Ahmadinejad: Homosexuality? "We don't have that Phenomenon in Iran."

So I watched the Ahmadinejad speech at Columbia. But before the speech, Columbia President Lee Bollinger suddenly felt compelled to offset his awful decision to invite Ahmadinejad to Columbia in the first place, by attacking him with a laundry list of ugly but accurate portrayals of the Iranian President. Unfortunately, it was too little too late. Bollinger's remarks came across as pandering to critics and making Ahmadinejad seem the victim of an ungracious and self-serving host.

The Iranian President took full advantage of the opportunity, coming across as a soft-spoken man of peace ambushed by a hostile host who had invited him in the first place. Yet, unfortunately for him, all the slick rhetoric and well calculated pandering to a naive and in some cases stupid Western audience, could not hide a number of embarrasing...ah...shell we say 'politically incorrect views.' He could not give an answer to the simple question: "do you seek the destruction of Israel?" Or "do you recognize that the Holocaust even occurred?" My personal favourite, and I suspect every ones favorite was in regard to his policies towards Homosexuals. His Answer? We don't have Homosexuals in Iran like you do here." Well, he certainly has fewer Homosexuals in Iran since he's been killing them, but the answer must have been an eye-opener for those "open-minded" starry-eyed students and their lefty professors who view the US armed forces a greater threat to world security than a nuclear armed Iran (Columbia does not allow the ROTC in its campus but murdering dictators are A-OK). What shocked me the most was the enthusiastic applause that Ahmadinejad received from the audience. Nobody rushed the stage or disrupted the event as occurred during the Minutemen visit to Columbia recently (read 'legal immigration advocates more dangerous than madman with nuclear weapons'). To me, this was also a graphic display of how liberalism tolerates the worst forms of evil; and I am reminded of Edmund Burke's saying: 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.' In this case, "good people" not only did nothing, but actively assisted the cause of evil.