by Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, USA - The novelty of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance yesterday at Columbia University did not, as many critics would have it, lie in the fact that an august Ivy League institution had invited the Iranian president -- a Holocaust-denier, authoritarian leader and sponsor of terrorism -- to speak on its campus. The protests, the fury, the screaming New York Daily News headlines, the counterarguments about free speech -- we have seen all of that sort of thing before.