From AFP, 26/9/07 ....
UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wraps up his third visit to the United States Wednesday after using his platform at the United Nations to downplay Tehran's nuclear ambitions and attack Washington.
...Despite being derided as a "petty and cruel dictator" while appearing at Columbia University, the Iranian leader used his visit to try to calm the international community over the Islamic republic's nuclear ambitions....
....Ahmadinejad used his address to world leaders gathered for the UN General Assembly Tuesday to say Iran considered the controversy over its nuclear program closed and to launch a broad attack on arch foe the United States.
....Iran has come under two waves of international sanctions for its nuclear program, which Ahmadinejad insists is only for energy production......Nevertheless, the international community has taken scant consolation from his comments and is expected to push for a third round of UN sanctions.
The visit comes at a low point in relations between the United States and Iran, which broke off diplomatic ties at the time of the 1979 Islamic revolution and have been at loggerheads recently over a raft of issues.
...Iran [is] a state sponsor of terror...arming insurgents battling US troops in Iraq and ...equipping Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah....a terrorist organization....
...he suffered the rare indignity of a public dressing down at the university. Booed and strongly challenged on his views on the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad ..... was forced to sit through 10 minutes of broadsides from university president Lee Bollinger....
..."Mr President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," Bollinger told Ahmadinejad, accusing him of brutal crackdowns notably on the country's academics and homosexuals and for stifling dissent.
"Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change?" he asked, challenging the leader of the Islamic republic to explain his comments downplaying the Holocaust.
"When you come to a place like this, this makes you quite simply ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," he said.
Ahmadinejad ....avoid[ed] any direct answers to Bollinger's challenges.
.... as he talked of Iran's culture and outlook on the world, Ahmadinejad drew the biggest jeers from students for stating that homosexuality did not exist in the Islamic republic. "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country," he said to a chorus of howls, laughter and boos. "In Iran we don't have this phenomenon, I don't know who told you this."
Ahmadinejad was due to fly to Bolivia on Wednesday and to later visit fellow ... pariah, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
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