Being mean to Iran

Mona Charen:

Spread on the desk before me are news accounts of atrocities committed by the Iranian regime. Here's one from 2004: Amnesty International protested the death penalty carried out on 16-year-old Ateqeh Rajabi, in the northern province of Mazandaran, for "acts incompatible with chastity." Reports are sketchy, but it seems the mentally impaired Ateqeh had sex with a boy. The boy was punished by 100 lashes and released. Ateqeh was hanged in the main square after the Iranian Supreme Court upheld her sentence.

The Guardian newspaper reports that hundreds of Tehran bus drivers who attempted to strike were beaten and arrested in July of 2007. Their families were targeted by plainclothes police, who burst into their homes and beat the women and children.

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Eric Foner, a professor with a long leftist pedigree, objected to Bollinger's mention of Iranian aid to Iraqi terrorists. "He accepts as true claims that are being made about Iran's role in Iraq, which are being put forward by people whose credibility on weapons in the Middle East has not always been 100 percent reliable," was Foner's snide take on the entire episode. Professor Richard Bulliet, an Iran expert who had a hand in bringing Ahmadinejad to campus, had told colleagues before the lecture that the Iranian leader was a "very reasonable speaker, a very effective debater." In the aftermath of the event, several professors denounced Bollinger's remarks as those of a "schoolyard bully" while remaining silent on Ahmadinejad's nauseating rant.

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Who is the school yard bully in this picture and who are the guys who deseerve the dunce cap in the corner. Eric Foner seems to reflect much of what is wrong with left wing academics. While some might questions Bollinger's hospitality, those who question the truth of what he said are living in an alternate universe where the bad guys are us and the people we need to understand are doing what Mona describes in the first part of her column. If you can read the first part and still agree with Foner, we are indeed on different planets.