Amiri Baraka comes to Yale

I don’t know how our friends at RealClearPolitics missed this one, but the best column on the Web this morning belongs to Yale freshman James Kirchik in the Yale Daily News. Kirchik takes an extended look at the visit of New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka to Yale from a variety of angles, none of them pretty.
According to Baraka, Israel was complicit in the 9/11 attack on America. Kirchik is not pleased that Baraka appeared before a student audience friendly to his anti-American, anti-Semitic ravings and that the Yale administration’s defense of Baraka’s appearance engaged in the kind of shameful moral equivalence that lends credence to Baraka’s hatred: “Applauding falsehoods at a university.”
We can hope that Baraka’s audience was unrepresentative of Yale students as a whole. The Daily News’ online poll indicates that 61 percent of the 414 students who have voted since the column was posted at 1:00 a.m. believe that “Baraka should not have been invited to campus.”