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Students jeering President Ahmadinejad during a protest at Teheran University last week, only days after his noisy reception at Columbia

Students staged a noisy protest against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the country’s leading university in Teheran last Monday, likening him to the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Riot police barred the group of about 100 chanting male and female students from leaving the Teheran University campus, where Ahmadinejad was giving a speech to mark the start of a new academic year.

“Ahmadinejad is Pinochet! Iran will not become Chile!” the students shouted, the witness said.

The demonstrators were calling for the release of students detained since May for publishing writings considered “insulting to Islam”, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

The gate of the campus was chain-locked by hundreds of regular police and then guarded by riot police equipped with hard helmets and plastic shields.

Some students tried to break down the lock by kicking at the gate and scuffled with university guards.
The demonstrating students briefly clashed with a rival group of supporters of the president who shouted: “Shame on you, hypocrites! Leave the university!”

The protesters, mainly male students, held banners reading “Free Ehsan Mansouri, Majid Tavakoli and Ahmad Ghasaban!”, the three detained students.

Holding hands, they sang a students’ solidarity song that dates back to the early days of the 1979 revolution during the demonstration, called by the Islamic Association of Students, a reformist group.

The clashes and angry verbal exchanges between the rival groups disrupted the planned live broadcast of Ahmadinejad’s speech, Fars reported.

One of the students in a speech criticized the treatment of university lecturers, the report said. “If we are the freest country of the world, why do you sack lecturers?” he asked.

A supporter of Ahmadinejad, however, shouted back: “Non-Muslim lecturers must be sacked”.
Last December, Iranian students disrupted a speech by Ahmadinejad at Teheran’s Amir Kabir University, setting fire to his picture and shouting “death to the dictator!”

Ahmadinejad, an ultra-conservative who won an election victory in 2005 on a wave of popular support, responded then by describing those students as an “oppressive” minority.

In recent months, Ahmadinejad has also faced mounting criticism of his government’s economic policies.
Monday’s protest came just two weeks after Ahmadinejad addressed New York’s Columbia University during a controversial visit to the United States to attend the UN General Assembly.

“Why only Columbia? We have questions too!” read banners brandished by the students at Teheran University.

Ahmadinejad was treated to a humiliating and public dressing down at Columbia, where he was described as a “petty and cruel dictator” by the university president even before he spoke.

He used his appearance to reject his label of a Holocaust denier, to insist the Islamic republic had the right to pursue a civilian nuclear energy program and to deny Teheran was seeking nuclear weapons.
Tensions are running high with the West over Iran’s atomic program, while major powers are expected to decide in November whether to impose further sanctions on the country.

‘Liberating all of Palestine’

Three days earlier, on October 5, the last Friday in Ramadan, Ahmadinejad launched a new tirade against Israel, pledging to work to abolish the Jewish state and questioning the scale of the Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad said Iran would strive to liberate “all of Palestine” from Israeli hands, in a speech to mark the Qods Day, where Iran holds its annual mass protest marches in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Tens of thousands of Iranians turned out for the march in central Teheran, carrying anti-Zionist banners, chanting “Death to Israel” and burning Israeli and American flags.

“The Palestinian people are standing firm. The Iranian people and other peoples will not stop until all of Palestinian territory is liberated”, Ahmadinejad told the faithful at Teheran University.
“They (world powers) should not think that the Iranian nation and other nations in the region will take their hands off the throat of the Zionists and their supporters”.

Ahmadinejad provoked an international outcry shortly after his election in 2005 when he reportedly called for Israel to be “wiped from the map” and also described the Holocaust as a “myth”.

He has since toned down his rhetoric but in this speech he reaffirmed his deeply controversial questioning of the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II and his suggestion that Israel could be moved to North America.

“The Iranian nation hates killing and considers Hitler and the executioners of the World War II as black and dark figures”, he said.

“But the Iranian nation has a question and as long as there is no clear and reasonable response to this question, it will remain.

“They have made the Holocaust sacred and do not allow anyone to ask questions. Under the pretext of the Holocaust they are allowed to commit whatever crime they like.

“Europeans cannot tolerate the Zionists in their region and country, but they want to impose them on the people of the region… Give these vast lands of Canada and Alaska to them to create a country for themselves”.

Israel was an ally of the imperial regime of the last Iranian shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, developing close military and economic ties, but all this changed when he was ousted by the Islamic revolution in 1979.

Iran is also home to 25,000 Iranian Jews, the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel, and officials say this shows its stance is anti-Zionist but in no way anti-Semitic.

State television showed pictures of tens of thousands of people streaming through the streets in other demonstrations held in every major city up-and-down the country, repeatedly chanting the mantra of “Death to Israel”.

Despite the heavily politicized nature of the Teheran demonstration, there was a festive mood with the numerous children present having their faces painted as cats and rabbits in entertainment laid-on by the municipality.

“I come every year because the Palestinians are helpless and cannot defend themselves. I come here to attract the world’s attention to their plight”, said Somayeh Salim, 27. She was carrying an Israeli flag in her rucksack: “I’m going to burn it”, she said.