New York Times – Sep 23, 2008( excerpts) – Once a year, the Israel-threatening, Holocaust-denying, nuke-building and child-hanging president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, comes to New York for the opening ceremonies of the United Nations General Assembly.
Many New Yorkers don’t like having him around. But they have no choice. Foreign leaders must be allowed to attend these sessions, no matter how Israel-threatening, Holocaust-denying, nuke-building and child-hanging they may be.

It is the price that the city has to pay as host to the United Nations – a role that is the sole reason New York may indulge in the vanity of calling itself the “capital of the world.”
So once a year, Mr. Ahmadinejad comes to New York, as he did again on Monday. And once a year, some normally sensible New Yorkers lose their bearings because of him.
Columbia University is a serial bearing-loser.

For reasons not universally understood, some Columbia officials have a notion that academic freedom requires them to invite this man to their Morningside Heights campus. They asked him over in 2006, only to back out in embarrassment after security types told them that the Iranian was too great a risk.

Somehow, the threat to the common weal dissolved by September 2007. Mr. Ahmadinejad was back in town, and Columbia just had to have him up for a schmooze. The city’s tabloids and some politicians who get hives if they venture too far from television cameras vented more furiously than an overheated nuclear reactor.

Up to Columbia the Iranian went. By way of a greeting, the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, called him “astonishingly uneducated” and denounced him as a “petty and cruel dictator.” There’s hospitality for you: Bring in someone whom you need not have invited in the first place, and then insult him before he can say hello.

Several thousand people gathered across the street from the United Nations campus on Monday for an anti-Ahmadinejad rally.

Speakers denounced the Iranian for statements describing the Holocaust as a myth. They deplored his threats to end Israel’s existence. They demanded that Iran’s nuclear ambitions be blocked. They attacked Iran for domestic human rights violations, which include sending teenagers to the gallows.

Indeed, separate from the rally
So it always seems to go when Mr. Ahmadinejad is in town. Chances are good that he will be here again next year. Maybe by then yet another group of New Yorkers will have figured out how to get it wrong.