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DOES Mahmoud Ahmadinejad support a football team? It’s just that if he wants to appear likeable, he should get one. (Pic: Poldraw)

He could have joined Gordon Brown and said something about Jose Mourinho’s departure for Chelsea. They could have held hands, by “mutual consent”.

But Ahmadinejad failed. “The Evil has landed,” says The Daily News as Ahmadinejad arrives in New York. “Madman Iran Perez,” says the New York Post.

“People in Iran are very joyous, happy people, they’ve very free in expressing what they think,” Ahmadinejad tells the Guardian. Ahmadinejad says Iranian women are “the freest in the world”. The Guardian hears “laughter”. Perhaps there are female Iranian journalists in the press pack.

Land Of The Free

But should Ahmadinejad be anywhere but in the UN compound? “It’s a free country,” says Dana Perino, White House spokesman, of Ahmadinejad’s appearance at Columbia University. “We wish the same were true in Iran.”

But not that free. Ahmadinejad has been to the US twice before as Iran’s President. Only this time he wants to make friends. He wants to visit Ground Zero. But he isn’t allowed to.

The US is worried about what Ahmadinejad might do at the site of the twin towers? But what can he do but try to look caring and appeal to the US and the sure-to-be watching world that invading Iran would mean starting a fight with a little man who just wants to be loved. The man of peace.

Home Of The Brave

Wasn’t America once about optimism? Isn’t the hope that Ahmadinejad sees where the twin towers once stood, takes in the vibrant New York City and changes his ways? Or is fear the thing in America?

Here’s Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney showing that he can be toughest on Ahmadinejad by launching a radio ad in early primary states that repeats a call he made last week for the world body to indict the Iranian leader under the Genocide Convention.

Here’s the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, introducing the President of Iran as a “petty, cruel dictator”. Says he: “When you come to a place like this, this makes you quite simply ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

Here’s Andrew Martin, senior at Columbia. He wasn’t to hear Ahmadinejad. He, too, wants to hear the Iranian president for himself: “I’d like to ask him about homosexuality in Iran; whether he believes what he believes about it and whether he believes it should be debated freely in his country.”

He asks his question. Says Ahmadinejad: “In Iran we don’t have homosexuality like in your country.”

And there is more laughter…

Posted: 25th, September 2007 | In: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Politicians. Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0