Ahmadinejad

The message on a Minneapolis street corner Wednesday was unmediated: VIVA IRAN. That and dozens of other slogans of the Iranian protest movement were carried on signs and on the mercifully cooler air that wafted through downtown, where a crowd of as many as 200 people gathered in a semicircle for urgent call-and-response chants.

Iran’s belligerent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a loser in most of his international appearances. But on Monday he garnered a rare victory at an unlikely venue: Columbia University in New York. He withstood a barrage of insults from that university’s president — his host– and, though apparently caught off guard, he held his head above [...]