Mr. Ahmadinejad called for Syria, his ally, to stop its violent crackdown on protesters, cautioning that “with clashes and confrontations problems will not be solved. They will be multiplied.”

Oh? What’s the difference with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s own harsh crackdown on dissidents?

“In Iran, things were quite different,” he insisted, a bit testy. Many of the dead in Iran were members of security forces, he claimed, suggesting that protesters were not deliberately targeted.

I asked Mr. Ahmadinejad what he thought when he saw the famous photos of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, lying on the ground and bleeding to death after she had been shot in the chest.

A hint of sadness crossed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s face. I thought, for a moment, that he was going to apologize. Instead, he constructed his own reality: He suggested that she had been murdered by his opponents, working with the BBC, as part of a bizarre snuff film.

“We do search for those who are truly guilty of murdering this young lady,” he said.