The British national debating team squared off against the William Pitt Debating Union… The British national debating team squared off against the William Pitt Debating Union Friday on the question of whether or not Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be given a forum to speak in the international community.

Pitt students Matthew Brigham and Catherine Morrison argued that a public forum for discussion with Ahmadinejad is vital, while Brits Alex Just and Alistair Cormack said that the nations of the world should give him the cold shoulder.

“Columbia made a mess of a good idea,” Brigham said, referring to the forum Ahmadinejad participated in at Columbia University on Sept. 24. “It’s as good as Britney Spears’ comeback performance.”

The mess began when the president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, opened the forum with a strain of insults against Ahmadinejad, Brigham said, also noting that the forum did not allow for any exchange of questions and answers directly with students.

Brigham and Morrison proposed that Ahmadinejad should instead participate in an Oxford forum-styled debate, in which students could play this role in the debate.

But Alex Just from the University of Durham in England said that an Oxford forum setup does not necessarily encourage free speech, calling the idea “fanciful, ridiculous twottle.”

Just said that, when the president of Libya came to a forum at Oxford, his aides told students what questions they could and could not ask him.

Just said he is convinced that Ahmadinejad would play a similar game. “We cannot have a genuine debate with him,” he said.

So what was Just’s solution? “We should not have public forums with him,” he said.

But Brigham argued that Ahmadinejad’s speech showed him to be more a fool than a villain, especially when he announced that Iran was completely free of homosexuals.

Morrison added that speeches like Ahmadinejad’s at Columbia unmask bullies for who they really are. Such speeches demonstrate that fundamentalism, hatred and bigotry do exist in individuals like the Iranian president, she said.

The discussion at Columbia was important, Morrison said, because it showed the public the extent of Ahmadinejad’s fanaticism. By not allowing Ahmadinejad to speak, there is no way to challenge such hatred and bigotry.

Cormack, of Oxford University, said that there are other ways to show that Ahmadinejad is a bad man – anyone can put a video of him on YouTube; not everyone is invited to speak at an Ivy League university.

Just augmented his teammate’s argument.

“We cannot give Ahmadinejad a forum in the U.S. while he represses free speech back home