Sometimes it’s surprising that Americans can’t see how racist and provincial they seem to the rest of the world, even when they are Ivy-League university presidents or “leaders of the free world”.

I wasn’t really following with any great fervor the controversy surrounding the invitation to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, to speak at Columbia University. I was just kind of surfing the web, when I stumbled upon the lead article on the New York Times online.

But when I read about how the president of Columbia, Lee C. Bollinger, introduced the foreign dignitary to the audience by insulting him with patronizing, almost racist challenges, I couldn’t help but get annoyed.

Would North Korean or Chinese leaders have been subjected to the same sort of insulting treatment, or are they higher in the racial (and political) hierarchy of respectability, even though their support of human rights is also a bit suspect?

By way of disclaimer, I am no fan of Iran. From what I’ve read in the Western press, it’s not exactly a hotbed of human rights. And I find Ahmadineja’s assertion that there are no homosexuals in Iran slightly Nazi-esque in its genocidal implications. Plus to be 100% frank, the hatred that many parts of the Arab world show towards the US scares me. I am, after all, American and the religious fanatics don’t seem to discriminate in their hatred of and/or desire to attack and kill Americans.

September 11th was a defining moment for me.

But I still don’t think that the way to convince someone from another culture that his point of view might be misguided is to insult and patronize him publicly. All you do is make him hate you more.

Why should he accept your argument that you and your culture are morally and evolutionarily superior when he has his own proud history and social norms?

Why should he trust you when the basis of your argument is “Do as I say, not as I do”?

As Ahmadinejad asked quite pointedly: “If you [the United States] have created the fifth generation of atomic bombs and are testing them already, who are you to question other people who just want nuclear power?”

This is the heart of the matter. What is the moral or cultural basis that separates the US’s right to produce weapons of mass destruction from the claims of other nations? That they’re Arab and can’t be trusted?

Again, after September 11th, I completely understand the rationale behind that argument, but I admit that it’s not a morally upright or intellectually convincing point of view. It’s a purely emotional reaction with racist implications.

It’s pure survival of the fittest.

Ahmadinejad is the president of a proud nation, one that’s profoundly influential — for good or for bad — in the modern political world. Bollinger is the president of a prestigious national university. That’s a great job, but not quite as influential or powerful.

So why does Bollinger think that he’s superior to Ahmadinejad? Just because he’s an American WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)?

A few gems from Bollinger’s introduction:

• “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” (Nice technique. Call someone “petty”and “cruel”, and then hint that he’s “astonishingly uneducated”, but buffer the insult by starting with “Mr. President”.)
• He noted that it was “well documented” that Iran was a state sponsor of terrorism. Wasn’t it also well-documented that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Isn’t that why we went to war with them?
• After 10 minutes of insult in which he suggested that Iran did not belong to the “civilized world”, Bollinger concluded that “I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions.”

If Bollinger felt this way, why did he invite someone he regards as an “intellectual coward” to speak? Maybe he just wanted to get free press and benefit from Ahmadinejad’s celebrity/infamy?

Isn’t he the intellectually disingenuous one?

Ahmadinejad is no idiot. As he astutely observed at the beginning of his speech: “In Iran, tradition requires when you invite a person to be a speaker, we actually respect our students enough to allow them to make their own judgment, and don’t think it’s necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of complaints to provide vaccination to the students and faculty.”

On that point, I think that the “petty dictator” is correct. And it’s not just an Iranian tradition. I think it’s pretty universal that you should treat your guests with respect.

All of this hypocrisy in the context of a country where, as Paul Krugman notes in his New York Times column, “race remains one of the defining factors in modern American politics”. The context to his commentary is the case of the Jena 6, a group of black students who beat up a white classmate (admittedly, not a nice thing to do) and were charged with second-degree murder.

The punishment doesn’t seem to fit the crime, which has made the trial a cause celebre. It is indicative of a culture in which the white majority has often used its political and economic superiority to control and oppress racial minorities.

In this environment, some white students warned black students not to sit under “whites only” trees by hanging nooses, a reference to the not-so-distant past when blacks were lynched (killed and hung from trees) as a means of social control.

And the party of our President has historically used the promise of continued racial superiority in order to win the white Southern vote. A few examples:

• President Bush, the idealist who goes to war to protect the freedoms of other countries’ citizens, exploited the symbolism of Bob Jones University in 2000 as part of his electoral strategy. Bob Jones’ claim to fame is that it banned interracial dating and punished students who dared to date people of other races.
• All four leading Republican candidates for the 2008 nomination have rejected invitations to debate minority issues on public television, and they have declined to address Latino voters directly. Given how a lot of poor whites are defensive about immigration rights — and given that poor, Southern whites were the only group to support the Republicans in the recent Congressional elections — the candidates don’t want to appear to support Blacks, Latinos and Asians. Their loyal, religious, white and often racist Southern voter base might get offended.

In short, intolerance, religious fanaticism and racism are not unique to “uncivilized” parts of the world.

Violence and aggression are not only initiated by (Arab) state sponsors of terror.

I’m happy to be American. But every now and then, I can’t help but be a little embarrassed and disappointed.