-- New York -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took the stage at Columbia University to a blistering welcome from the president of the school, who said the hard-line leader behaved like “a petty and cruel dictator.”Ahmadinejad sputtered out a retort, but I guess none of his conversations with the "Hidden Imam" had really prepared him for this very public beatdown.
Mr. Ahmadinejad smiled as Columbia President Lee Bollinger took him to task over Iran's human-rights record and foreign policy, and Mr. Ahmadinejad's statements denying the Holocaust and calling for the disappearance of Israel.
“You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated,” Bollinger said in reference to Ahmadinejad’s views on the Holocaust. “Will you cease this outrage?”
“People in Iran are very joyous, happy people,” he said when questioned about the arrests of students, journalists and women. “They're very free in expressing what they think.”You've gotta love the sheer impenetrability and arrogance of this guy... he just doesn't know when to get off the bus.
He said women in Iran were "the freest women in the world... They're active in every level of society."
The Iranian leader has previously called the Holocaust “a myth” and called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”
Asked about executions of homosexuals in Iran, Mr Ahmadinejad replied: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country."Sounds like someone's being awfully defensive, Mahmoud...
Reacting to laughter and jeers from the audience he added: "In Iran we don't have this phenomenon, I don't know who you told this."
C'mon sweetie... you got anything else you'd like to share?
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