The United States and Israel commit human rights violations. There are no gay Iranians. We must allow ourselves to look at the Holocaust from different perspectives. Israel needs to be wiped off the map. The attacks of September 11, 2001, were actually perpetrated by the United States. Looks like Ahmadinejad is back on the warpath, this time launching his attacks from our own front door.
Last year, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to the United States with his signature rhetorical firestorm, the mere mention of his speaking at Columbia University was enough to trigger a storm of concern. That appearance was cancelled at the last minute due to “security concerns.” Controversy seems to follow the outspoken leader wherever he goes, and this year he made sure it would be no different.
Ahmadinejad began his pestering of the American people when he requested permission to visit Ground Zero in New York City, to “lay a wreath” on the site where the Twin Towers fell. His request was denied by police, citing security concerns, but already the idea of an enemy of our country visiting one of our most hallowed locations was enough to anger a great many Americans.
Then last Thursday, in an interview with “60 Minutes” taped in Tehran, he accused the CBS correspondent of acting like a CIA agent. The reporter’s crime? Asking a follow-up question to Ahmadinejad’s non-answer of his initial question. Ahmadinejad specializes in dodging uncomfortable questions by answering with questions of his own. For example, during Monday’s forum at Columbia, the university’s president Lee Bollinger asked, “Why is your government providing aid to terrorists? Will you stop doing so and permit international monitoring to certify that you have stopped?”
Ahmadinejad responded, “Well, I want to pose a question here to you. If someone comes and explodes bombs around you, threatens your president, members of the administration, kills the members of the Senate or Congress, how would you treat them?”
Between dodging questions, leaving appearances early and speaking to a UN assembly that lacked the U.S. delegation (which had walked out in protest), Ahmadinejad was able to stay on message: Iran is great and peaceful. The United States and Israel are evil. The Holocaust is mere theory.
At Columbia, Bollinger was rather hostile with the Iranian president, saying in his introduction that Ahmadinejad displays “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.” When he denied the Holocaust, Bollinger called him “either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” Why would a world leader put up with this? After all, as he reminded us constantly, he is the president of mighty Iran.
It’s because Ahmadinejad likes the attention. A forum at Columbia, or in front of the U.N. General Assembly, gives him the platform he needs in order to spew his rhetoric, to respond to a question about the persecution of homosexuals in Iran with, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran we do not have this phenomenon, I don’t know who has told you that we have it.”
Of course, Ahmadinejad has his fans. The Iranian people, generally not huge fans of their crazy president, were rightfully outraged by the treatment he received at Bollinger’s hands, and this won him some more support.
Fellow pariahs President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Venezulan President Hugo Chavez voiced their support for Ahmadinejad. “I congratulate him,” Chavez said, “in the name of the Venezuelan people, before a new aggression of the U.S. empire.”
Ahmadinejad will meet with Chavez later this week, where they’ll surely hold another meeting of the petty dictator club and come out with a whole new set of anti-U.S. rhetoric. At least this time, we won’t have to put up with them in our country.
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