If you are keeping score at home, September was a bad month for the “Axis of Evil,” especially for its junior member in Damascus. In the middle of the month, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to New York to address the UN General Assembly and was invited to Columbia University, one of the US’s most important institutions of higher learning. Once led by Five-Star General Dwight D. Eisenhower after he had helped the Allies win WWII as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and before he became the thirty-fourth president of the United States, Columbia of late has acquired something of a reputation as a hotbed of campus anti-Americanism. After all, this is the tenured perch from where Edward Said had famously explained how Western imperialism was responsible for everything that had gone wrong with the Middle East. Current Columbia University president, Lee Bollinger, turned the Orientalism doctrine on
