Love of the Land: What Is To Be Done About Nuclear Iran?

What Is To Be Done About Nuclear Iran?

Roger L Simon
Pajamamedia.com
11 February '10

Click here to watch the second part of Roger’s interview with Israeli ambassador to the United States. (View Part One here.)

A transcript of the entire interview appears below:

MR. SIMON: Ambassador Oren, thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule for PJTV. And before we get into the real subject of this discussion on Iran, I can’t resist asking you to comment on the events yesterday at UC Irvine. Was it really as bad as Judean Ramallah or not as bad?

AMBASSADOR OREN: First of all, pleasure to be here, Roger. As to what happened yesterday in UC Irvine, I was giving a presentation on the state of US Israel and Israel-Middle Eastern relations, and a group of several hundred students kept on disturbing me, calling out rather, you know, various curses and expletives, none of them deleted, and basically, violating the most fundamental law on an American campus, indeed, outside of American campus in this country, and that’s the right of free speech. And from my perspective, it was a great squandered opportunity for them. Here, they had an opportunity to hear a different perspective, perhaps not a perspective they agreed with or like, but — and a chance to exchange ideas, and that, I think, is what universities are about, but they’ve blocked this. And unfortunately, this has happened at several campuses to several Israeli speakers, but not only to Israeli speakers. Last week, down at Georgetown campus, General Petraeus was subject to the same type of interference. So I think it’s the beginning of a trend that we have to watch very, very carefully, a trend to sort of bring the Middle East, where there is no freedom of expression, onto American campuses. And I think we have to be very vigilant, indeed, to prevent that from happening.

MR. SIMON: It’s not just American campuses, though, unfortunately. My nephew is a student at the London School of Economics, and the same thing happened there. And he wrote about it for Pajamas Media. But let’s move on to Iran, here.

(Read full transcript)

Love of the Land: What Is To Be Done About Nuclear Iran?