Just as the despot of ancient Persia, the Grand Vizier Haman was hanged on the very gallows he intended to use to execute the Jews of his realm, so was the leader of modern Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hanged by his own ignorant and hateful words in his highly controversial appearance at Columbia University at the invitation of that university’s Middle East Studies Faculty as a “distinguished speaker.” The formal invitation by a great university to the pathetic but dangerous despot of Tehran might have been rejected as a basis for a Saturday Night Live satire just a few years ago, but in today’s “anything goes” climate, the invitation is no more surprising than the fact that the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat was a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

The very idea that a so-called “national leader” who has openly and repeatedly said that the State of Israel must be “wiped off the map,” and who hosted a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers, and who continues to deny the international community’s demand that he halt his uranium enrichment project that could lead to the development of nuclear weapons, could be invited to deliver a major address at a prestigious American university stretches the legitimate tradition of “academic freedom” beyond the breaking point. On many U.S. and Canadian college and university campuses, mobs of anti-Israel students have prevented Israeli officials and scholars from speaking at legitimate academic forums. Despite this unfair treatment of Israeli speakers, a modern university in the top tier of American higher education found it acceptable to invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to come to its campus as a lecturer. Would Columbia University have hosted Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist dictator and mentor to Adolf Hitler to come to its campus as a speaker in the late 1930s? These are questions which Columbia University officials should have asked themselves before the invitation was extended to the Iranian “leader”.

Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, who in August was the organizer of an American Jewish Committee advertisement in The New York Times denouncing the British Academic Union’s boycott of Israel, was unusually blunt in his introduction of Ahmadinejad, telling him, “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.” Bollinger added that the Iranian’s denial of the Holocaust might fool the illiterate and ignorant. “When you come to a place like this it makes you simply ridiculous. The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. Will you cease this outrage?”

By his strong words, Bollinger clearly registered his personal loathing and contempt for the hateful views espoused by Ahmadinejad. It is interesting that many Columbia faculty members, who did not speak up to protest the Iranian despot’s calls for Israel’s destruction or his Holocaust denial, criticized Bollinger for his “rude” treatment of their “honored guest.”

In his own idiotic presenation, Ahmadinejad drew jeers and derisive laughter when he said he “simply wanted more research” about the Holocaust, adding the old canard that the Shoah is “abused as a justification for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians.” The Iranian asked, “Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?” He used the same tactic in responding to direct questions from the audience that his terrorist mentor Yasser Arafat used, turning the questions aside with his own questions, or simply telling such a huge lie that the audience exploded in laughter. Asked about reports that gays were abused and imprisoned in Iran, he said, “We don’t have gays in Iran like you do in the United States.”

The Iranian president’s official remarks before the General Assembly of the United Nations were no better than those he offered at Columbia University. He said last Tuesday that he considered the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program “closed” and that Iran would disregard the resolutions of the Security Council, which he said was dominated by “arrogant powers.” Of course the real power in Iran resides with the Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the Supreme Islamic Leader who succeeded the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when the latter died in 1989.

Just as Haman’s evil plot in ancient Persia resulted in his own downfall at the time of the original Purim events in 496 BCE, it is to be hoped that the insane, idiotic and dangerous views and policies of Iran’s current president will result in his being hanged by his own cruel and irrational words.