The US on Thursday led a mass walkout of the UN General Assembly as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched an outspoken attack on Western nations.
The Iranian leader again cast doubt on the origins of the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and criticized the US for killing al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden rather than bringing him to trial.
European countries use the Holocaust as an excuse to pay “ransom to the Zionists,” he said.
The “diabolical” aims of the West are the cause of wars and the financial crisis, Ahmadinejad said.
In a repeat of walkouts at the UN and other international events in recent years, a US diplomat monitoring the speech in the UN General Assembly left halfway through the 20-minute discourse.
The 27 EU nations then followed in a coordinated protest move.
“Mr Ahmadinejad had a chance to address his own people’s aspirations for freedom and dignity, but instead he again turned to abhorrent anti-Semitic slurs and despicable conspiracy theories,” US mission spokesperson Mark Kornblau said.
In a message sent on Twitter A French spokesperson called -Ahmadinejad’s attacks “unacceptable” and the German delegation said it was protesting the “crude, anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-West te by the Iranian president.”
Earlier Ahmadinejad had offered to halt Iran’s production of low-enriched uranium — which can be a stepping stone to producing atomic weapons — if the West supplied Tehran with the material in return.
However, he failed to mention either the nuclear crisis with the West or the Palestinians bid to join the UN as a full member state in his speech.
Iran, accused by Western nations of seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, is under four sets of UN sanctions for refusing for years to bow to international demands to rein in uranium enrichment.
“If they give us the 20 percent enriched uranium this very week, we will cease the domestic enrichment of uranium of up to 20 percent this very week. We only want the 20 percent enrichment for our domestic consumption,” Ahmadinejad told the New York Times.
The EU also offered to resume the sputtering talks with Iran over its suspect nuclear program which broke down in January.
However, the invitation seemed to cut little ice with Ahmadinejad.
Some European countries “still use the Holocaust, after six decades, as the excuse to pay fine or ransom to the Zionists,” he told the assembly.
The US considered Zionism as “sacred,” while they “allow sacrileges and insult” against other religions, he said.
And on the Palestinian issue, he referred only to the imposition of “60 years of war, homelessness, terror and mass murder on the Palestinian people and on countries in the region.”
However, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton has offered to resume talks between Iran and the so-called P5+1 group of Britain, China, France, Russia, the US and Germany.
The EU is “ready to resume talks with Iran on building confidence in the nature of its nuclear program, on the understanding that Iran is ready to enter into meaningful talks without pre-conditions,” spokesperson Maja Kocijancic said.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, who stepped up to the podium after Ahmadinejad, sharply criticized the Iranian leader.
“He didn’t remind us that he runs a country where they may have elections of a sort, but they also repress freedom of speech, do everything they can to avoid the accountability of a free media, violently prevent demonstrations and detain and torture those who argue for a better future,” Cameron said.
Across the street from the sprawling UN complex, behind steel security barriers, about 400 people rallied to protest the Iranian regime under the banner of the opposition People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran.
“While Ahmadinejad is getting the podium at the world’s biggest party, the Iranian people are being suppressed,” organizer Ali Safavi said.
The rally was addressed by guest speaker John Bolton, the mustachioed, hawkish former US ambassador to the UN under former US president George W. Bush.
He spoke of his scorn for the world body, branded Ahmadinejad “the world’s central banker of terrorism,” and proposed an undiplomatic solution.
“I believe it should be the declared policy of the United States to overthrow the regime,” he said to cheers.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the