TALK TO THE HAND Bollinger, Ahmadinejad (Photo: Getty Images)
Most remarkable about Mahmoud Ahmadinjad's address at Columbia today was not anything he said—he somehow restrained from calling for a fiery death to Israel—but rather the pissing match between the Iranian president and Columbia's president, Lee C. Bollinger.

Bollinger, a leading first amendment scholar known around campus as a silver-haired fox, has been working overtime to defend the speaking invitation he extended to the Iranian leader. After watching his introduction today, it can be surmised that he just wanted the opportunity to tear Mahmoud a new one on the national stage.

"Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," Bollinger said to the near-midget (to be fair, he's a lot taller when he's standing on a pile of the oppressed). To deny the Holocaust, Bollinger said, "You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated." Bollinger is no doubt still waiting for an answer to his rhetorical, "Will you cease this outrage?"

Ahmadinejad, in a crisp white shirt and suit jacket—he doesn't wear that bastion of Western culture, the tie—looked shocked himself.

He began by objecting to Bollinger's characterization, which included the adjectives, "ridiculous," "brutal," "absurd," "fanatical," and "evil."

In Iran, "we don't think it's necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of claims and to attempt to provide vaccination of some sort to our students and faculty," Ahmadinejad said. "Nonetheless, I should not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment."

After a rambling address on religion and science, with a few allusions to "bullying" and "war-mongering" world powers (oh, we know he is not talkin' 'bout us!), his excellency settled in to field student-submitted questions for which he'd clearly practiced an array of non-answers.

It's still unclear whether he ever inhaled, but the Iranian president did issue the following truths: "We are friends with the Jewish people," and "we are against nuclear weapons, period." So that's clear now.

Pressed on a question about public executions of homosexuals, Ahmadinejad said to laughter, "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who told you that we have it."

Not surprisingly, the room fell so silent, you could hear a feather boa drop.