Somebody tried to tell the emperor (well, the president to be more accurate) that he was wearing no clothes. He just smiled, said that he was, and that the thousands of people watching him just could not see properly.
Personally, I think that it was right to give Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a platform to speak and answer questions at Columbia University. There seem to be three compelling reasons to do so.
First, how can we protest at the lack of freedom of speech in other countries if we deny that right to visitors. We may abhor what he says (or what we think he might say), but surely, to deny him the right to speak would be to shoot ourselves in the foot and seriously remove any moral authority to ask him to bring change to his own country.
Secondly, the prospect of him facing open questioning, has to be positive. Even if there is little chance that he would change his views (especially on such a public stage), at least he is being brought face-to-face with a strong, different world view. As well as being a novel experience, it would leave him in no doubt about the force of the opposition. It would bring it home experiencially, as well as intellectually.
Thirdly, the forum provided a golden opportunity for him to shoot himself in the foot - although he would never see that. They do say that all the best reality television happens when producers give people enough rope to hang themselves. And that is precisely what happened yesterday. People laughed in amazement when he claimed that the civil liberties of women were not quashed in his country, and they gasped in disbelief when he claimed that homosexuals were not executed in his country and that Iran did not have homosexuals. If you were ever tempted to trust his claims that he was not building nuclear weapons and that he was not supporting armed insurgents in Iraq, you may wish to think again. Remember that this is the same man who claims he loves peace while wanting to destroy the nation of Israel, and the same man who argues that the Holocaust didn’t happen, despite it being one of the most researched and authenticated topics in history. He clearly has difficulty in seeing the reality that the majority of the rest of us see. And naked, middle-aged men can look so silly.
[...] are extreme, irrational, and repulsive, let them speak and demonstrate that to others. (See also: The Naked Leader.) If people are genuinely undecided about these two men, they are more likely to be repulsed by [...]