MattKennard.com

My first month at Columbia University Journalism School in New York had been rolling along at pedestrian pace: A cat up a tree in Queens, a serial candy thief in Brooklyn, a flock of chickens on the loose in
downtown Manhattan. Somehow my heart was still working.

Then the President of Iran decided to show up on campus on Monday and it all got a bit more interesting. The hottest story in the world was suddenly on our doorstep and the world’s media and an eclectic spray
of crackpot activists descended on campus.

President Ahmadinejad was on a visit to talk at the United Nations, but the President of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, had successfully invited him to speak at the World Leaders Forum, which sparked an unbelievable amount of vituperation in the New York media. “The Evil has Landed,’ screamed the front-page of the Daily News. ‘A Monster with Chutzpah,’ ran the New York Post.

As I arrived outside the university in the morning there was a group of activists complete with signs showing Ahmadinejad’s body contorted into the shape of a swastika.

One man had a baseball cap with the words, ‘Nuke ‘Em’ written across the top. ‘You’re a journalist,’ he said. ‘An honourable profession for someone who wants to destroy everything good in the world. Who do you
write for?’ A magazine in England called the New Statesman “What’s it position?” Ah, pretty neutral. ‘Ah that means left-wing! Is it mostly represented by homosexuals and communists?’

Impatient to hear his thoughts on the event I asked about the hat. ‘We should nuke ‘em; in fact, we should get Mecca and Medina first.’ He pointed to his Indonesian wife, who was about thirty years younger than
him. ‘Where she comes from the Muslims are killing and raping nuns, it’s not a pretty picture.’

After hearing I was English, he gave his name as Enoch Powell and his age as 63, saying proudly that he is a ’small investment capitalist’.

We were cut off by a loud racket behind. A Muslim man was holding up a sign saying, “May Allah make a mushroom cloud over Israel.” ‘Terrorist! Muslim terrorist!’ shouted the baying crowd. Then the police
led him away before not before Mr. Powell dived for him, pushing him against a car before police broke it up.

I caught up with Yousef Al-Kattab as he was led away by police. He was 39. ‘I bought this sign because I want peace,’ he said with a straight face. ‘I don’t even like Ahmadinejad, I’m a Sunni Muslim, I don’t
support Iran. But I pray for an attack on Israel’.

The general public was not allowed past the front gates and inside there were rival demonstrations going on between students.

Judd Lindenfield was a 19-year-old economics student at Columbia. “This is a private institution, I don’t have to pay to hear him speak his words of hate and violence,” he said.

Rahmin Mehdizadeh was a 30-year-old post graduate architecture student from Iran. “I’m against his point of view,” he said. “But I think most of the time the media changes reality and distorts what he actually
says, of course he should be allowed to speak here.”

When it got underway most students were perplexed by the forthright introduction by university president, Lee Bollinger. In his email to all the students the day before he had tried to cool the frenetic atmosphere: “I ask that each of us make special efforts to respect the different views people have about the event and to recognize the different ways it affects members of our community,” he wrote.

At the speech he railed against Ahmadinejad, calling him an ‘petty and cruel dictator’ and saying he lacked the ‘intellectual courage to answer questions’, which begged the question, Why ask him, then?

The loudest laugh came when the President said, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country … I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.”

After the circus was over, the highly-charged masses dispersed with relative calm, and the 160 journalism students began what they were hoping would the biggest story of their lives.

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