RUSH: All right, ladies and gentlemen, back now to the audio sound bites and the one and only Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But first I mentioned to you the propaganda reasons regarding why we should not have invited Mahmoud. Nobody should have invited him to speak in this country, because it just provides propaganda for his use back home in his controlled society. Now, here’s an Associated Press writer in Tehran. Maybe it’s a terrorist, for all I know. An AP terrorist writing in Tehran. Headline: ‘Iranians Criticize Columbia University’s Combative Introduction for Ahmadinejad — Iranians on Tuesday called the combative introduction of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by the head of Columbia University ‘shameful’ and said the harsh words only added to their image of the United States as a bully. In a region where the tradition of hospitality outweighs personal opinions about people, many here’ in Tehran… I’m going to puke. In a region? You’re talking about Iran here. ‘In a region where the tradition of hospitality outweighs personal opinions about people, many [in Tehran] thought Columbia University President Lee Bollinger’s aggressive tone — including telling Ahmadinejad that he exhibited the signs of a ‘petty and cruel dictator’ — was over the top. ‘The surprising point of the last night meeting is the behavior of the university president,’ state-run radio reported, describing Bollinger’s introduction as ‘full of insult, which was mostly Zionists’ propaganda against Iran.’ The chancellors of seven Iranian universities issued a letter on Tuesday to Bollinger saying his statements were ‘deeply shameful’ and invited him to Iran’ to see the truth. So not too many people are talking about Bollinger, but this AP terrorist — or reporter — in Tehran certainly is following the Iranian party line, is he not? I think it’s a he. Who can tell? What’s the name? Yeah, it’s Nasser Karimi. You never know with some of these names. It sounds like it’s a guy. Let’s go to the audiotape here, the audio sound bites. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, responding to these, quote, unquote, ‘insults’ leveled at him by Lee Bollinger.
AHMADINEJAD (via translator): I want to complain about… from the person who read this political statement against me. In Iran, tradition requires that when we demand a person to invite a speaker, we actually respect our students and the professors by allowing them to make their own judgment, and we don’t think it’s necessary before this speech is even given to come —
AUDIENCE: (wild applause)
AHMADINEJAD (via translator): — in with a series of claims —
RUSH: Yay! Students are applauding the terrorist in their midst, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This is fabulous. Now, I’ve talked to several people, and I’m a little bit surprised to tell you that some people think Mahmoud has a point. This is not polite, if you invite somebody, to this. Somebody said, ‘It was no different, Rush, than you getting invited on a TV show and they do a 30-minute setup of what a rotten SOB you are and make you come out after that. You wouldn’t like that.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind if they were telling the truth. Bollinger was telling the truth about old Mahmoud.’ But some people said, ‘Still, it was a lot impolite to do this.’ The question is: Why did Bollinger do it? Well, clearly, there are a lot reasons. One of them is money, obviously. The guy was threatened with [withdrawal of] money from alumni and boosters and others, plus there was incredible criticism from the right. I think what happened here was this little guy, Bollinger, just wanted some attention for his school. ‘Wow, this will really set me well with the liberal community, being open and tolerant of this little terrorist coming in here, because everybody knows that he hates Bush, and we hate Bush, and so have a little love-fest down here.’
He didn’t expect the reaction he got. So it was a CYA thing to go out there. But who cares? You know, who cares about the motivation? The bottom line is what Bollinger said, and it pulled the lid off of the jar that is housing the phoniness of the Democrat Party’s belief about the war on terror. Still, to me, that was the major import of what happened. Screw what Ahmadinejad said. Whatever Bollinger said about him and about the Middle East and the United States’ position, that, to me, was profound. This is a major university president. He is one of the leading liberal leaders of academe, and he just sold ’em out. I’ll bet he’s getting some grief privately. He’s probably being applauded on the one hand not the other, but what was the cocktail party like last night for him? You know, the Drive-Bys ran the tape, and they missed the story. They ran the tape and they missed the story of it. Well… Yeah, they may have genuinely missed it or they may have purposely ignored it. Here is a question: An unidentified student said, ‘Iranian women are now denied basic human rights, and your government has imposed Draconian punishments, including execution on Iranian citizens who are homosexuals. Why are you doing these things?’
AHMADINEJAD (via translator): In I-ran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
AHMADINEJAD (via translator): We don’t have that in our country!
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
AHMADINEJAD (via translator): In Iran —
AUDIENCE: (Booing.)
AHMADINEJAD (via translator): In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have it.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
RUSH: (Laughing.) And the students, who had previously applauded him, started laughing at him. Little Mahmoud became a laughingstock at Columbia University. You see? Without Democrat talking points to follow, he really doesn’t know what to say in this country. He knows what to say about Hurricane Katrina. He knows what to say about Abu Ghraib. He knows what to say about ‘secret European prisons.’ He knows what to say about Club Gitmo. Because all he has to do is listen to Democrats say it. But this question came out of the blue, because the Democrats in this country, of course, never rip homosexuals. So he was flying blind. He had to say, ‘I don’t have that problem.’ (Laughing.) ‘We don’t have that phenomenon.’ (Laughing.) So he was off message. He had no talking points furnished for him on that subject.
RUSH: Now, the Mahmoud comment on gays. The media is somewhat stymied, and Matthews last night on Hardball attempted to explain what Mahmoud meant.
MATTHEWS: You know what he meant! We all know what he meant! There’s no, uh… (smarmy laugh) There’s no Provincetown.
REPORTERETTE: (giggling)
MATTHEWS: There’s no place you can go if you’re openly gay and enjoy freedom. There’s no…locales. I mean, I was two years in Africa. I didn’t see any gay hangouts.
RUSH: Yeah, uh, you won’t see gay hangouts anywhere in the world of Islam. You ought to consider them a huge enemy out there, Chris. A lot of them couldn’t go to locales if there were locales because they’re killed. You know, they live in the shadows there. (interruption) Mr. Snerdley wants to know, ‘Why does Matthews assume to know what he meant?’ You know, it’s a famous rhetorical trick. If you start an answer to a question with, ‘Well, as we all know,’ or, ‘As everybody knows.’ That’s a very clever rhetorical trick. Madeleine Albright uses it. A lot of lib Democrats use it when answering policy questions. ‘Well, as everybody knows…’ That means it’s decided. Everybody doesn’t know what he meant. He might have actually meant, ‘We don’t have any here because if we find ’em, we do something about it. We don’t tolerate it. We don’t have that phenomenon.’ There’s a tendency here to soft-sell this guy and not be honest about just the kind of regime he runs and the kind of terrorist that he is. Here’s an even better example. Christiane Amanpour was on last night with Anderson Cooper on CNN. They are wondering, ‘Why does he say these things? Why does Mahmoud say these things?’
COOPER: To point-blank say that they don’t have homosexuals in — in Iran is just — just ludicrous.
AMANPOUR: It’s bizarre!
COOPER: Why does he do this? Why does he want to come here, make these speeches, make these remarks about the Holocaust? What is the audience he’s trying to reach?
AMANPOUR: His own hard-line audience, the ideologues are — who are still the fundamentalist, hard-line adherers to the revolution of 28 years ago. He believes that — that those who are angry with the United States because of the Iraq war, conversely admire him, because he stands up to the United States.
RUSH: Here they are: ‘Why would he say these things? Why would he come here and do this?’ They had such high hopes that Mahmoud would come and give a stem winder, a barnburner, ripping George W. Bush to shreds — and, instead, he embarrassed liberals by saying they don’t have any homosexuals in Iran! Having homosexuals amongst you is the surest sign of enlightenment, but not to Mahmoud. ‘Why would he come say that? Why would he damage his case?’ That’s what they’re wondering. Not the first time this has happened on CNN. We’ll go back to August 1st of 2006, Anderson Cooper 360, is in northern Israel. He’s on the Israel-Lebanon border interviewing New Yorker magazine’s Jeffrey Goldberg. See if you remember this.
COOPER: I think what’s been lost in a lot of this coverage is just how anti-Semitic Hezbollah is in the rhetoric.
GOLDBERG: It’s absolutely fascinating, Anderson, the anti-Semitism. There are two things that are fascinating about it. One is how embedded in the core of Hezbollah ideology anti-Semitism is. And I don’t mean anti-Israel thinking or anti-Zionism. I mean frank anti-Semitism. The other thing that’s so interesting about it is how blunt they are and how frank they are about their anti-Semitism. They don’t hide it. They don’t try to mask it in any way. They state very openly to you when you ask their exact feelings about Jews, which are quite extreme.
RUSH: This guy is stunned that an Islamist terrorist group would, A, be anti-Semitic, and then be so open about it when they speak. Why would they do this? It’s really interesting, Anderson. There is a precedent here for CNN to be curious about why totalitarians, terrorists, and thugs admit how mean they are and how bigoted and prejudiced they are. Why would Mahmoud say there are no homosexuals in Iran? I’ll tell you why I think he said it. I’m going to be flat-out, dead-straight honest with you, folks. If you’ve studied this, you know it’s not permitted in Islam. It is not permitted. It’s the worst thing you can be — second only to being a woman — in Islam, these guys’ version of it anyway. Remember, I think even after Bollinger’s introduction, he thought he would be able to control the event. You have to understand the mind-set. This guy is coming here thinking he’s a hero. The Democrats won the election in ’06. That’s his party, Bin Laden’s party. This guy, on 60 Minutes, talks about how America sucks: because of Katrina, because Abu Ghraib, because of Club Gitmo, because of secret European prisons. He parrots what he hears from American Democrats. He thinks he’s on safe ground. He does not have to come here and rip this country to shreds because the Democrat Party is doing it for him. All he’s gotta do is echo what they say.
So he comes here and the media is fawning all over his arrival. You saw the motorcade that brought him in from JFK. I mean this little guy is getting all kinds of attention in this infidel country, and he thinks he’s got us wrapped around his little finger. Part and parcel of that is the media fawning all over the guy. Wherever he goes, there’s thousands of them outside, hours in advance of his arrival, and he’s sitting there thinking, ‘Man, I’ve got this one licked. These people, what a bunch of dupes they are.’ He walks into Columbia yesterday all confident as he can be, and then here comes Bollinger’s little broadside. I think it unnerved him a bit, but once that was over — and especially when he gets the applause in his opening remarks, ripping Bollinger for being impolite and rude — he’s thinking, ‘All right, these people love me, and the Democrats won the election, and I’m just saying what they say — and I’m in a liberal enclave here. I mean, I’m at a university. I’m at Columbia University. They invited me.’ He thinks he’s on top of the world, folks. He’s feeling his oats. This is a high. This is a huge rush. (No pun intended!) Then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, comes this question on homosexuality — and that he wants in the talking points, and he hadn’t heard the Democrats talk about that, and he doesn’t quite know what to say. So he comes out and he says, ‘Well, we don’t have that problem. We don’t have that phenomena. There are no homosexuals in Iran.’
What he was saying was, ‘It. Isn’t. Permitted.’ He didn’t say, ‘When we discover them, we execute them.’ He was just saying, ‘It isn’t permitted.’ Even when the audience laughed through his answer, he kept on with that line, because I think that was one of the few times in the address yesterday he was off script. He kept talking about how women are God’s greatest creatures. We love women, and we love this, and we love that, and we hate war, and all these sorts of things — and everybody here is eating it up. Everything he says, everybody is just eating it up. So he gets this question that’s not on the talking points. He hasn’t prepped for it, and so he’s left to think, ‘Okay, they love me. Tell ’em the truth. We don’t have that phenomenon in this country,’ because they don’t permit it, and he gets laughed at and so forth, but he kept on with it. I don’t think it’s any great mystery what he meant. I don’t think it’s any great mystery that he was off his talking points. Look, I’m not exaggerating about this. I am confident that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad goes to all these public appearances… Now, the UN will be different because that’s going to be an audience of his peers in there, so he can launch in there.
But when he’s talking to American citizens, he thinks he’s talking to people that also hate George W. Bush and love Democrats and love him, because that’s all he’s doing: saying the same things that they’re saying. He knows that his comments about wiping Israel off the map don’t get reported widely here. He knows that his comments about attacking the United States and denying the Holocaust don’t get widely reported here. He knows the American media is on his side. So I don’t think it’s controversial at all to try to detect what he meant, nor is it a mystery why he said it. He’s proud of the fact they don’t permit homosexuals in Iran! He’s proud of it, and that’s what allowed him to continue on undaunted through the laughter of the students. By the way, in none of the Iranian media that I’ve seen (and I haven’t by any means seen all of it) that whole exchange has not been reported, even by this AP terrorist or the Iranian state-run news service. There’s no reference to what he said about homosexuals at all, and they have a closed society over there, so you don’t know how much of the actual presentation the Iranian people have actually seen, because I’m sure whatever they’ve seen has been carved up and edited with a fine-tooth comb.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We’ve got two more Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sound bites. It wasn’t just Columbia University that welcomed Mahmoud with open arms. The Drive-Bys rolled out the red carpet for him, too, at the National Press Club, and he assured them here that threatening war with Iran is just a propaganda tool of Bush. He got a question here from the Press Club’s president, Jerry Zremski. Zremski said, ‘Bernard Kouchner, the new French foreign minister, recently said the world would prepare for war with Iran if negotiations fail. Is Iran willing to go to war with the West to protect the Iranian nuclear program?’
AHMADINEJAD (via translator): We think that the talk of war is basically a propaganda tool. Why is there a need for war? People who talk about it have to bring a legal reason for going to war. Why should they threaten another country? Why should they create more insecurity? I think officials who talk this kind of talk should really be pressured and warned to know what to say and when not to say something. They cannot endanger world security, and if they haven’t learned a lesson, then the international community has to tell them how to learn that lesson.
RUSH: This from the guy who twice a week threatens to blow Israel off the map, and about once a month to attack us. (Laughing.) But the Drive-Bys love this, folks, because it’s aiming right at Bush. The next question from Zremski, ‘Well, here in the US we have very long presidential campaigns. It would prompt an American reporter to ask, ‘Do you plan on running for reelection?” (laughing) It’s like asking Saddam Hussein if he was going to run for reelection in two years!
AHMADINEJAD (via translator): What do you think?
REPORTER: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. I think I’ll listen to what you have to say. That smile would seem to indicate…
AHMADINEJAD (via translator): Well, I want to see what you have to say for once, too.
REPORTER: (Giggling.) I have no opinions on Iranian politics.
AHMADINEJAD: The press, if Iran and became — as a candidate again. Because every day you’ll be — you’ll have news about peace, good news coming.
RUSH: (Laughing.) Why do I feel like I’m in this movie Mars Attacks? Like this guy is a little Martian, ‘Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack!’ You know how they talked in that movie? ‘Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack!’ This little translator here sounds like a valley girl. All right. Anyway, Andrea Mitchell now, to sum up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is on MSNBC this morning with Joe Scarborough, who said to her yesterday, ‘Quite a speech up at Columbia. Is the president of Iran going to be able to top that one today when he speaks before the General Assembly?’
MITCHELL: This is a very, very clever politician. He is clearly reaching out to the larger Muslim world, to anti-US sentiment. He is trying to undermine US policy, and particularly the Bush administration policy which, as you know, is very controversial, and instead of focusing on his own problems at home, appeal to, uh, a large sentiment around the world which is responsive to the plight of the Palestinian people, and, which especially the way he articulates it, is very hostile to Israel.
RUSH: He’s a brilliant politician, very clever, clearly reaching out to the larger Muslim world! Yes, Bush is ‘controversial.’ This guy is clever, and smart, and brilliant. Bush’s policies are controversial. Thank you, Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington. Let me ask you, folks, a serious question here about Mahmoud saying that they don’t have ‘the phenomenon’ of homosexuality in Iran. Are any of you observing — and if you are observing, are you surprised or amazed — how that one question and answer has become the question and answer that everybody in the Drive-By Media is talking about and analyzing? You know, he says that they love women in Iran. Women are stoned to death in Iran every day, and for nothing more than looking the wrong way or glancing the wrong way — and, of course, also if they don’t have the proper attire. The homosexual thing in Iran is probably not a big deal because they don’t permit it, but the idea that that has been the one thing everybody here is focusing on leads me to believe that Israel might be able to actually turn world opinion to its side. If Israel would simply come out and be as pro-homosexual as possible, with as many people as possible living in homosexual relationships publicly and out of the closet, why, American academe would love ’em, and be hard-pressed to criticize them.
You know, the homosexuality on the American left is a political issue — and, of course, liberals make everything about them. So when Ahmadinejad gives his answer, ‘We don’t have any homosexuals in Iran. We don’t have that phenomenon,’ they think: ‘How could you say that? How could you say that!’ By the way, how long will it be…? I make this prediction today, or I ask this question: How long will it be before some liberal or Democrat somewhere says, ‘You know, Ahmadinejad sounded a lot like right-wing Republicans, Falwell and Robertson, when he was talking about no homosexuals in Iran.’ How long will it be before we hear that? But the real story is the plight of women in Iran. This gay thing has captivated the media here. Now, as to Ahmadinejad’s answer to, is he going to run again, what he was really saying… You have to be able to see the stitches on a curveball, see the stitches on a slider here. Not just the stitches on a fastball. You gotta be able to see the stitches on a curveball — and I can. Now, what Mahmoud was really saying is, ‘Of course I’m running! I’ll be running as a Democrat. I’m running on a peace agenda. My fundraiser, Mr. Hsu, is in some problems right now. He’s a little busy, but I’m sure I will trump every one of my opponents in fundraising, and perhaps I will even be allowed to appear on your Oprah show if she wears a burqa, and I’ll be glad to make my candidacy available to the American media running as a Democrat from Tehran.’
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Leah in Providence, Rhode Island, hello, and welcome to the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. First-time caller. I love your show.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: Listen, your question about why the Drive-By liberal media focused more on the homosexual remark: The reason that they did that, then they’d have to really admit some of the other telling remarks that this megalomaniac made. One of them was that he admitted how Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on his people, killed hundreds of thousands of them, and then he made mention of a reporter that works at the United Nations that is a deformed survivor of this hideous chemical warfare. And the liberals out there are the ones calling President Bush a liar, that he never had chemical war — chemical, biological accident or, God forbid, even seeking nuclear capabilities. And I thought that was very telling. And the second remark that the nut made about kind of equating the Holocaust to physics, when he was talking about science, and going on and on about science should be free of ideology and it should be pure: Maybe he should have told that to the four Iranian doctors that trained in Iran that tried to blow up the airport in Scotland.
RUSH: Yeah, you’re right. He’s not getting that kind of scrutiny because that’s not what the interest of the Drive-By Media and the leftists in his visit is.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: He’s a celebrity. This is pop culture news coverage. He is an exciting and intriguing figure to them because they think he hates Bush, and he can’t be all bad if he hates Bush.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Because Ahmadinejad fits the mold. The Democrats’ line — and we know it is a total lie — but the Democrats’ line the last four years, (sniveling lib impression) ‘I am so depressed about what the world thinks of my country and Bush has ruined our reputation in the world, and Bush has ruined our status, and I am so upset because I wanted to be admired as an American, and we’re a laughingstock now, and they hate us.’ So here comes Ahmadinejad, spouting his hateful rhetoric toward America, they say, ‘See, see? This happened because of George W. Bush, Mr. Limbaugh, this happened because of Bush. And this is why we must get rid of Bush, we should impeach Bush now, and Cheney, and Halliburton, too, because Ahmadinejad would not hate us if it weren’t that.’ That’s what they think. So he fits their little narrative, if you will.