Friday, September 28, 2007

Columbia University's Past: Nazi Ambassador Invited to Speak in 1933

We read:

According to the David Wyman Institute of Holocaust Studies, Columbia University's invitation to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not the first granted by that prestigious institution to the representative of a despotism committed to anti-semitism.
The invitation to Iran's leader may seem less surprising, but no less disturbing, when one recalls that in 1933, Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler invited Nazi Germany's ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, to speak on campus, and also hosted a reception for him. Luther represented "the government of a friendly people," Butler insisted. He was "entitled to be received ... with the greatest courtesy and respect." Ambassador Luther's speech focused on what he characterized as Hitler's peaceful intentions. Students who criticized the Luther invitation were derided as "ill-mannered children" by the director of Columbia's Institute of Arts and Sciences.

And this was not all. Three years later Columbia would send a delegation to celebrate the 550th annniversary of the University of Heidelberg, even though it had already been purged of Jewish faculty members, instituted a Nazi curriculum and burned books by Jewish authors. Could this be the effect of the importation of German scholarship in the previous century? Or just that every generation supplies its share of useful idiots?

Source

What it shows is that Leftists have a compulsion to portray themselves as in possession of superior wisdom -- even if to do so they have to deny the obvious

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