of al-Banna's Nazi sympathies while asserting that the real question at hand was the Arab struggle against Israel. He stated: "[Al-Banna] was against the existence of Israel," but that this was a "very specific position" and "you cannot find support for the Nazis" in al-Banna's writing.

"I don't like to contextualize a long-term alliance with a leading Nazi propagandist and collaborator," Packer responded -- a remark that drew a rare outburst of applause from a sizable portion of the audience. Ramadan dismissed the point, and the panel moderator obliged him by quickly changing the subject. Yet this was not the first time Ramadan justified extremist positions based on "context": He told the Italian magazine Panorama in 2004 that terrorism against civilians is "contextually explicable."

Packer's courage notwithstanding, it was impossiblenot to leave the auditorium feeling slightly nauseated by the panel's choice to offer apologias for Ramadan's Islamism while celebrating moral relativism. Cooper Union can carve a notch in its stock for hosting another "dangerous man." The rest of us will be left to wonder how a college that hosted one of the great Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1860, in which the future president outlined the evils of slavery, became by 2010 a refuge for those who would justify misogyny, anti-Semitism, and terrorism.

Brendan Goldman is a senior at New York University majoring in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and an intern at the Middle East Forum. This essay was sponsored byCampus Watch, a project of theMiddle East Forum.

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