Here’s one for the ages:
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the bloody handed Iranian provocateur and abettor of terror in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, sought permission to visit Ground Zero to “pay his respects” when he speaks at the United Nations next week.
Permission was denied, on the grounds that Ground Zero is under construction – the same reason Mayor Bloomberg gave in seeking to bar 9/11 families from the site during anniversary ceremonies last week.
Why Bloomberg felt obliged to couch the refusal in limp diplomatic terms is a mystery – unless that actually was the reason. (Anyone wondering how his predecessor would have handled the request need only recall the night in 1995 when Rudy Giuliani had Yasser Arafat tossed on his keister out of Lincoln Center.)
But let’s be clear on one point: If Ahmadinejad or any of his gussied-up goons from the Iranian U.N. mission make one move toward Ground Zero next week, Bloomberg needs to see to it that not a penny of city resources – or the efforts of a single police officer – are expended to help them get there.
And if the feds think he needs security for such a trip, let them send a squad of paratroopers – at federal expense.
But why the request in the first place?
Did Ahmadinejad want to pay “respects” to the 3,000 innocent victims of his fellow murderers?
Or to the skyjacking murderers themselves?
Certainly not the former.
Clearly, his request was meant to make a mockery of America’s continuing 9/11 agony.
It’s bad enough that the United Nations is here in New York in the first place. Once upon a time, it may have had some value – but that was before it was hijacked by the boodlers, bandits and bums that run it today.
But it’s even worse that Ahmadinejad and his ilk get to visit every fall.
If there were any justice at all, he’d be arrested and flung behind bars the minute he steps foot on U.S. soil.
The grounds? How ’bout:
* Sending agents and weapons to kill Americans in Iraq – a policy that continues to this day.
* Fomenting full-scale war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel last year.
* Flouting international rules and pursuing nuclear weapons – so as to ensure regional dominance and, if necessary, blow Iran’s enemies to smithereens.
* Threatening to wipe a peace-seeking democracy, Israel, off the face of the earth – and denying the Holocaust.
Not to mention presiding over a country that for nearly three full decades has sponsored terrorism – from the 444-day kidnapping of Americans at the U.S. embassy in Tehran to Iranian-linked attacks against Westerners in Argentina, Saudi Arabia and throughout the world.
Ahmadinejad’s U.N. speech last year was a provocative rant, blaming the United States for all the world’s ills and claiming Israel should not exist (while his soul brother, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, called President Bush the “devil”).
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shouldn’t be received with respect anywhere in New York City. The notion of him standing at Ground Zero simply is repulsive.