Nobles and Knaves

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Noble: The 14th Dalai Lama for his lifelong pursuit of peace for Tibet.

The Dalai Lama would certainly be a candidate for Noble on any given week, but His Holiness received the Congressional Gold Medal this week and that warrants special mention. On Wednesday in the Capitol Rotunda, President Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Robert C. Byrd presented to the Dalai Lama the highest honor of Congress, to the clear and strong disapproval of the Chinese government, which regards the Buddhist spiritual leader as a troublemaking "separatist." Mr. Bush called the Dalai Lama "a man of peace and reconciliation" and urged officials in Beijing to meet with the exiled leader.

In 1950, the Dalai Lama was called upon to assume full political power of Tibet shortly after the region was invaded by the Communist Chinese armed forces, the People's Liberation Army. In 1959, the oppressed people of Tibet revolted against the Chinese and the Dalai Lama escaped to exile in India. He has continued to lead the effort for autonomy and religious freedom for the Tibetan people ever since. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, and now, despite the growling in Beijing and China's threat to cool relations with the United States, Congress gave the Dalai Lama this well-deserved honor. Good for Congress.

For being a political and spiritual leader of the highest order, the Dalai Lama is the Noble of the Week.

Knave: Stephen Knapp, the president of George Washington University, who is punishing the wrong people in the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week poster saga.

Last week's Knaves were the seven GW students who posted satirical anti-Muslim posters around campus, which were wrongly atttributed to the conservative Young America's Foundation. This week, Mr. Knapp takes dubious honors for vowing consequences but giving the kid-gloves treatment once it emerged that the offending students were not young conservatives, but a bunch of left-wingers seeking to portray the foundation as a nest of bigots.

When the posters were first discovered, Mr. Knapp, unable to recognize them for what they were, called them "reprehensible" and said: "There is no place for expressions of hatred on our campus." That clearly doesn't apply when "expressions of hatred" are meant to smear a conservative group. Late last week, after the perpetrators came forward, the university announced that all disciplinary issues would be handled by the Student Judicial Services, and not the administration. University police have closed their investigation. In fact, the students may escape punishment altogether because GW's "hate speech" provisions do not extend to political affiliation.

Young America's Foundation remains the school's target. School administrators demanded something like a loyalty oath, in which the foundation promised "that you will not allow hate speech to be a part of any [group] events, literature, written or verbal communication planned for Islamofacism Week." When you're afraid of the guilty at GW, you punish the innocent.

For his cowardice when confronted by troublemakers, Stephen Knapp is the Knave of the Week.