On October 4, 2006, James Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen, an unarmed citizens group that serves as the unofficial eyes and ears of the U.S. Border Patrol along the U.S.-Mexican border, and Marvin Stewart, an African American leader of the Minutemen, were invited by the Columbia University College Republicans to address a meeting of faculty and students at Columbia’s Roone Arledge Auditorium in New York.

In his remarks, Stewart made mention of the fact that those who wrote our Declaration of Independence were convinced that it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. However, according to the New York Sun, as he spoke those words he was booed and shouted down by student protesters who called him “a racist, a sellout, and a black white-supremacist.”

Then, when Gilchrist approached the podium, a contingent of leftist students, members of the Columbia Chicano Caucus, the African-American Student Organization, and the International Socialist Organization, stormed the stage, knocking over chairs and tables and attacking Gilchrist.

Members of the College Republicans rose to their defense and campus security officers quickly escorted Gilchrist and Stewart off the stage and out a back door. Having realized their goal of disrupting the meeting and preventing Gilchrist and Stewart from speaking, the leftist students unfurled a banner that read, in Arabic and in English, “No one is ever illegal.”

In a subsequent interview with a Sun reporter, third-year Columbia student Ryan Fukumori, who took part in the protests, said, "These are racist individuals heading a project that terrorizes immigrants on the U.S.-Mexican border… They have no right to be able to speak here."

Fast forward 355 days to September 24, 2007. President Lee. C. Bollinger stood before Columbia’s World Leader’s Forum and introduced the world’s most dangerous supporter of Islamic terrorism, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In his introductory remarks, Bollinger said, “… since 2003, the World Leaders Forum has advanced Columbia’s longstanding tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate (emphasis added), especially on global issues…

“… to those who believe that this event never should have happened, that it is inappropriate for the University to conduct such an event, I want to say… as forcefully as I can, that this is the right thing to do and, indeed, it is required by existing norms of free speech (emphasis added), the American university, and Columbia itself.”

He went on to say, “… this event has nothing whatsoever to do with any “rights” of the speaker but only with our rights to listen and speak. We do it for ourselves… We need to understand the world we live in, neither neglecting its glories nor shrinking from its threats and dangers… 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 universities, we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth. We do not have access to the levers of power. We cannot make war or peace. We can only make minds. And to do this we must have the most (complete) freedom of inquiry.”

The boundless hypocrisy of the liberal mind is truly breathtaking. Exactly how does the treatment accorded the Minutemen fit with Bollinger’s dedication to “robust debate?” And if the university has “a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth,” is that merely a new discovery on his part?

Why was it “the right thing to do” to allow this modern day Hitler to speak on the Columbia campus, because, as Bollinger argues, “it is required by existing norms of free speech,” while those same “norms of free speech” did not apply to the Minutemen who help protect our borders from foreign invasion?

And finally, while it is true that Ahmadinejad had no inherent right to be heard on the Columbia campus, if his presence there was all about the right of students, faculty, and the media to hear him, what was so repugnant about the Minutemen’s story that caused leftist students to deny others the right to hear what they had to say?

As the Los Angeles Times opines in a September 29, 2007 story, “One of the world's truly dangerous men… Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left New York a clear winner this week, and he can thank the arrogance of the American academy and most of the U.S. news media's studied indifference for his victory.”

They might also have concluded that our rights as citizens are far too precious to be entrusted to leftists in the mainstream media and on university campuses, and that the intellectual cesspool that is American liberalism cannot “make minds,” they can only produce more young fascists to make our world, and especially the Columbia campus, a very dangerous place.