Ah, madinejad.

I biked straight into a circus when I arrived at school yesterday. Columbia's main gate was thick with protesters denouncing the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There were journalists (and journalism students) blocking the sidewalk and police demanding school IDs before letting people onto campus. As I struggled to fish out my wallet, all sweaty from my ride from my home in Washington Heights, I was sure someone was going to panic that my duffel bag contained a bomb. Once inside the Big Top--I mean campus--there was a crowd gathered on the steps of the domed Lowe Library, listening to an orderly lineup of students on either side of the controversy taking turns to voice their opinions.

I just wanted to go to the gym. As the hoopla surrounding Ahmadinejad's speech built last week, I couldn't help but tune it out. I could see both sides of the argument, and I found the absolutism on either side hard to take. On the one hand, giving a platform to an antisemitic hatemonger who is likely pursuing nuclear weapons is questionable. On the other, dialog is the best antidote to war in the long run, and listening to a country with which we disagree so strongly means hearing a lot of things we don't like to hear. I walked over to the athletic center blocking out the signs that littered the walk. When I walked to the journalism school after my workout, there was a group of Jewish students singing and dancing in a circle beneath the campus' Greek-revival buildings.

The unreal nature of the day was intensified by watching the speech from the satellite press room set up in the J-School's lecture hall. Ahmadinejad's head floated disembodied against a black screen, his voice translated by a woman who made him sound like he was a whiny teenager. The event happened more-or-less as the reporters expected. As promised, Columbia President Lee Bollinger delivered scathing opening remarks, producing the quality soundbite, "Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator." Taking his cue, Ahmedinejad said outrageous things about the Holocaust and Palestine, and defended his pursuit of nuclear technology, though he began with a rambling soliloquy on the virtues of science and scholarship. (Imagine you have a senile uncle with a philosophical streak and you have an idea of what he sounded like.) The reporters could have written the story before anyone had opened their mouths--with the exception of an amusingly preposterous soundbite about homosexuality ("We have no homosexuals in Iran like you do in your country."), the President said more or less what was expected, as did President Bollinger. Students were both proud of the University standing up for free speech and angry about it allowing Ahmadinejad to speak.

As I said, I recoiled from the din, so my comments are impressionistic, but as far as I whitnessed, everyone played their roles more or less as they were expected to. And its hard to imagine how they could have done otherwise--the debate surrounding the event (and protesters did literally surround the event) was so extreme that it seemed to brook no doubt. The rabbi who led Yom Kippur services at Columbia's Hillel, for example, exhorted her congregation to protest as if it were an obligation of being a Jew, calling Ahmadinejad "the worst dictator in the world." (Impressive that he earned the title in a competition that includes leaders who have actively committed genocide against their own people, do not even have show elections in their past, and do not play second fiddle to a Supreme Leader who actually calls the shots.) Supporters of the event who couched it as a matter of free speech missed the fact that, by declining the event, Columbia would not be censoring speech as a government would but rather voicing its own disapprovals of the things Ahmadinejad represents.

He was there as a symbol, not as a speaker. He seemed to recognize this, and to use it to his advantage. I wondered what the purpose of his homage to scholarship and truth meant until I realized it was a strategy for framing his pursuit of nuclear technology and calling for continued "research" into whether the Holocaust took place. He didn't need to explicitly deny the Holocaust (which he managed to avoid doing)--he was better off allowing his presence simply to be a reminder of his previous statements. He didn't need to specifically advocate the destruction of Israel, because he could count on his audience to fill in the blanks. (The press corps laughed incredulously when he responded to a question about whether he advocated the destruction of the Jewish state by saying, "We love all nations.")

Columbia took a pretty big gamble on the event, and I think it worked out in its favor. Bollinger's forceful denunciation of the Iranian President turned the event into an opportunity to reaffirm America's abhorrence of Iran's oppressive regime. Had Ahmadinejad not gone to Crazytown on the Holocaust, Israel, nuclear weapons, and homosexuality, Bollinger might have come off as overly defensive, but Ahmadinejad was reading from the same script. The principle of free speech was upheld and served as an opportunity to denounce ugly views.

But it felt a lot more like theater and spectacle rather than true debate.