The Hindu Business Line : What's he doing here, ask Americans

Most Americans couldn’t even swallow the fact that the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has been allowed to come to New York to address a session of the United Nations General Assembly.

His request to visit Ground Zero to lay a wreath was firmly turned down on security grounds, and there is a bitter debate raging on why the Columbia University should have bothered, or rather, dared, to extend an invitation to the “obnoxious man, whose government is raging a proxy war against the US in Iraq by supplying arms that are being used to kill our sons”.

This is the argument being heard on all TV channels and newspapers where the ‘experts’ being interviewed are pouring a series of abuses on the Iranian President.

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker, who was interviewed by a TV channel did not mince his words in criticising the man “who had American blood on his hands”.

Others called him a monster, belligerent, provocative, bellicose and ‘pure evil’. Columbia President Lee Bollinger, under a lot of flak for extending an invitation to Ahmedinejad, was quite hostile as he introduced his guest to a packed hall on Monday, and criticised his policy towards Israel and his denial that the Holocaust had happened.

“When you come to a place like this it makes you quite simply ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated,” he said.

But the man under fire remained unfazed through most of this speech but did mention later in his address how he had been subjected “to a wave of insults”.

The Iranian leader was both booed and applauded, as two groups of students clashed over his visit. Predictably, in his address, Ahmedinijad provoked the audience by saying that if the “root causes” of 9/11 were examined – “why it happened, what caused it, what were the conditions that led to it, who truly was involved” –, it would help “fix the problems in Afghanistan and Iraq”.

Obviously, all this was too much to take for a country deeply anguished and bitterly resentful of 9/11.

When asked at Columbia University about the repression of homosexuals in his country, the visitor denied that there were any gays in Iran and added that America has homosexuals, not Iran! This was galling enough for American TV channels to run footage of two blindfolded teenage gay boys about to be hanged in Iran. Repression of women’s rights in Iran was another issue over which he was grilled.

On Tuesday the Iranian President made a defiant speech at the UN General Assembly where he declared “closed” the debate over Iran’s nuclear power, described the UN sanctions against his country illegal and termed the permanent members of the Security Council “arrogant” and “bullying”.

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