The Great Munchkin has spoken.

As far as I can tell the world is still rotating on its axis. The sun is still in the sky. There are still 6 million dead Jews as a result of Hitler’s Holocaust although the refugee from the Lollipop Guild tried to wipe that little historical detail from memory and the record by pleading for “more research” – as if digging deeper into the historical record (help yourself, no one is stopping you) will erase the meticulously kept records at Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Dachau, and other death camps that carefully listed the numbers of Jews who were shoved into “showers,” gassed, and then cremated in gigantic ovens.

And Columbia is still a school that features the most nauseating double standards in Christendom when it comes to free speech, denying many speakers the opportunity to address students whose ideological bent is deemed too…what? They can’t use the excuse that conservative speakers are spouting “hate” anymore. They just hosted the world’s most celebrated anti-Semite.

Despite President Bollinger’s spot on indictment of the little shit’s nation and rulers, I found it depressing when American citizens actually cheered what this man had to say – cheered when he answered Bollinger with an harangue about academic freedom when the ruling clique of Iran dismisses and jails teachers for looking sideways at the government.

Maybe those idiot leftists missed this report from Human Rights Watch:

The same pattern of persecuting academics in order to curb their intellectual activity recurred around the world. In Iran, a number of prominent academics were arrested in March and April as part of a broader campaign of stifling dissent apparently aimed at countering the widespread support for reform of Iran’s political system. In the weeks immediately preceding Iran’s presidential elections, authorities arrested at least ten scholars among a group of forty-two figures associated with the liberal Iran Freedom Movement, a banned but previously tolerated political party. Among the scholars arrested were Gholam-Abbas Tavassoli, a sociologist at Tehran University and formerly chancellor of Isfahan University, Hadi Hadizadeh, a prominent physicist, Ghaffar Farzadi, Mohammad Mehdi-Jafari, Habibollah Peyman, Reza Raisdoosti, and Mohammad Maleki. Tavassoli was released two days after his arrest, but several other academics remained in jail.

In response, more than one hundred faculty members from Iran’s universities signed an appeal to the government requesting the release of their colleagues. Widespread student protests in support of the detained academics also occurred at universities in Tehran and other cities, and were met by heavy handed police reaction.

These attacks on academic freedom formed the backdrop to a critical rise in the “brain drain” phenomenon among Iran’s academics and university graduates. According to a report issued by the Iranian government in May 2001, tens of thousands of academics and professionals left Iran for Western countries in the preceding twelve months. Commenting on this report, chancellors from several Iranian universities blamed the mass exodus of educated Iranians on the “continual psychological insecurity on the campuses.”

There are other, more recent reports of repression in the Iranian academy. Ahmadinejad himself has led this effort to purge universities of what passes for liberal professors and academics, just as he has purged most of the ministries of educated technocrats and replaced them with incompetent true believers.

For the idiots at Columbia who cheered anything this man had to say in the context of academic freedom shows a depressing ignorance of the true state of affairs in Iran not to mention a derangement that should have sent them for a night of observation at Bellvue.

But why shouldn’t they be captivated by the visitor from Oz? His surface histrionics merged easily with their own warped view of history and current events. Ahmadinejad may not be a classic determinist but his bottom-up teleological belief in the return of the Mahdi – something he mentioned once again, right off the bat during his introductory remarks and colored every utterance he made during his appearance – should chill the knickers off those kids like nothing Bush or America has ever done or said.

Beyond that, the Iranian president showed himself to be something of a coward, failing to address many questions directly and substituting platitudes and religious double talk instead. He even got off the best laugh line (unintentional) of the afternoon when he denied there were any homosexuals in Iran. What wasn’t very funny is that he actually believes it. Such obliviousness to reality from a man whose nation is about to acquire the capability to enrich uranium beyond that which is necessary for the operation of power plants should give us pause.

All in all, a revealing appearance by Ahmadinejad, convicting himself out of his own mouth as I predicted here. What I didn’t anticipate was that there would be a few on the left who found what he had to say appealing.

Even I didn’t think anyone could be so dense.