Reports early on Thursday evening relayed that the fanatic who is the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had decided against visiting Ground Zero. Perhaps he lost faith in his ability to mesmerize what promised to be an energized crowd of New Yorkers unwilling to forgive and forget the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983, the bombing of the Jewish center in Argentina in 1994, the supply to Hezbollah of the rockets and missiles used in last summer's indiscriminate attacks on civilians, or the killing and wounding of American soldiers and Marines in Iraq through the use of Iranian manufactured explosives and Iranian trained and directed terrorists.
New Yorkers may be liberals, but on terrorism and state sponsors of terror, on the threat Iran poses to the world and especially Israel, and on Ahmadinejad 's Holocaust denials and his genocide incitement, they are not MoveOn.org lefties --and they were not about to allow this fanatic to desecrate the site of the 9/11 attacks.
Two leading Republican candidates for president, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, immediately blasted Ahmadinejad 's plan when it was announced: If Senator Clinton (D.-MoveOn.org) had a reaction, I could not find it on her website. (Thursday was a busy day for the senator given the effort she had to put it defending MoveOn.org's assault on the reputation and integrity f General Petraeus.)
Ahmadinejad has not run out of New York venues, though, because of the welcome extended him by Columbia University.
Columbia University was once led by Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is easy to guess what Ike would have though of the fanatic who will grace the campus Monday unless the Trustees of that university come to their collective senses and instruct the president, Lee Bollinger, to rescind this outrageous invitation. Ike had experience with Holocaust deniers:
When General Eisenhower learned about [Buchenwald], he immediately arranged to meet Generals Bradley and Patton at Ohrdruf on the morning of April 12th. By that time, Buchenwald itself had been captured. Consequently, I