Carlton Vogt's

Enterprise Ethics

Volume 5, No. 9 September 28, 2007

Sodom on the Hudson

Hospitality is one of the most ancient of moral precepts

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, spoke at Columbia University this week. If you've missed that fact, you should be catching up on the news, rather than reading this column. I was prepared to ignore the event, but had to renege on that when something quite striking happened.

In introducing Ahmadinejad, Columbia's president Lee Bollinger, roundly insulted him, calling him a terrorist and implying that anything he would say wasn't worth listening to. Bollinger's claque in the audience hooted and hollered like drunken frat boys at a strip club. Charming.

A lot of people see Ahmadinejad as a really bad person, and they're encouraged in that by the corporate media, whose criticisms range from a sophomoric mispronunciation of his name to claims that he has advocated wiping Israel off the map and has denied that the Holocaust took place.

His name is hard to pronounce, and in a xenophobic and depressingly monolingual and mono-cultural population in the US that alone is enough to demonize him. How dare he have a name that doesn't trip lightly off uneducated tongues! Note to on-air personnel: If you're making over $100K a year, you can take 10 seconds to learn how to pronounce someone's name. Do it while you're having your teeth whitened.

As to the other claims -- about Israel and the Holocaust -- there seems to be more than few flies in that ointment. It's hard to find where he said these things. It seems that his words were either mistranslated or purposely distorted by the media, something not unimaginable as the media are busy greasing the skids for an attack on Iran.

Granted he did host a conference that was attended by Holocaust deniers, among others, but that, ironically, was done under the guise of "academic freedom." Ahmadinejad's only statement that I can find is that he questioned why, if the Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans, the price of reparations had to be paid by Palestinians.

But, I'll leave that discussion to others, and let's assume, for the sake of argument, that he actually did say the things of which he's accused. Then, why did Bollinger, as the president of a major university in the US city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel, invite Ahmadinejad to speak?

When a university invites someone to speak, there is an underlying assumption that the person has something reasonable to say -- even if you disagree with what he says. If you think the person has a reasonable, although wrong, argument, you welcome him graciously, listen to his argument, and then launch a reasonable counter-argument. That's called academic freedom.

However, to invite someone to speak and then, right out of the chute, before he has opened his mouth, ridicule him, insult him, and accuse him of being a terrorist is the most disgraceful behavior I can imagine and unworthy of a college or a college president.

If Bollinger believed all these things about Ahmadinejad, the most proper response would have been to simply ignore him and not extend an invitation at all. Someone's right to speak freely does not create for you or me an obligation to provide that person a platform from which to speak.

I realize there may be some confusion, because in the US our current entertainment-as-news and politics-of-personal-destruction game has characterized Bollinger's behavior as the norm. People are invited on to television shows in the US and then are ridiculed, humiliated, and sometimes politically eviscerated. We call that alternately "news" and "reality."

So, while some people in the US may have cheered Bollinger for giving Ahmadinejad what-for, not everyone sees it that way. There are people in the world, many of them in the Middle East, who take hospitality and the demands of hospitality very seriously. It is among the most ancient of moral imperatives.

In a nomadic culture, where peril was everywhere outside the confines of the camp or caravan, you were responsible for the safety and well being of the stranger to whom you offered hospitality. To allow someone to violate that stranger, while he was a guest, was a serious breach. To harm him yourself was simply unimaginable -- even if, paradoxically, you planned to kill him after he was out of your control and on his own.

Now, most people have heard the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. And most people have been told from an early age that it was sex and depravity that earned the inhabitants their fire-and-brimstone fate. But anyone who's done any serious study of the matter knows otherwise.

Charlatan preachers of all stripes would have you believe that the "sin of Sodom" was sexual, and specifically homosexual. In reality, the "sin of Sodom" was the inhabitants' failure to provide safety for the visitors to the town. The residents violated the cardinal moral imperative of hospitality.

The sexual angle, while of convenient use to preachers, is belied by the fact that Lot -- who is the hero of the piece, remember -- offered his daughters to the mob to use for their "amusement." So, if the message of the story really is about sex, it's a pretty grim message: trying to turn your young daughters over to a mob for sexual abuse makes you the good guy. You can believe that, if you want, but I'll remember to stay away from your church.

Now, there is an alternate explanation of Sodom and Gomorrah that comes from quite a different creation story. I'm actually a big fan of creation myths and side partially with the "creationists" who want to teach them in schools. Where we part company, of course, is that I would like to see schools teach all the creation myths --and there are so many more interesting ones -- while the current creationists want to teach only one of the several that appear in the Old Testament.

In this alternative creation story, the inhabitants of Planet Earth -- all of our animal life forms including us -- are part of a genetic-engineering experiment being conducted by extraterrestrials. These experimenters live on a distant planet and drop by every several thousand years, when their planet's orbit brings them into the neighborhood, to check on the guinea pigs (that would be us), make some adjustments, and tinker with their experiment.

Those who hold this theory surmise that what happened at Sodom and Gomorrah was that something went terribly wrong with the inhabitants -- perhaps rebelling against the visitors from the mother ship and trying to kill them -- resulting in the extraterrestrials'  having to drop a small nuclear device (or its analog) on the offenders. This would account for the fire that "rained down" from the sky and for the unfortunate fate of Lot's wife, who, you will remember, was turned into a "pillar of salt" for looking back and potentially exposing herself to a nuclear blast.

The central message, however, is the same. The inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were punished for their inhospitality to the visitors.

The ET myth, by the way, also accounts for so many other things -- ancient sightings of UFOs, petraglyphs in widely spread areas showing "visitors from the sky," and discontinuous leaps in the evolutionary process. I know some people find this myth preposterous, and prefer the more logical explanation --the one on which I was raised -- of people being made out of dirt and spit, talking snakes, bad apples, and jamming animals into big boats. But, I digress.

The key here is hospitality, and many people still take this notion very, very seriously. Bollinger sure showed Ahmadinejad who's the boss, and therein lies the problem. While it may have gotten a knee-slapping howl from the Jerry Springer-fed audience, that "whooshing" sound you heard was a sharp intake of breath from people across the Middle East. We are, Bollinger proved, as boorish and anti-Muslim as they've been told we are -- at least in their eyes.

Bollinger may have had them rolling in the aisles in Morningside Heights, but he had them seething in the streets across the Middle East. If anyone thinks that's useful, that person needs to re-read "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

So, why did Bollinger invite Ahmadinejad to speak, if he felt he was a terrorist and a buffoon with no reasonable argument to present? That will probably remain a mystery, although my Inner Cynic has a clue.

Inner Cynic suspects that Columbia invited Ahmadinejad to make a splash and get the publicity, not expecting the backlash it got not only from the community, but from Alumni (with a capital A, Alumni means graduates with big checkbooks). At the time of the invitation, even I was wondering what the heck Columbia was thinking. Once the invitation was out there, it was hard to rescind, as that would have caused a backlash to the backlash, would have damaged the university's reputation for academic freedom, and would have been a PR blot instead of a shining star.

Bollinger, according to Inner Cynic, took what he thought was the middle path, allowing Ahmadinejad to show up, but then tried to mollify the backlashers by doing the academic equivalent of  "pantsing" Ahmadinejad (or, "de-pantsing" him, if you're a stickler for grammar), spraying him with a seltzer bottle, and pushing a pie in his face. Let's make that a pork pie -- just to make sure we offend as many Muslims as possible. I have no proof for any of this, just a hunch, but, like the ET creation myth, it makes as much sense as any other theory.

So, at the bottom line, Ahmadinejad was invited to Columbia under the guise of academic freedom and, once there, was the victim of the "sin of Sodom" -- a gross and inexcusable breach of hospitality.

© Copyright 2007 Carlton Vogt