Ahmadinejad speech

I caught a good chunk of the speech at Columbia.  I thought the President of the University probably overdid the attack at the start.  I can deal with an insulting speech, the President of Iran can deal with it, but I'm told by friends that he actually said Ahmadinejad was "illiterate" among other things.  That's silly.  The best way to be insulting is accurate.

Anyhow, I thought the questioning was rather effective.  It made good use of follow-ups and got to a lot of the key issues.

• I tend to think he was most effective when questioned on terrorism, he retorted by complaining that the U.S. was backing a terrorist group that killed many Iranian parliamentarians years ago. 
• He was least effective on the execution of homosexuals, I think.  He first tried to dodge the question by saying that they arrested and sometimes executed drug dealers and the like.  When pressed with a follow-up question he replied that they don't have homosexuals in Iran like we do in the West.  That got him laughed at.
• For the record, his holocaust responses dodged any question of facts and focused on the arrest of two holocaust deniers in Europe and that the Palestinian people had nothing to do with the holocaust.  Smarter than being an outright denier, but won't win him any friends given the outrageousness of his past statements.
• Given his emphasis on scholars (in good part sucking up to the audience) I have to think that the timing of the release of a range of U.S. scholars in Iran was not coincidental.  Questions on that matter could have been quite damaging.

I think Columbia was right to invite him.  They were appropriately aggressive, if not a bit over the top, in their treatment of a figure that had well earned some insults.  That said, I've got no objection to protests aimed at him personally rather than at Columbia University.

[Update: I've gotten a transcript of the speech turns out the version I heard second hand was wrong:

One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers.

For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda.

When you have come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous.

You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.

That's fair enough. Complaint retracted.]