If Rudolph Giuliani were mayor, I think his denial of President Ahmadinejad’s request to visit ground zero would have been a bit pithier than the New York City Police Department’s rebuff.

Instead of citing “security reasons,” Mr. Giuliani probably would have turned the Iranian president down by saying, “Iran is the biggest sponsor of terror and this request is totally unacceptable and an insult to those who died there.” The city’s current administration, however, is not likely to be as forthright as our former mayor, who had no problem recognizing that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were acts of horrific terror. Would Mayor Bloomberg have returned a $10 million check from Prince Alwalid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, made out to the Twin Towers Fund, when the prince suggested that America’s Middle East policy contributed to the World Trade Center attacks? Mr. Giuliani rejected the prince’s statement in no uncertain terms when he returned the donation:

“To suggest that there’s a justification for [the terrorist attacks] only invites this happening in the future,” he said. “It is highly irresponsible and very, very dangerous. And one of the reasons I think this happened is because people were engaged in moral equivalency in not understanding the difference between liberal democracies like the United States, like Israel, and terrorist states and those who condone terrorism.”

Mr. Giuliani made that statement on October 11, 2001, and most of the city agreed with him. We also had no problem distinguishing which were the terrorist states. The idea that Iran, which has been threatening the demise of Israel on a daily basis, should be treated with anything but contempt would have been laughable. That, of course, was then. The mood of the city has changed, but not for the better. I don’t think it’s wise to forget who our enemies are so that we don’t offend individuals with lawyers on retainer. Mark Steyn recently wrote a delicious column criticizing those who feel a need to understand our enemy. Naturally, his essay received comments from readers who insist we do just that.

When exactly did New Yorkers turn into “Can’t we all get along?” California boobs? Could it be something lacking in our current leadership?

The mayor seems to be determined to make this city as multicultural as possible. He also seems to have a less strident relationship with critics of America. In 2002, he appointed a Council on American-Islamic Relations official to the city’s Human Rights Commission. The appointment generated a number of complaints because CAIR had co-sponsored an event at Brooklyn College at which attendees shouted anti-Semitic remarks, because it is funded in part by Prince Alwalid, and because CAIR posted a letter on its Web site suggesting that Muslims could not have been responsible for the September 11, attacks.

Would Mr. Giuliani even have considered starting an Arabic-language public school like Khalil Gibran International Academy? No, he would have introduced the language into the curriculum of regular schools. That would have made sense.

Now Mr. Ahmadinejad is coming to town. How much of a red carpet will be laid out for him at Columbia University?

Earlier this year I met with an Iranian dissident to discuss a possible Persian renaissance in Iran that would preclude any necessary military intervention by America or Israel. When I asked him his opinion of Mr. Ahmadinejad, he described him as a “psychopath.” “He’s a puppet of the mullahs, but he’s still dangerous,” he said. When I asked him about Iran’s nuclear program, he said it was a problem. Although my new friend held out the hope that the Iranian intellectual leader Dr. Forood Fouladvand could take command in a bloodless coup, he realistically acknowledged the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. “If the threat is imminent, then there is no option but to bomb the site,” he said.

On my way to work Wednesday, I passed ground zero. Two men were trying to take pictures through a hole in the stockade fencing around the site. What, I wondered, were they looking at? It’s still just a hole in the ground. The president of Iran, a country supplying insurgents in Iraq to kill Iraqi citizens and our military, wants to lay a wreath at ground zero and the city was actually mulling over the offer. No one in this city’s administration has the gumption — and boy did I have to search high and low for this euphemism — to express how contemptible his presence at the World Trade Center site would be. It’s times like this that I really hate term limits.