If Rudolph Giuliani were mayor, I think his denial of
President Ahmadinejad's request to visit ground zero would have
been a bit pithier than the New York City Police Department's
rebuff.
Instead of citing "security reasons," Mr. Giuliani
probably would have turned the Iranian president down by saying,
"Iran is the biggest sponsor of terror and this request is
totally unacceptable and an insult to those who died there."
The city's current administration, however, is not likely to be
as forthright as our former mayor, who had no problem recognizing
that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were acts of horrific
terror. Would Mayor Bloomberg have returned a $10 million check
from Prince Alwalid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, made out to the
Twin Towers Fund, when the prince suggested that America's Middle
East policy contributed to the World Trade Center attacks? Mr.
Giuliani rejected the prince's statement in no uncertain terms
when he returned the donation:
"To suggest that there's a justification for [the terrorist
attacks] only invites this happening in the future," he
said. "It is highly irresponsible and very, very dangerous.
And one of the reasons I think this happened is because people
were engaged in moral equivalency in not understanding the
difference between liberal democracies like the United States,
like Israel, and terrorist states and those who condone
terrorism."
Mr. Giuliani made that statement on October 11, 2001, and most of
the city agreed with him. We also had no problem distinguishing
which were the terrorist states. The idea that Iran, which has
been threatening the demise of Israel on a daily basis, should be
treated with anything but contempt would have been laughable.
That, of course, was then. The mood of the city has changed, but
not for the better. I don't think it's wise to forget who our
enemies are so that we don't offend individuals with lawyers on
retainer. Mark Steyn recently wrote a delicious column
criticizing those who feel a need to understand our enemy.
Naturally, his essay received comments from readers who insist we
do just that.
When exactly did New Yorkers turn into "Can't we all get
along?" California boobs? Could it be something lacking in
our current leadership?
The mayor seems to be determined to make this city as
multicultural as possible. He also seems to have a less strident
relationship with critics of America. In 2002, he appointed a
Council on American-Islamic Relations official to the city's
Human Rights Commission. The appointment generated a number of
complaints because CAIR had co-sponsored an event at Brooklyn
College at which attendees shouted anti-Semitic remarks, because
it is funded in part by Prince Alwalid, and because CAIR posted a
letter on its Web site suggesting that Muslims could not have
been responsible for the September 11, attacks.
Would Mr. Giuliani even have considered starting an
Arabic-language public school like Khalil Gibran International
Academy? No, he would have introduced the language into the
curriculum of regular schools. That would have made sense.
Now Mr. Ahmadinejad is coming to town. How much of a red carpet
will be laid out for him at Columbia University?
Earlier this year I met with an Iranian dissident to discuss a
possible Persian renaissance in Iran that would preclude any
necessary military intervention by America or Israel. When I
asked him his opinion of Mr. Ahmadinejad, he described him as a
"psychopath." "He's a puppet of the mullahs, but
he's still dangerous," he said. When I asked him about
Iran's nuclear program, he said it was a problem. Although my new
friend held out the hope that the Iranian intellectual leader Dr.
Forood Fouladvand could take command in a bloodless coup, he
realistically acknowledged the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
"If the threat is imminent, then there is no option but to
bomb the site," he said.
On my way to work Wednesday, I passed ground zero. Two men were
trying to take pictures through a hole in the stockade fencing
around the site. What, I wondered, were they looking at? It's
still just a hole in the ground. The president of Iran, a country
supplying insurgents in Iraq to kill Iraqi citizens and our
military, wants to lay a wreath at ground zero and the city was
actually mulling over the offer. No one in this city's
administration has the gumption - and boy did I have to search
high and low for this euphemism - to express how contemptible his
presence at the World Trade Center site would be. It's times like
this that I really hate term limits.