I proffered the moral dilema that Columbia University has faced over the last couple of days pretending to be so utterly offended and outraged by the hangman's noose on an African American professor's door while allowing one of the biggest signs of racism and bigotry to be given supreme limelight and a featured guest speaker only days previously.

In my e-mail bag I got this today...

Hello, Mr. McCullough:

I wanted to submit a comment on your post "Columbia U: Nazi Terrorists welcome, Klansmen not...", but was unable to do so and decided to email you instead.

You miss a fundamental distinction between the noose incident and President Ahmadinejad's speech.  Leaving the noose was a threat of violence against Prof. Constantine.  It was more than just speech that she found offensive; it was a crime just like any other credible threat of violence. (This is true even if it turns out not to rise to the level of a hate crime.)  Ahmadinejad said highly offensive things to be sure, but he didn't tell his audience to fear that he would kill them. 

There is a world of difference between offending someone and threatening them with harm.  The law recognizes this difference, and so does common sense.  It's easy to draw false equivalencies, but I hope you will see things differently in light of my comments.

Kindly,
Ed

Here's why I believe Ed is mistaken... To believe that fundamentally somehow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represents something, somehow more benign than the noose is ignorant.

A noose was used to send the message to blacks in the Reconstruction and post-reconstruction era's that the "better play the game" or "get in line." It was actually used as a tool to "recruit" (more like threaten) blacks to join the Democratic party of the early 1900's. It was used to intimidate people who had been freed because of laws following the civil war in which every single guarantee of the U.S. Constitution was extended to people who had previously had them kept from them. 

Democrats knew that the Republican anti-slavery, anti-klan, and anti-segregation laws were beloved by blacks and that it gave Republicans a sizable voting block that blacks saw with their own eyes could be trusted because of their attempts to even the playing field. 

The racist Democrats - did several things in that era - they founded the Ku Klux Klan, began lynchings, rape, and hangings to intimidate blacks to vote with them, and simultaneously started taking away the voting, commerce, freedom of association and gathering - and dozens more rights that had been conferred upon them post civil war. 

The "noose" was vital to this effort. It is a despicable sign that represents the most vile period of our own history. A period in which democrats would kill to threaten people into submission - and later testify before Congress in the "Klan Hearings" that they were proud of those methods used.

But I ask you to consider how that can be any more morally offensive than Ahamdinejad speaking to a group of Jews and Americans who he has threatened with complete annihiliation nearly a dozen times over the past two years? Ed's e-mail claimed that Ahmadinejad was merely "offensive" while the noose represented violence and murder. 

Does threatening to nuke Israel off the map not just constitute murder but MASS murder not qualify by the most legal and strict understanding of the words - a worse crime? 

I think it does. And Columbia yawned at it - and told him to come speak anyway.

Columbia University can't have it both ways. You can't feign indignation at some symbols of violence and murder and yet yawn at others. Since you are reportedly an institution of higher learning  such hypocrisy sends the distinct double message that "blacks" are a protected race while "jews" aren't.

And that is every bit as offensive as allowing the practice of slavery, the birth of the klan, and the use of intimidation in the political process - as the Democratic party did. ("Does" actually - remembering that the Democratic Party to this day has never condemned the actions of the Klan...)