Then come to New York!
Even if you’re a “petty and cruel dictator,” an Ivy-League school will still be interested in your time:
A group of Columbia University students may be attending a private dinner with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who will be in New York City in September for the United Nations General Assembly, the Columbia Spectator reports.Fifteen members of the Columbia International Relations Council and Association (CIRCA) were invited to the Sept. 21 event in Manhattan, according to the school newspaper. The meeting would reportedly allow for the students to dine and speak with Ahmadinejad and Columbia President Lee Bollinger…
And if your family has a legacy of rising to the top by brutally murdering citizens and political dissidents, you can still nab a spot at New York Fashion Week:
The organizers of New York’s Fashion Week have gone back on a decision to cancel a show by the designer daughter of Uzbekistan’s autocratic leader Islam Karimov, who is accused of presiding over widespread human rights abuses,Gulnara Karimova’s September 15 show was originally pulled by IMG Worldwide canceled in response to criticism and threats of protests by human rights groups.But the company told RIA Novosti on Wednesday that the show would now be held at a different location from the originally planned Lincoln Centre and would be open to invited guests only.
Nice to know where the priorities of these organizers lie. If either Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Ms. Karimova were charged with, I don’t know, serial murder or as being accessories to a crime (as they should be), I don’t think they’d be receiving such nice invitations. (Of course, I have rather low intellectual and moral expectations for fashion designers.)
Instead, because they work within their own perverse political systems, and have successfully trounced their political competitors, it’s not considered disgusting to accept them in polite company. The scale of their crimes have somehow made them more acceptable.
So, if you’re a high-ranking bureaucrat in an authoritarian regime… and you’re tired of having people paying homage to your greatness at home…. take a nice vacation to New York where nobody will hold the whole “evil” thing against you.
And you don’t have to threaten them with death!
Oh, also, Politico has a fantastic, but nauseating, video of President Obama asking various groups for his bill to be passed.
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