Pass the bread, Mahmoud.
Columbia University students may get the unique chance this month to dine with madman Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he visits New York, according to the school’s student newspaper.
In an email sent to members of the Columbia International Relations Council and Association, students are invited to a private dinner Sept. 21 in Midtown with the man whom University President Lee Bollinger introduced as “a petty and cruel dictator” when he spoke on campus in 2007.
Members of the group were notified earlier this summer that they would have a chance to bring 15 students to the dinner, The Columbia Spectator reported Saturday.
The location of the dinner has not been determined.
The Iranian president will be in New York for the United Nations’ 66th annual General Assembly, which runs from tomorrow through Sept. 27.
The Columbia International Relations Council and Association is one of Columbia’s largest undergraduate organizations and claims on its website to be “the largest devoted to international relations.”
Four years ago, the Iranian leader caused a firestorm of controversy when he gave a speech at Columbia.
At the forum, Bollinger blasted Ahmadinejad as “a petty and cruel dictator” — before the demented despot railed about 9/11 conspiracies, openly challenged the Holocaust, and bizarrely stated, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals.”
A grim-faced Ahmadinejad sweated out intense grilling from Bollinger and hordes of others in the audience who demanded answers from him on his dangerous rants.
“You exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” Bollinger said to cheers from the 800-plus people packed into the auditorium. “I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for.”
The pint-sized Persian president responded by whining that he was “insulted” during his hourlong appearance at the Ivy League institution, which has weathered a firestorm of protest over giving the Axis of Evil leader a platform to propagandize.
After Bollinger’s fusillade, all Ahmadinejad could do was invoke a passage from the Koran and steal a line from Rodney Dangerfield.
In an answer that many in the auditorium cheered, Ahmadinejad claimed Bollinger showed no “respect” and called his remarks an “insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here.”
He kicked off his speech with rambling and confusing remarks that attempted to weave together biblical Adam’s conversation with an angel, modern man’s pursuit of science, the development of nuclear weapons, the Holocaust and the Palestinian refugee problem.
The Iranian leader also denied that he wants nuclear weapons.
“Let me tell a joke here,” he said. “The politicians who are after atomic bombs – politically, they are retarded.”
With AP