It’s important to know your enemies.

Not attempting to understand opposing viewpoints can lead us into unwanted wars.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech this week at Columbia University, amid considerable protest. He also gave several television interviews and spoke at the United Nations.

He talked about Iran’s nuclear program, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his desire for dialogue between Iran and the U.S.

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger spoke prior to Ahmadinejad’s arrival at the university. Bollinger slammed the Iranian president for, among many other things, cracking down on academics in Iran and denying that the Holocaust happened. He said Ahmadinejad bore “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.”

The Iranian president has been called a tyrant and a hate-monger. Comparisons to Adolf Hitler abound.

Ahmadinejad hasn’t been happily met – if he’s been met at all.

The U.S. delegates to the U.N. walked out when Ahmadinejad spoke there this week. Even if our representatives don’t want to listen, it’s imperative that Americans take the time to.

“Given the current tensions between Iran and the U.S., it is terribly important that the American people hear the Iranian point of view,” said Tomis Kapitan, philosophy department chair at NIU.

“This is what citizens of this democracy should demand if we are to make informed and intelligent decisions about what policies to support.”

Ahmadinejad has legitimate concerns over U.S.-Iran relations and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Iranian academics have posed questions to Bollinger about the U.S. backing of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, U.S. alliance to “extremely undemocratic” nations in the Middle East and other foreign policy inconsistencies.

Corey Flintoff, National Public Radio correspondent, wrote that “many of [Ahmadinejad’s] views, though strange and repellent to people in the West, are not much out of the mainstream of thought in Muslim countries.”

Ahmadinejad did, after all, win his country’s presidential election in 2005 by a hefty margin.

While his views may not be mainstream in Iran, they’re clearly not anathema to winning an election. They might be unpleasant ideas to hear, but far too many people are resorting to mere name-calling.This isn’t a time for willful ignorance.

It’s important, Kapitan said, for us to know and understand more about the Middle East.

“Our country is deeply involved, militarily, politically and economically in that region of the world, and the future of every American citizen partly depends upon the outcomes of this involvement,” Kapitan said.

Ahmadinejad might say things you don’t want to hear. He might irritate you, offend you and make you hate him. I’m not asking you to hold back these feelings.

I’m simply suggesting that we should know our enemies well before we attack, verbally or otherwise.