McCain says Iran's leader should not speak at Columbia University

John McCain is the latest presidential candidate to use Iran's president as a punching bag, calling on Columbia University in New York to rescind its invitation for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak.

"A man who is directing the maiming and killing of Americans troops should not be given an invitation to speak at an American university," McCain said in a statement issued by his campaign today. "Rather than rolling out the red carpet for the leader of a terrorist-sponsoring regime, Columbia should be welcoming the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) back on campus to honor the men and women who put their lives on the line every day defending our freedom."

Columbia's president, Lee C. Bollinger, defended the invitation for Ahmadinejad to speak on Monday, saying it will be part of the annual World Leaders Forum, "intended to further Columbia's longstanding tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate, especially on global issues."

In a statement posted on Columbia's website Wednesday, Bollinger also says that the university insisted that Iran's leader divide his time equally between speaking and answering questions from the audience. Bollinger also said that in his introduction, he will cite some of the controversies surrounding Ahmadinejad, including that he has denied the Holocaust occurred and has called for the destruction of Israel.

"We must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes," Bollinger's statement says. "Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason."

McCain's Republican rivals Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney on Wednesday condemned the possibility of Ahmadinejad visiting Ground Zero while in New York to speak to the United Nations. The New York police later said they had rejected a request for Iran's leader to lay a wreath there and would oppose him visiting nearby for security reasons.