US academic slams Iran president

Why, in a letter last week to the Secretary-General of the UN, did Akbar Gangi, Iran's leading political dissident, and over 300 public intellectuals, writers and Nobel Laureates express such grave concern that your inflamed dispute with the West is distracting the world's attention from the intolerable conditions your regime has created within Iran? In particular, the use of the Press Law to ban writers for criticising the ruling system.

Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change? In our country, you are interviewed by our press and asked to speak here today.

And while my colleague at the Law School, Michael Dorf, spoke to Radio Free Europe (sic, Voice of America) viewers in Iran, a short while ago on the tenets of freedom of speech in this country, I propose going further than that.

Let me lead a delegation of students and faculty from Columbia to address your university about free speech, with the same freedom we afford you today.

Will you do that? In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as a "fabricated" "legend".

One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers.

For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda.

When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous.

You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.

You should know that Columbia is a world centre of Jewish studies and now, in partnership with the YIVO Institute, of Holocaust studies.

Since the 1930s, we've provided an intellectual home for countless Holocaust refugees and survivors and their children and grandchildren.

The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history. Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments about the "debate" over the Holocaust both defy historical truth and make all of us who continue to fear humanity's capacity for evil shudder at this closure of memory, which is always virtue's first line of defence. Will you cease this outrage?