Iran leader denied WTC wreath request

[Kidlicious]

America is teh bad hosts.

[Cort Haus]

For anyone cheering Hezbollah on...




Having made that point, I am in the camp that says that if you're going to invite Ahmadinajad, he should be treated with a cold civility during the formal introductions. What happens in any debate / Q & A is another matter.

If the view is taken that his despicable politics deprives him of the right to be treated in accordance with normal diplomatic protocol, then why stop there? Why not kidnap him and send him to Gitmo, or hurl official university rotten fruit at him, or something?

It should be perfectly possible to expose his moral bankruptcy within the framework of polite protocol. Otherwise the only winner is Ahmadinajad, as far as his domestic image is concerned.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by GePap


Calling someone petty, uneducated, so forth is an insult, unles you have forgotten the definition of that as well.

If Ahmadinajad genuinely believes the holocaust did not occur, then he is uneducated wrt to the holocaust.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Cort Haus the right to be treated in accordance with normal diplomatic protocol,

As info Columbia is a private university, and Bollinger is not a diplomat or govt official. Diplomatic protocol is irrelevant.

[Kidlicious]

Indeed, calling him uneducated is giving him the benefit of the doubt.

[lord of the mark]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by GePap

The speech was rambling

Cause it wasnt structured as a speech, but as a list of questions.

Plus his calling the President of Iran a "dictator", when given the structure of the Islamic Republic he isn't, given that he does not even hold the most important parts of executive power,

Theres considerable debate about the extent of his power. His alliance with the rev guards gives him far more power than is constitutionally inherent in the office of Prez. Anyway, thats a quibble.

or his calling Moqtada al Sadr an "insurgent leader"

I think thats close enough for the thrust of the question.

[Cort Haus]

Columbia may not formally be a state organ, but it will be seen as representing the host country in this instance, like it or not.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
Columbia may not formally be a state organ, but it will be seen as representing the host country in this instance, like it or not.

possibly. However diplomatic protocol, per se, is irrelevant.

[SlowwHand]

It doesn't have to be a state operated school for them to be supportive of their country, and appalled by a liar.

[GePap]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by lord of the mark

Originally posted by GePap
Cause it wasnt structured as a speech, but as a list of questions.

It was a series of statements phrased like questions. Akin to :

"how do you explain all the years in which you have viciously and endlessly beaten your wife?"

The intent is clearly not to ask the questions in good faith, something proven clearly by his statement at the end that the questions would be not answered.

Theres considerable debate about the extent of his power. His alliance with the rev guards gives him far more power than is constitutionally inherent in the office of Prez. Anyway, thats a quibble.

No, its not remotely a quibble, specially given the fact the man will not likely be re-elected if he continues on this path.

I think thats close enough for the thrust of the question.

Bollinger wasn't asking qustion in good faith, and even if he were, the statement remains ignorant.

[lord of the mark]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by GePap

"It was a series of statements phrased like questions. Akin to :

"how do you explain all the years in which you have viciously and endlessly beaten your wife?"

When youre dealing with a man who HAS viciously and endlessly beaten his wife thats a question.

The intent is clearly not to ask the questions in good faith, something proven clearly by his statement at the end that the questions would be not answered.

a reasonable expectations that turned out to be true.

[lord of the mark]

todays WaPo, Anne Applebaums column

Playing Democrat At Columbia

By Anne Applebaum
Tuesday, September 25, 2007; Page A19

The novelty of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance yesterday at Columbia University did not, as many critics would have it, lie in the fact that an august Ivy League institution had invited the Iranian president -- a Holocaust-denier, authoritarian leader and sponsor of terrorism -- to speak on its campus. The protests, the fury, the screaming New York Daily News headlines, the counterarguments about free speech -- we have seen all of that sort of thing before.

No, the novelty of Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia lies in the fact that he wanted to make that speech at all. Though a blustering Columbia dean foolishly told Fox News that "if he were willing to engage in a debate and a discussion," the university would happily invite Adolf Hitler to speak, too, it's impossible to imagine the Fuhrer accepting. Hitler staged his theatrical public appearances with extreme care -- banners, uniforms, vast crowds -- and never for the purpose of creating catchy sound bites. He wasn't interested in impressing upon anyone his status as an internationally accepted "democrat" who could keep up his end of a dialogue with American students. He was interested in demonstrating his power to Germans. The same could be said of Joseph Stalin and, among modern totalitarian leaders, of North Korea's Kim Jong Il.

Ahmadinejad's agenda, though, differs from that of the traditional autocrat. His goal is not merely to hold power in Iran through sheer force, or even through a standard 20th-century personality cult: His goal is to undermine the American and Western democracy rhetoric that poses an ideological threat to the Iranian regime. Last winter, when he invited a host of dubious Holocaust-deniers to discuss the Holocaust in Tehran, he claimed that it was in order to provide shelter for the West's "dissidents" -- that is, for Western thinkers "who cannot express their views freely in Europe about the Holocaust." This week, he declared that his visit to New York would help the American people, who have "suffered in diverse ways and have been deprived of access to accurate information." Thus the speech at Columbia: Here he is, the allegedly undemocratic Ahmadinejad, taking questions from students! At an American university! Look who's the real democrat now!

This sort of game is both irritating and dangerous, particularly when it is being played by a man whose regime locks up academics for the " crime" of organizing academic conferences and regularly arrests the Iranian equivalent of the students who listened to him speak yesterday. Iran is experiencing an unprecedented wave of political executions and death sentences -- more than 300 since January, according to the Boroumand Foundation -- and there is renewed pressure on the media.

In that atmosphere, it was deeply naive to imagine that the Iranian president would enter into a "vigorous debate" with students who were deploying their "powers of dialogue and reason," as Columbia University President Lee Bollinger stated before the event, or that he would answer the appropriately aggressive questions Bollinger put to him -- which of course he didn't. (To a question about persecution of gays, Ahmadinejad responded: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country.") All things being equal, Columbia would have done better to ignore him, instead of feeding the media circus that serves his purposes. It's not as if he is deprived of a platform in this country: Only last week, he ducked and dodged his way through a long interview on "60 Minutes," and his pronouncements regularly appear in media of all kinds.

Nevertheless, it would have been wrong, once he'd been invited, to ban Ahmadinejad from speaking: To do so would have granted him far more significance than he deserves and played right into his I'm-the-real-democrat-here rhetoric. Instead, the university should have demanded genuine reciprocity. If the president and dean of Columbia truly believed in an open exchange of ideas, they should have presented a debate between Ahmadinejad and an Iranian dissident or human rights activist -- someone from his own culture who could argue with him in his own language -- instead of allowing him to be filmed on a podium with important-looking Americans. Perhaps Columbia could even have insisted on an appropriate exchange: Ahmadinejad speaks in New York; Columbia sends a leading Western atheist -- Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens or, better still, Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- to Qom, the Shiite holy city, to debate the mullahs on their own ground.

I realize that isn't likely. But neither is it likely that this past week's free-speech-vs.-nasty-dictator debate, complete with sputtering New York politicians and puffed-up university professors, achieved much either. On the contrary, it focused attention in the wrong place.

Instead of debating freedom of speech in Iran, here we are once again talking about freedom of speech in America, a subject we know a lot more about. Which is exactly what Ahmadinejad wanted.

[Wezil]

Good article.

[lord of the mark]

Dana Milbank'

Live From New York, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Unreality Show

By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, September 25, 2007; Page A02

"For hundreds of years, we've lived in friendship and brotherhood with the people of Iraq," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the National Press Club yesterday.

That's true -- as long as you don't count the little unpleasantness of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when a million people died, some by poison gas. And you'd also have to overlook 500 years of fighting during the Ottoman Empire.

But never mind that: Ahmadinejad was on a roll.

"Our people are the freest people in the world," said the man whose government executes dissidents, jails academics and stones people to death.

"The freest women in the world are women in Iran," he continued, neglecting to mention that Iranian law treats a woman as half of a man.

"In our country," judged the man who shuts down newspapers and imprisons journalists, "freedom is flowing at its highest level."

And if you believe that, he has a peaceful civilian nuclear program he wants to sell you.

Much of officialdom spent yesterday condemning Columbia University for hosting the Iranian leader while he visits the United Nations this week. There were similar protests outside the National Press Building in Washington, where reporters gathered to question Ahmadinejad in a videoconference. "Don't give him any press!" shouted one woman.

But that objection misses a crucial point: Without listening to Ahmadinejad, how can the world appreciate how truly nutty he is?

"In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country," he informed the Columbia audience.

It takes time to come up with profound thoughts such as that, so Ahmadinejad was understandably in a hurry yesterday. His appearance at the press club was delayed 10 minutes when he didn't show up on time at the television studio in New York. Then his delegation informed the press club, mid-rant, that he would have to leave 15 minutes early so that he would have time to pray before his Columbia appearance. The prayer evidently missed the mark, for he was greeted at Columbia with a lengthy condemnation by President Lee Bollinger. He called Ahmadinejad a "petty and cruel dictator" and ended with the thought that "today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for."

The reception was rather friendlier at the press club, where the sole questioner was moderator Jerry Zremski of the Buffalo News. He introduced Ahmadinejad as "one of the most newsworthy heads of state in the world" and chose written questions submitted by the audience such as "Do you plan on running for reelection in two years?"

Ahmadinejad, wearing open collar and glasses, lost his audience at the press club almost immediately. After only one sentence of his speech, the translator stopped translating. "The president is reciting verses from the holy Koran in Arabic," she explained. Completing his verses, he launched into 20 minutes of cheap sentiment.

"I believe we all believe strongly that it is possible to create a better world for humanity, and to realize this sublime and beautiful goal, we need to take a look and revise how we view the world around us," he said, going on to mention the "sublime value of humanity" and a "walk on the sublime path."


The faces on the dais -- Greta Van Susteren, Eleanor Clift and Clarence Page among them -- met the president's statement with expressions of confusion that gradually turned into boredom as Ahmadinejad eschewed talk of uranium enrichment in favor of Hallmark. "Family is the center of love and beauty," he advised.

The man who recently hosted a convention for Holocaust deniers also treated listeners to his thoughts on the truth. "Lies have nothing to do with the divine spirit of mankind," he asserted.

Then the lies began.

Zremski inquired about the Amnesty International report finding flogging and imprisonment of journalists and at least 11 Iranian newspapers closed. "I think people who prepared the report are unaware of the situation in Iran," the president answered. "I think the people who give this information should seek what is the truth and, sort of, disseminate what's correct."

Zremski then raised the specific cases of two Kurdish journalists who have been sentenced to death for enmity toward God.

"This news is fundamentally wrong," Ahmadinejad replied. "What journalist has been sentenced to death?"

Zremski supplied the names of Kurdish journalists Adnan Hassanpour and Hiva Boutimar, sentenced July 16. "I don't know people by that name," the president retorted. "You have to, sort of, rectify the information channel."

A pattern had emerged. Zremski asked about the beating and torture of women's rights leaders. "Can you again tell me where you get this report from?" Ahmadinejad asked innocently.

Zremski asked about Ahmadinejad's assertion, at a news conference last month, that Iran is "prepared to fill the gap" of power in Iraq as U.S. influence declines. "Well, again, this, too, is one of those distortions by the press," he answered.

And those Iranian weapons showing up in Iraq? "No, this doesn't exist," he said.

Who knows? In the wild and wacky mind of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that just might be true.

[GePap]

Jesus, this is moronic.

When Khatami was president, everyone was on and on about how weak the presidency is. Now this bufoon is president, and you have people calling an "autocrat" as if he were the head of state. It would be laughable if it didn't display vast amounts of ignorance. The same ignorance that led us to the mistakes in Iraq, an utter inability to even attempt to come to an understanding of what we are dealing with. Instead, you guys gladly take this buffoon and trump him up, not because he is actually particulalrly powerful, but because he fills the shoes you guys need him to fill, the bigger than life bad guy. Comparing him to Hitler or Stalin is as stupid as comparing Bush to either of those men.

As for Applebaum's column, I guess she misses the irony of her calling out Columbia for giving his a forum, then doing an entire column on it, just feeding the media ****fest.