Columbia platform

Kudos to Tim Rutten for his excellent account of Columbia University’s appalling complicity with treacherous dictators in the 1930s and for his righteous condemnation of that academic institution’s continuing dance macabre with totalitarian hatemongers such as Iranian President Ahmadinejad [“A Pulpit of Shame for Iran Leader,” Sept. 29].

As it doggedly pursued its cherished academic shibboleth of “freedom of speech,” Columbia University abandoned morality and academic integrity by providing a public platform and granting a cachet to one of our century’s most perfidious leaders who, shrewdly presenting himself as a reasonable statesman, makes a perilous mockery of truth.

Susan Ehrlich

Beverly Hills

TIM RUTTEN’S narrow-minded diatribe about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fails to take the broader view of what is happening in the Islamic world, as do the comments of most conservative commentators. In his first sentence he states that Ahmadinejad is “one of the world’s truly dangerous men.” Bullet for bullet, bomb for bomb and body for body, this guy doesn’t hold a candle to George W. Bush when it comes to being the world’s most dangerous man.

I don’t see why conservatives insist on calling the Iranian president a madman when the country next to his was senselessly invaded and transformed into a disastrous hellhole by the current American administration. What responsible leader in his right mind wouldn’t do everything he could to deter a similarly mindless attack on his own country?

Thomas Haskin

La Mesa