Ahmadinejad Wows Citizens at Columbia University

During Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger may well have felt he was doing the right thing by blistering the Iranian President with the unvarnished truth about the evil of his regime. But he may well have played into Ahmadinejad's hands.

Recently Iranian President Ahmadinejad was invited to impart his wisdom to students and faculty at Columbia University in New York. Since Ahmadinejad is a tyrant who presides over a regime that persecutes and even kills people for their political and religious beliefs, and even their sexual orientation, and regularly threatens Israel and the United States with annihilation, this invitation was somewhat controversial.

Columbia President Lee Bollinger, taking note of Ahmadinejad's status as the Hitler of our age, let the Iranian President have it during his introduction. "Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator, and so I ask you, and so I ask you, why have women, members of the Baha'i faith, homosexuals and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country?"

Ahmadinejad pretended to be affronted by the introduction. "At the outset, I want to complain a bit about the person who read this political statement against me. In Iran, tradition requires that when we invite a person to be a speaker, we actually respect our students and the professors by allowing them to make their own judgment and we don't think it's necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of claims..."

In fact, the Iranian tyrant could not have been happier. The reason Ahmadinejad was overjoyed at the tongue lashing he had gotten from Columbia President Bollinger is that his real audience was not the addled students in the Columbia auditorium who clapped and cheered at almost all of his obfuscations and evasions (the exception being the absurd claim that there are no homosexuals in Iran.) His real audience was the Iranian people back in his homeland and Muslims around the Middle East.