Call him every name under the sun, but don't accuse Ahmadinejad of concealing his goals. At every opportunity, he makes plain his regime's intent to remake the world order in its image - to reform "the inequitable and unjust management of the world," as he put it on Monday.
A handful of nations did the right thing, or at least some of it, in staying away from Geneva. More walked out of his speech.
But neither the boycotts nor the walkouts will have troubled Ahmadinejad in the slightest. Indeed, they only reinforce his case, bolstering the argument he makes over the diplomats' heads that the traditional centers of global influence don't care about the underprivileged, that they don't want to hear his "truth."
His victory, yet again, was in the very fact of getting to speak - to speak to a global audience, his words carried live on network after network worldwide, his calculated oratory preying on profound, widespread, genuine grievances in less-developed countries. He was reaching out, again, to the poor and the ill-educated and the repressed, and offering his Islamist worldview as a panacea.
That it was Ahmadinejad calling attention to international injustice does not make such injustice any less acute. That it was Ahmadinejad, the public face of a repressive, misogynistic, homophobic regime, whose "solution" would lead the world back into the dark ages, is a continuing case of canny manipulation by him, and shameful, appallingly counterproductive indulgence by his hosts.
Iran's principal targets are a "great Satan" that strives to protect and encourage freedoms and democracy, and a 'little Satan" that struggles to preserve the enlightened values its faith brought to the world. Again, in Geneva on Monday, the United Nations gave him the platform to pursue an expansionist agenda that places a brutal, narrow-minded and intolerant interpretation of religion above free world values, and applauded as he won over further converts toward achieving it.
