Meanwhile university president Lee Bollinger dissembled like a typical jackass academic when he talked about the “robust debate” Ahmadinejad would bring to northern Manhattan. Bollinger’s half-baked in-your-face pre-emptive challenges to the Iranian were more of a sideshow and requisite political grandstanding than they were serious affronts to the veracity of the Islamist dictator. When Ahmadinejad responded, for instance, that it is important to investigate the Holocaust further because, like physics, nothing ever really is final, every fraud detector in America should have gone to Code Red.

But not on Gilligan’s Island.

It is important to remember who Ahmadinejad is. He is a worldwide sponsor of terrorism; he has declared that he wishes to wipe our ally Israel off the face of the map; he is helping to kill American soldiers in Iraq; he is building a nuclear weapon for ultimate deployment about 12 miles south of Columbia University, on Wall Street in New York City; and he executes children and oppresses men, women, homosexuals and everyone else. But none of this seemed to bother the elites at Columbia because Ahmadinejad had one trump card: He hates America and he hates George Bush. And that was the crux of this whole charade.

This appearance really was intended to give legs to ideas that all Americans should find reprehensible, but which the mad dogs of the academic left at Columbia chew on like their last bone. It is an outgrowth of the question asked after 9/11: Why do they hate us? And this type of intellectual terrorism finds its roots in the universities and in the same United Nations that routinely embraces thugs from around the globe, like last year’s appearance by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, while democratic and prosperous nations like Taiwan are frozen out of the UN in favor of its tyrannical, impoverished and demented cousin communist China.

Ahmadinejad probably confounded even his most starstruck groupies with his references to science as the light of the world, and the “monopolistic activities” of some nations (i.e., the Unites States) in the field of technology. What he really was saying it that science is going to give Iran The Bomb, and you better get used to it. And his references to tapped telephones and certain nations’ (i.e., the United States) obviously unfair possession of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons must have had leftist professor telephones jingling off the hook all over Gilligan’s Island.

Ahmadinejad made minced meat of his professorial hosts, politely admonishing Island president Bollinger for his rude treatment of a guest by pre-emptively asking penetrating questions. No, Gilligan explained that in friendly Iran, guests are treated with respect. And Columbia fell for it, hook, lie and sinker.

Activists on the political left have a really nasty habit of cozying up to anti-American brutes around the world. It is time to call out the academics about speeches like this one, and to call out the people of New York for their pathetic non-“protest”. How this city ended up utterly unperturbed after a maniac posed like Mr. Rogers in their midst probably might seem like a puzzle to most Americans. But to those of us who know how liberals operate, we can tell the rest of America one thing for certain: You cannot trust liberals to defend us against any enemy any time, anywhere. This speech is proof.

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