In Defence of Bollinger ( not the champagne)

Ahmadinejad Walks Away with a Win :
http://iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news.pl?l=en&y=2007&m=09&d=29&a=2

BOLLINGER clearly had an American audience in mind when he denounced the Iranian leader to his face as a "cruel" and "petty dictator" and described his Holocaust denial as designed to "fool the illiterate and the ignorant." Bollinger's remarks may have taken him off the hook with his domestic critics, but when it came to the international media audience that really counted, Ahmadinejad already had carried the day. The invitation to speak at Columbia already had given him something totalitarian demagogues -- who are as image-conscious as Hollywood stars -- always crave: legitimacy. Bollinger's denunciation was icing on the cake, because the constituency the Iranian leader cares about is scattered across an Islamic world that values hospitality and its courtesies as core social virtues. To that audience, Bollinger looked stunningly ill-mannered; Ahmadinejad dignified and restrained. Back in Tehran, Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leading Iranian reformer and Ahmadinejad opponent, said Bollinger's blistering remarks "only strengthened" the president back home and "made his radical supporters more determined," According to an Associated Press report, "Many Iranians found the comments insulting, particularly because in Iranian traditions of hospitality, a host should be polite to a guest, no matter what he thinks of him. To many, Ahmadinejad looked like the victim, and hard-liners praised the president's calm demeanor during the event, saying Bollinger was spouting a 'Zionist' line." All of this was bad enough, but the almost willful refusal of commentators in the American media to provide their audiences with insight into just how sinister Ahmadinejad really is compounded the problem. There are a couple of reasons for the media's general refusal to engage with radical Islamic revivalists, like Ahmadinejad. He belongs to a particularly aggressive school of radical Shiite Islam, the Haghani, which lives in expectation of the imminent coming of the Madhi, a kind of Islamic messiah, who will bring peace and justice -- along with universal Islamic rule -- to the entire world. Serious members of this school -- and Ahmadinejad, who was(a kind of) brilliant university student, is a very serious member -- believe they must act to speed the Mahdi's coming. "The wave of the Islamic revolution" would soon "reach the entire world," he has promised. As a fundamentally secular institution, the American press always has had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that Islamists like the Iranian president mean what they say and that they really do believe what they say they believe.
There Is No Spoon Long Enough: Dining With Mahmoud
"This is a devil, and no monster; I will leave him; I have no long spoon.'" --Shakespear, The Tempest
My Dinner with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
The invitation for Tuesday dinner with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came from the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. The scene was the darkly brocaded Barclay Room of New York's Intercontinental Hotel. A small group of journalists, including Christiane Amanpour and Brian Williams, along with Iran experts from academia and think tanks, sat around a square table lit by chandeliers, and set with plates of oriental salads and vases of roses. No alcohol was served.

وضعیت هولناک همجنسگرایان در ایران

مصاحبه 5 دقیقه ای احمدی نژاد با سی ان ان

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