Dear Mr. President !!!!
Parts of a comprehensive NY Times report on Ahmadinejad’s session in Columbia University:
- Mr. Bollinger [Columbia University President] asked Mr. Ahmadinejad: “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator , adding, “You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated, 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?”
- He added that he believed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s failure to provide answers would only undermine the hard-line regime’s power in Iran.
- He added that he regretted if people were hurt by the speech, and he called for the “intellectual and emotional courage” to “confront the mind of evil.”
- Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke about the importance of scholarship, but did not address Mr. Bollinger’s criticism of the Iranian regime’s crackdown on academics in Iran.
- Mr. Bollinger concluded: “Frankly, and in all candor Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions, but your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mind-set that characterizes what you say and do.”
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