Iranian president spars with academics in NY

By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clashed with an American university president who called him a "petty and cruel dictator" at a forum on Monday where Ahmadinejad criticized Israel and the United States and said Iran was a peaceful nation.

Ahmadinejad also said in an appearance at Columbia University that Iran's nuclear program was purely peaceful, and his country was a victim rather than a sponsor of terrorism.

Challenged over his past comments that Israel should be wiped off the map and questioning the Holocaust, he said his concern was for Palestinian suffering.

Ahmadinejad, who was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, received a caustic welcome at the Ivy League university, which had come under fire from critics who said it provided a platform to a Holocaust denier.

Security was tight at the hall holding around 700 people, 80 percent of them students -- dozens of whom wore T-shirts saying "Stop Ahmadinejad's Evil."

Introducing the Iranian president, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said Ahmadinejad behaved as a "petty and cruel dictator" and that his Holocaust denials suggested he was either "brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated."

Bollinger asked a string of pointed questions, most of which Ahmadinejad ignored in a speech that dwelt at length on science as a gift from God and the importance of using knowledge and learning purely and in a pious way.

Asked about his views on the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad said "a different perspective" was needed given the impact on the Middle East of those events. Six million Jews were killed in the Nazi genocide of World War Two.