Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, seems to me to be a man of contradictions:

On the one hand, he wants to lay a wreath at the memorial site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But on the other hand, he had declared that the attacks were an inside job carried out by the U.S. government, and he was “amazed” that families of the victims were sickened by his request.

On the one hand, he says that the American people are eager for different opinions about the world, and he is looking forward to providing them with “correct and clear information”.

But on the other hand, he calls the Holocaust a “myth”, says that the nation of Israel should be “wiped off the map”, and, just yesterday before he boarded a plane for the U.S., stood before a military rally where a banner declared “Death to America”.

So, I think that CNN calling him a “hardliner” is just plain incorrect. What is he? I don’t know. He does not speak the truth, let alone speak the truth in love, as we Christians are called by Christ to do. He instead speaks lies.

It reminds me of something that the Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, said while American troops were marching on Bagdad and had started bombing Saddam’s strongholds there (paraphrased): The American soldiers are surrendering by the thousands!

Of course, they weren’t surrendering at all; in fact, the opposite was true: Iraqi soldiers were understandably surrendering, but that didn’t stop Mr. Aziz from lying through his teeth about it.

How do you handle someone who lies over and over again and spouts nothing but murderous threats? If you are Columbia University, you invite him to speak at your school.

Does he have something to say that needs to be heard? No, because people never need to hear lies. Is what he says “different” and therefore important to hear to have “diversity of opinions”? Yes, it is different, in the same what that a white supremacist believes something “different”: that human beings are not created equal, but diversity for its own sake is meaningless; only diversity in the unity of truth makes sense, and this man has nothing of the truth in him.

The confusion of relativism and false tolerance has permeated our nation’s academic institutions. How else can we explain an acclaimed university in our country allowing someone such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak?