Behind the recent media frenzy over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trip last week to New York, making controversial appearances at Columbia University and at the United Nations, was a glaring disconnect between the reality of human rights in Iran and the fantasy its President tried unsuccessfully to portray to skeptical Western audiences.

Probably most outrageous was his claim during his Columbia remarks: “Our people are the freest people in the world, the most aware people in the world, the most enlightened, so to say.”

These claims are not difficult to refute. According to Human Rights Watch, Iran regularly imprisons and pressures critics of the regime in the academic and the journalistic communities. Furthermore, freedom of information is severely restricted in Iran: its government has censored over 10 million online sites that it has deemed unsatisfactory.

Iran also has a “criminal” justice system with a long history of human rights abuses that violently imposes conservative Muslim social mores on its citizenry. Take, for instance, the case of Pegah Emambakhsh, which has gotten little coverage in the press. She is an Iranian who sought asylum in the United Kingdom in 2005 because she faced imprisonment and possible stoning to death as punishment for her lesbian lifestyle. Both Pegah’s partner and father were imprisoned and tortured because of the relationship. There is an online petition to stop Pegah’s upcoming deportation from the UK back to Iran which would mean almost certain imprisonment and possible death.

Pegah’s case is not unique. According to Iranian Human Rights Campaigners, over 4,000 homosexual men and women have been executed since the Ayatollahs came to power in 1979.

All this transforms Ahmadinejad’s gloating this week that the “phenomenon” of homosexuality does not exist in Iran, to the boos and jeering of a Columbian audience, from laughably absurd to frightening. It also makes the existence of the Iranian Queer Organization all the more fantastic.

If it’s dangerous to be gay in Iran, it’s probably worse to be an active political dissident. Valiollah Feiz-Mahdavi is a political prisoner being held now in Gohar Dasht prison in Iran for having allegedly joined the People’s Mujahidin Organization in Iran, which is a leading opposition organization to the Islamist autocratic regime. According to an online petition to stop the execution, Feiz-Mahdavi suffered solitary confinement for 546 days and was tortured using the “harshest physical and psychological” methods. His execution was originally scheduled for May 16, 2006, but has reportedly been postponed indefinitely.

If that’s not enough, according to research from Human Rights Watch, Iran is also the leader in the world in executing juveniles, having executed more than any other country in the world. It’s always good to be number one.

Last week Ahmadinejad was quick to point his finger at the United States and the West. At Columbia, the smooth and undeterred Ahmadinejad defended his right to free speech, chastised Columbia’s President Lee C. Bollinger (who called Ahmadinejad a “petty dictator” in his opening remarks) for being a bad host, and argued for an unbiased and thorough academic investigation of historic events such as the Holocaust.

Speaking to the UN General Assembly, he warned of a mysteriously unnamed hegemonic imperial despot who was “setting up secret prisons, abducting persons, trials and secret punishments without any regard to due process, … tapping of telephone conversations intercepting private mail.” Indeed, there is no doubt that the U.S. has also committed a fair share of its own human rights abuses, with its detaining of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay without full rights to due process probably topping the list.

Unfortunately for Ahmadinejad, however, his rhetoric cannot be taken too seriously because the world is fully informed about the gross human rights abuses orchestrated by his own government. There is no debate (or comparison to the U.S) when it comes to the lack of both personal civil liberties and an intellectual community free to challenge the theocratic dictatorship in Ahmadinejad’s country. In his speeches, Ahmadinejad simply came off as a hypocrite and a liar; his rhetoric of moral superiority smacked of delusion and megalomania.