Yesterday was a day that should have made us all proud. Standing on the podium across from Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University celebrated traditional American freedoms - not Ahmadinejad’s leadership.

In his opening remarks Bollinger reminded us that to listen to ideas does not in any way imply “our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas,” and that the debate about whether or not to have Mr. Ahmadinejad appear at the university itself was understood and respected. He apologized to those who may be hurt by the invitation and stressed the rights of Americans - to question, to debate, to confront ideas, to listen - over the rights of the invited guest:

We do it in the great tradition of openness that has defined this nation for many decades now. We need to understand the world we live in, neither neglecting its glories nor shrinking from its threats and dangers. It is consistent with the idea that one should know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament. In the moment, the arguments for free speech will never seem to match the power of the arguments against, but what we must remember is that this is precisely because free speech asks us to exercise extraordinary self- restraint against the very natural but often counter-productive impulses that lead us to retreat from engagement with ideas we dislike and fear. In this lies the genius of the American idea of free speech.

My question to those of you who so vigorously protested Columbia’s invitation is this, which has done more damage to our country’s national security and standing in the world community - inviting Ahmadinejad to speak for two hours at a university or preemptively invading a sovereign nation and causing a humanitarian crisis for that nation and the region? Which is more pro-American?

This post was written by Mary Mancini