WASHINGTON (CNN) - Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Monday he finds it "disturbing" Columbia University invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak before its student body. (Related: Iranian president speaks)
"He’s denied the Holocaust. He’s threatened the future survival of Israel,” Giuliani said in an interview with Maine television station WMTW. "I believe he’s even threatened at various times American interests, and he keeps threatening to develop nuclear capacity."
"So this is not even a close question. Literally thousands and thousands and thousands of people would want to have the right to go to Columbia and speak," Giuliani added. "So a choice had to be made, which seemed to me the choice would be made not to bring ... the leader of one of the governments that’s one of the biggest supporters of terrorism in the world. [I]t’s very, very disturbing and I think that’s why you see such an outcry against it."
Meanwhile, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, one of Giuliani's chief rivals for the GOP nomination, is out with a new radio ad Monday that calls on the United Nations Secretary-General to revoke his decision to allow the Iranian leader to speak before the body later this week.
"We should be tightening our sanctions against Iran, not welcoming him to the world stage, and I've called on the Secretary-General of the United Nations to withdraw that invitation," Romney says in the ad set to run in Iowa and South Carolina today and Florida later in the week. "What we should be doing is indicting Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention."
- CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney