Ill will for Ahmadinejad

NEW YORK — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday plunged into an openly hostile audience at Columbia University, defying Zionist groups, Iranian expatriates and anti-nuclear activists to defend his government’s nuclear program and its antipathy toward Israel.

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Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose invitation to speak to Columbia students proved even more controversial than his scheduled address to the U.N. General Assembly today, almost accepted that Israel has a right to exist, but insisted that Iranian homosexuals do not.

“In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have it,” he said in response to a student’s query about why so many Iranian homosexuals have been put to death.

In a question-and-answer period that drew applause, boos and even laughter, Mr. Ahmadinejad maintained that Iran did not need nuclear weapons, denounced the source of the Palestinian people’s “60-year-old wound” and defended his aborted ground zero visit as an opportunity to pay his respects to the victims of September 11 and their families.

Mr. Ahmadinejad seemed to acknowledge the Holocaust offhandedly.

“I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I said, ‘Granted this happened, what does it have to do with the Palestinian people?’ ” he said through an interpreter, in an apparent suggestion that the West justifies the suffering of the Palestinians with the plight of the millions of Jews that perished in the Holocaust.

“We love all nations,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “We love the Jewish people.”

But he also suggested that it is too early to make conclusions about the Holocaust.

“Can you argue that researching a phenomenon is finished forever, done? Can we close the books for good on a historical event? There are different perspectives that come to light after every research is done,” he said.

“Given that the Holocaust is a present reality of our time, a history that occurred, why is there not sufficient research that can approach the topic from different perspectives?” he asked.

In a pattern familiar from his visit to New York last year, Mr. Ahmadinejad repeatedly responded to questions from the audience with his own questions.

“I want to pose a question here to you,” he said when asked when his government will stop supporting terrorism. “If someone comes and explodes bombs around you, threatens your president, members of the administration, kills the members of the Senate or Congress, how would you treat them?”

He added: “Our nation has been harmed by terrorist activities. We were the first nation that objected to terrorism and the first to uphold the need to fight terrorism.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad, who also defended Iran’s nuclear program and not surprisingly insisted it was peaceful, was startled by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger’s introductory remarks, which were marked by the kind of harsh language one rarely hears in either diplomacy or academia.

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