Signs and Events

Netanyahu May Endorse Palestinian State on US Trip

photo
Ben Curtis AP

JERUSALEM — On the eve of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's crucial visit to Washington, his defense minister suggested Saturday the Israeli leader might endorse a Palestinian state when he meets with President Barack Obama.

That would be a significant shift for Netanyahu, who has made clear in the past that he does not think the Palestinians are ready to rule themselves. But that position has put him at odds with long-standing U.S. policy that supports Palestinian statehood as the cornerstone of Mideast peace efforts.

Senior White House officials said Obama's meeting with Netanyahu Monday is "part of his commitment that he's made since day one of the administration to pursue comprehensive peace in the Middle East, including a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians."

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said he thought an agreement with the Palestinians could be achieved within three years.

"I think and believe that Netanyahu will tell Obama this government is prepared to go for a political process that will result in two peoples living side by side in peace and mutual respect," Barak told Channel 2 TV.

However, he did not use the word state, leaving open other options for Netanyahu.

After the Israeli prime minister made a lightning visit to Jordan Thursday to meet with the king, a senior Jordanian government official said Netanyahu is likely to endorse a two-state solution when he meets Obama. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

When they meet, the two allies will be grappling with diverging policies on how to approach the Mideast conflict. They do not see eye-to-eye on the Palestinian issue or on the Obama administration's efforts to open a dialogue with Israel's arch foes, Syria and Iran.

There has been a flurry of diplomatic activity surrounding Syria in recent weeks. An Obama envoy was in Damascus to try to repair strained relations and assured the government the U.S. is committed to pursuing a comprehensive Middle East peace that would include the Syria-Israel track. Obama's chief Middle East envoy George Mitchell is also planning a trip to Syria, U.S. officials said Friday.

Last year, Turkey mediated indirect talks between Israel and Syria but Damascus halted them over the Gaza war.

The recent messages from both sides have not been positive. On Friday, Syrian President Bashar Assad said his country was interested in resuming indirect talks but does not see the new hard-line Israeli government as a good partner.

Syria is demanding Israel cede all the Golan Heights, territory captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war. But just days ago, Netanyahu said Israel would not leave the Golan.

"When we have a specific vision and when there is a partner, then we can speak about a date to resume peace talks," Assad said.

The U.S. and its Arab allies see the establishment of a Palestinian state as the key to broader Middle East peace. And even if Netanyahu expresses support for a Palestinian state, it won't be easy for his hawkish government to make the sweeping concessions needed such as freezing Jewish settlement in the West Bank and sharing the holy city of Jerusalem.

Netanyahu has said the old formula of trading land for peace has been unsuccessful. He has suggested focusing instead on building up the Palestinian economy and security services loyal to moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

But he has acknowledged that would not be a substitute for political negotiations. And on trips to Egypt and Jordan last week, he said he wanted to quickly renew talks with Palestinians that stalled last year without any breakthrough.

Aides say he favors giving Palestinians the powers to govern themselves but minus the powers that could threaten Israel — establishing an army, making treaties with states including Iran, importing heavy weapons, or controlling air space close to Israel's international airport.

If Netanyahu does endorse a Palestinian state or agree to resume contacts with Syria, he will almost certainly want something in return from Obama — a tougher line on Iran.

"For the U.S., Israel-Palestinian relations is the top priority. But for Israel, Iran is the most pressing issue," said Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israel relations at Bar Ilan University.

Netanyahu has hinted he would be prepared to take military action against Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons — something Vice President Joe Biden has said would be "ill-advised." Israeli and foreign media reported this week that CIA Director Leon Panetta secretly visited Israel earlier this month and asked for advance warning of any military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.

Netanyahu doesn't believe Tehran's claims that its nuclear program is peaceful and sees Iran as the crux of the Mideast's problems, with its nuclear ambitions, military arsenal and anti-Israel proxies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. He traveled to Egypt and Jordan this week to try to rally Arab support against Iran.

That approach is at odds with Washington's, which sees movement toward Palestinian statehood as key to pressuring Tehran to keep its nuclear program peaceful.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pointedly made that linkage last month.

"For Israel to get the kind of strong support it is looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can't stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts," she said.

Signs and Events

US Upholds Israel's Nuclear Position as long as Iran Enriches Uranium

It removes a major obstacle clouding White House talks next Monday, May 18, between Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and president Barack Obama and paves the way for an Israeli request to extend the 40-year old "ambiguity" arrangement approved by Obama's predecessors.

 

The senior US official, who spoke in Vienna on condition of anonymity, was addressing preparatory talks for a nuclear non-proliferation treaty review conference in 2010 Friday night, May 15. He made it clear that US arms control negotiator Rose Gottermoelle did not break new ground last week when she urged presumed atomic powers India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea to join the nuclear non-proliferation pact.

 

The US official said Friday: The four were unlikely to join the NPT "until there is a change in the overall political and security context." He added: "In the particular case of the Middle East, Israeli adherence to the NPT is only going to be possible in the context of… full compliance with [the treaty in the region]." Establishing a Middle East nuclear weapons-free zone "depends on Iran fully complying with its NPT obligations and suspending uranium enrichment."

 

This statement eased concerns in Jerusalem that as part of his drive for global nuclear disarmament, President Obama would insist on Israel leading the way to win a bargaining chip in his forthcoming diplomatic negotiations with Tehran. This would have terminated the informal longstanding deal between Jerusalem and US presidents allowing Israel to refrain from admitting or denying possession of a nuclear arsenal while maintaining the status of a nuclear power in relation to its enemies.

 

At the Vienna meeting, the five major UN powers welcomed the decision by the US and Russia to negotiate an updated version of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Their officials meet in Moscow next week.

 

Signs and Events

The Europe of Our Dreams

May. 14, 2009
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

Israelis are wild about Europe. A poll carried out by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation last month showed that a whopping 69 percent of Israelis, and 76% of Israeli Jews, would like for Israel to join the European Union. Sixty percent of Israelis have a favorable view of the EU.

This poll's most obvious message is that as far as Europe is concerned, Israelis suffer from unrequited love. A 2003 Pew survey of 15 EU countries showed that 59% of Europeans consider Israel the greatest threat to world peace. A poll taken in Germany the following year showed that 68% of Germans believe that Israel is pursuing a war of extermination against the Palestinians and 51% said that there is no difference in principle between Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and German treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

And it isn't simply Israel that they hate. They don't like Jews very much either. In an empirical study published in 2006, Professors Edward Kaplan and Charles Small of Yale University demonstrated a direct link between hatred for Jews and extreme anti-Israel positions. A recent poll bears out the fact that levels of hostility toward Israel rise with levels of anti-Semitism.

According to a 2008 Pew survey, anti-Semitic feelings in five EU countries - Spain, Britain, France, Germany and Poland - rose nearly 50% between 2005 and 2008. Whereas in 2005, some 21% of people polled acknowledged they harbor negative feelings toward Jews, by last year the proportion of self-proclaimed anti-Semites in these countries had risen to 30%. In Spain levels of anti-Semitism more than doubled, from 21% in 2005 to 46% in 2008.

Not surprisingly, increased hatred of Jews has been accompanied by increased violence against Jews. Just last week, for instance, three men assaulted Israel's ambassador in Spain Rafi Shotz as he and his wife walked home from a soccer game. They followed after him and called out, "dirty Jew," "Jew bastard," and "Jew murderer." A crowd witnessed the assault, but no one rose to their defense.

Shotz was lucky. As Israel's ambassador he had two policemen escorting him and so he was not physically threatened. The same was not the fate of Holocaust survivors who assembled at Mauthausen death camp in Austria last week to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the camp's liberation by American forces.

As Jewish survivors of the camp where 340,000 people were murdered mourned the dead, a gang of Austrian teenagers wearing masks taunted them, screaming "Heil Hitler," and "This way for the gas!" They opened fire with plastic rifles at French Jewish survivors, wounding one in the head and another in the neck.

And Austria is not alone. From Germany to France, Belgium, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and beyond, Jewish kindergartens and day schools, restaurants and groceries have been firebombed and vandalized. The desecration of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues has become an almost routine occurrence. Jewish leaders from Norway to Germany to Britain to France have warned community members not to wear kippot or Stars of David in public. Rabbis have been beaten all over the continent.

There is no state sanction for anti-Jewish violence in Europe. But in many places it is either brushed off as insignificant, or justified as a natural byproduct of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. In at least one case, the official downplaying of the significance of anti-Jewish sentiments and violence has had murderous consequences.

In January 2006 Ilan Halimi, a French Jew, was kidnapped by a gang of Muslim sadists. For an entire week, the police ignored the anti-Semitic nature of the attack - and hence the imminent danger to Halimi's life - in spite of the fact that his kidnappers made threatening phone calls to Halimi's parents where they recited verses from the Koran while Ilan was heard screaming in pain from his torture in the background.

In the end, Halimi was tortured continuously for 20 days before he was dumped at a railhead naked, with burns and cuts over 80% of his battered body and died of his wounds shortly after he was found.

SOME HAVE attributed the rise in European anti-Semitism to the rapid growth of Muslim minorities throughout the continent. This explanation has much to recommend it. Levels of anti-Semitism among most Muslim minority populations in Europe are exceedingly high. According to Kaplan and Small's study, European Muslims are eight times more likely than non-Muslims to be openly anti-Semitic. And Franco Frattini, the EU official responsible for combating anti-Semitism, told The Jerusalem Post last year that some 50% of anti-Jewish attacks in Europe are conducted by Muslims.

But while European Muslims are a major factor in the rise of anti-Jewish violence, they are a bit player when it comes to the overall prevalence of anti-Jewish attitudes. For example, with 46% of Spaniards negatively disposed toward Jews, and with Muslims making up only 3-5% of Spaniards, we learn that nearly half of Christian Spaniards are anti-Semitic. And as the 2008 Pew survey shows, European hatred of Jews is growing at a fast clip. Indeed, it is growing two and a half times faster than European hatred of Muslims.

In all likelihood, these negative trends for Jews are only going to escalate in the coming years. Politicians interested in being elected have already begun exploiting the rise in anti-Jewish sentiments to increase their electoral prospects. In the 2005 British elections, for instance, the Labor Party under Tony Blair depicted then Conservative Party leader Michael Howard as the hateful anti-Semitic icon Fagin from Oliver Twist in a campaign poster. Another Labor poster portrayed Howard and fellow politician Oliver Letwin as flying pigs.

This state of affairs bodes ill for Israel's future relations with Europe. In most cases, European politicians pander to the growing constituency of anti-Semites by adopting hostile policies toward Israel. These policies then serve to further justify anti-Semitic attitudes, and so the number of European anti-Semites continues to grow, and in turn, European hostility to Israel increases.

No doubt recognizing the political advantage to be garnered by attacking Israel, last year Spanish investigative magistrate Judge Fernando Andreu Merellesis decided to use a specious complaint submitted by the discredited Palestinian Center for Human Rights to launch a war crimes investigation against Israel's top political and military leaders. Against the stated will of Spain's state prosecution, Merellesis announced last week that he is proceeding with his investigation into claims that a dozen senior Israeli leaders committed a war crime when they approved the 2002 decision to target Hamas terror master Salah Shehadeh.

ALL OF this brings us back to Europhilic Israel. Due to the fact that the majority of Israelis have yet to get their way, and Israel continues not to be a member in the EU, EU courts lack the power to enforce their rulings against Israelis. Today the only thing Israelis need to worry about is that we will be arrested if we visit Europe. This is inconvenient, but not impossible to live with.

Were Israel to join the EU, however, EU laws would supersede Israeli laws. European courts could compel Israeli courts to enforce their rulings. Israel, in short, would find itself subsumed in a hostile political entity that could simply adjudicate and legislate it out of existence.

So what explains Israel's unrequited love affair with Europe?

There is no all-encompassing explanation for the EU's popularity in Israel. It is a function of a number of complementary causes. The most important among them is the abject failure of the Israeli media to examine European anti-Semitism and its implications for European policy toward Israel in any coherent fashion.

Rather than recognize that European anti-Semitism and its concomitant hostility toward Israel is the consequence of internal European dynamics, the Israeli media tend to cast both as a function of Israel's actions. Doing so certainly makes for neat, easily digestible news stories, but it also trivializes the situation. Moreover, by acting as though Israel's actual behavior is at all relevant to European treatment of Jews and the Jewish state, the local media effectively buy into cynical European moves to belittle the significance of anti-Jewish violence. They give credence to false European claims that the firebombing of synagogues is simply the regrettable consequence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Then there is the issue of Israel's constant quest to end its international isolation. For many Israelis, it is tantalizing to think that we can end our international isolation by joining the EU. The EU is seen as a club of rich and cultured countries with which Israel would benefit from merging. This view again is nurtured by the media, which have failed to report on the failure of the European welfare state model.

In light of the media's refusal to tell the story of Europe's hostility toward Jews and the Jewish state, or the story of the EU's severe economic problems, it is not surprising that precious few Israeli politicians have a clear understanding of Europe. Successive foreign ministers - from Shimon Peres to Silvan Shalom to Tzipi Livni to Avigdor Lieberman - have all voiced varying degrees of support for Israeli membership in the EU. Their statements have never been challenged in debate.

Finally, there is the nostalgia that many Israelis feel toward the old pre-war Europe from their grandparents' stories. That long gone Europe, where young women and men would walk along the promenades in Berlin, Paris, Antwerp and Prague holding hands and eating ice cream, breathing in the air of Heinrich Heine and Franz Kafka, has been kept alive in the imaginations of generations of Israelis. Many of them work today as leading journalists, movie directors and actors. For many Israelis, then, the myth of Europe is more familiar than the real Europe.

Looking to a future of an increasingly Jew-hating Europe it is clear that Israel and Israelis must quickly divest ourselves of our delusions about Europe. For Israel to competently contend with Europe in the coming years, it will be essential that both our political leaders and society as a whole gain a firm grasp of where Europe stands in relation to both the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

With a burgeoning and deeply anti-Semitic Muslim minority, and with a Christian majority increasingly comfortable with flaunting traditional anti-Semitic attitudes, dispensing with anti-Jewish myths ranks low on the priority list for most European leaders. In contrast, for Israel, gazing at this unfolding European state of affairs, it is clear that abandoning our adoration for a mythological Europe is one of the most urgent items on our national agenda.

Signs and Events

America's Support for Israel

May. 7, 2009
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

Arctic winds are blowing into Jerusalem from Washington these days. As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's May 18 visit to Washington fast approaches, the Obama administration is ratcheting up its anti-Israel rhetoric and working feverishly to force Israel into a corner.

Using the annual AIPAC conference as a backdrop, this week the Obama administration launched its harshest onslaught against Israel to date. It began with media reports that National Security Adviser James Jones told a European foreign minister that the US is planning to build an anti-Israel coalition with the Arabs and Europe to compel Israel to surrender Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians.

According to Haaretz, Jones was quoted in a classified foreign ministry cable as having told his European interlocutor, "The new administration will convince Israel to compromise on the Palestinian question. We will not push Israel under the wheels of a bus, but we will be more forceful toward Israel than we have been under Bush."

He then explained that the US, the EU and the moderate Arab states must determine together what "a satisfactory endgame solution," will be.

As far as Jones is concerned, Israel should be left out of those discussions and simply presented with a fait accompli that it will be compelled to accept.

Events this week showed that Jones's statement was an accurate depiction of the administration's policy. First, quartet mediator Tony Blair announced that within six weeks the US, EU, UN and Russia will unveil a new framework for establishing a Palestinian state. Speaking with Palestinian reporters on Wednesday, Blair said that this new framework will be a serious initiative because it "is being worked on at the highest level in the American administration."

Moreover, this week we learned that the administration is trying to get the Arabs themselves to write the Quartet's new plan. The London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi pan-Arab newspaper reported Tuesday that acting on behalf of Obama, Jordanian King Abdullah urged the Arab League to update the so-called Arab peace plan from 2002. That plan, which calls for Israel to withdraw from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights and accept millions of foreign Arabs as citizens as part of the so-called "right of return" in exchange for "natural" relations with the Arab world, has been rejected by successive Israeli governments as a diplomatic subterfuge whose goal is Israel's destruction.

By accepting millions of so-called "Palestinian refugees," Israel would effectively cease to be a Jewish state. By shrinking into the 1949 armistice lines, Israel would be unable to defend itself against foreign invasion. And since "natural relations" is a meaningless term both in international legal discourse and in diplomatic discourse, Israel would have committed national suicide for nothing.

To make the plan less objectionable to Israel, Abdullah reportedly called on his Arab brethren to strike references to the so-called "Arab refugees" from the plan and to agree to "normal" rather than "natural" relations with the Jewish state. According to the report, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was expected to present Obama with the changes to the plan during their meeting in Washington later this month. The revised plan was supposed to form the basis for the new Quartet plan that Blair referred to.

But the Arabs would have none of it. On Wednesday, both Arab League General Secretary Amr Moussa and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas announced that they oppose the initiative. On Thursday, Syria rejected making any changes in the document.

The administration couldn't care less. The Palestinians and Arabs are no more than bit players in its Middle East policy. As far as the Obama administration is concerned, Israel is the only obstacle to peace.

To make certain that Israel understands this central point, Vice President Joseph Biden used his appearance at the AIPAC conference to drive it home. As Biden made clear, the US doesn't respect or support Israel's right as a sovereign state to determine its own policies for securing its national interests. In Biden's words, "Israel has to work toward a two-state solution. You're not going to like my saying this, but not build more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow the Palestinians freedom of movement."

FOR ISRAEL, the main event of the week was supposed to be President Shimon Peres's meeting with Obama on Tuesday. Peres was tasked with calming the waters ahead of Netanyahu's visit. It was hoped that he could introduce a more collegial tone to US-Israel relations.

What Israel didn't count on was the humiliating reception Peres received from Obama. By barring all media from covering the event, Obama transformed what was supposed to be a friendly visit with a respected and friendly head of state into a back-door encounter with an unwanted guest, who was shooed in and shooed out of the White House without a sound.

The Obama White House's bald attempt to force Israel to take full blame for the Arab world's hostility toward it is not the only way that it is casting Israel as the scapegoat for the region's ills. In their bid to open direct diplomatic ties with Iran, Obama and his advisers are also blaming Israel for Iran's nuclear program. They are doing this both indirectly and directly.

As Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel made clear in his closed-door briefing to senior AIPAC officials this week, the administration is holding Israel indirectly responsible for Iran's nuclear program. It does this by claiming that Israel's refusal to cede its land to the Palestinians is making it impossible for the Arab world to support preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Somewhat inconveniently for the administration, the Arabs themselves are rejecting this premise. This week US Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the Persian Gulf and Egypt to soothe Arab fears that the administration's desperate attempts to appease the mullahs will harm their security interests. He also sought to gain their support for the administration's plan to unveil a new peace plan aimed at isolating and pressuring Israel.

After meeting with Gates, Amr Moussa - who has distinguished himself as one of Israel's most trenchant critics - said categorically, "The question of Iran should be separate from the Arab-Israel conflict."

Just as the administration is unmoved by objective facts that expose as folly its single-minded devotion to the notion that Israel is responsible for the absence of peace in the Middle East, so the Arab rejection of its view that Israel is to blame for Iran's nuclear program has simply driven it to escalate its attacks on Israel. This week it opened a new campaign of blaming Israel directly - through its purported nuclear arsenal - for Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Speaking at a UN forum, US Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller said, "Universal adherence to the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea... remains a fundamental objective of the United States."

As Eli Lake from The Washington Times demonstrated convincingly, by speaking as she did, Gottemoeller effectively abrogated a 40-year-old US-Israeli understanding that the US would remain silent about Israel's nuclear program because it understood that it was defensive, not offensive in nature. In so doing, Gottemoeller legitimized Iran's claim that it cannot be expected to suspend its quest to acquire nuclear weapons as long as Israel possesses them. She also erased any distinction between nuclear weapons in the hands of US allies and democratic states and nuclear weapons in the hands of US enemies and terror states.

The Israeli media are largely framing the story of the US's growing and already unprecedented antagonism toward Israel as a diplomatic challenge for Netanyahu. To meet this challenge, it is argued that Netanyahu must come to Washington in 10 days' time with an attractive peace plan that will win over the White House. But this is a false interpretation of what is happening.

Even Ethan Bronner of the The New York Times pointed out this week that Obama's Middle East policy is not based on facts. If it were, the so-called "two state solution," which has failed repeatedly since 1993, would not be its centerpiece. Obama's Middle East policy is based on ideology, not reality. Consequently, it is immune to rational argument.

The fact that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, all chance of peace between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and the Arab world will disappear, is of no interest to Obama and his advisers. They do not care that the day after Hamas terror-master Khaled Mashaal told The New York Times that Hamas was suspending its attacks against Israel from Gaza, the Iranian-controlled terror regime took credit for several volleys of rockets shot against Israeli civilian targets from Gaza. The administration stills intends to give Gaza $900 million in US taxpayer funds, and it still demands that Israel give its land to a joint Fatah-Hamas government.

REGARDLESS OF the weight of Netanyahu's arguments, and irrespective of the reasonableness of whatever diplomatic initiative he presents to Obama, he can expect no sympathy or support from the White House.

As a consequence, the operational significance of the administration's anti-Israel positions is that Israel will not be well served by adopting a more accommodating posture toward the Palestinians and Iran. Indeed, perversely, what the Obama administration's treatment of Israel should be making clear to the Netanyahu government is that Israel should no longer take Washington's views into account as it makes its decisions about how to advance Israel's national security interests. This is particularly true with regard to Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Rationally speaking, the only way the Obama administration could reasonably expect to deter Israel from attacking Iran's nuclear installations would be if it could make the cost for Israel of attacking higher than the cost for Israel of not attacking. But what the behavior of the Obama administration is demonstrating is that there is no significant difference in the costs of the two options.

By blaming Israel for the absence of peace in the Middle East while ignoring the Palestinians' refusal to accept Israel's right to exist; by seeking to build an international coalition with Europe and the Arabs against Israel while glossing over the fact that at least the Arabs share Israel's concerns about Iran; by exposing Israel's nuclear arsenal and pressuring Israel to disarm while in the meantime courting the ayatollahs like an overeager bridegroom, the Obama administration is telling Israel that regardless of what it does, and what objective reality is, as far as the White House is concerned, Israel is to blame.

This, of course, doesn't mean that Netanyahu shouldn't make his case to Obama when they meet and to the American people during his US visit. What it does mean is that Netanyahu should have no expectation that Israeli goodwill can divert Obama from the course he has chosen. And again, this tells us two things: Israel's relations with the US during Obama's tenure in office will be unpleasant and difficult, and the damage that Israel will cause to that relationship by preventing Iran from acquiring the means to destroy it will be negligible.

Signs and Events

Holocaust was pretext for Israel's creation


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday branded Israel a "racist government," charging the West with dispossessing the Palestinians "on the pretext of Jewish suffering from World War II."

The remarks seemingly living up to concerns that the United Nations conference on racism which he was addressing would turn into a forum to vilify the Jewish state.

 

 

 

 

The comments sparked a mass walk-out of the conference hall by dozens of Western delegates to the summit.

Ahmadinejad accused Israel of "being the most cruel and racist regime," sparking a walkout by angry Western diplomats at the conference and protests from others.


In a rambling speech, Ahmadinejad on Monday pointed the finger at the United States, Europe and Israel and said they were "destabilizing the entire world."


Some European diplomats immediately walked out of the room when Ahmadinejad said Israel was "created on the pretext of Jewish suffering from World War II."


"The UN security council has stabilized this occupation regime and supported it in the last 60 years giving them a free hand to continue their crimes," Ahmadinejad said.


"What were the root causes of the U.S. attacks against Iraq or invasion of Afghanistan?" the Iranian president said. "The Iraqi people have suffered enormous losses ... wasn't the military action against Iraq planned by the Zionists ... in the U.S. administration, in complicity with the arms manufacturing companies?"

"The Security Council made it possible for that illegitimate government to be set up," Ahmadinejad said. "For 60 years, this government was supported by the world. Many Western countries say they are fighting racism, but in fact support it with occupation, bombings and crimes committed in Gaza. These countries support the criminals."


A wigged protester shouting "Racist! racist!" threw a soft red object at
Ahmadinejad, hitting the podium and interrupting his speech.

 

Ahmadinejad's speech came as Israel prepared to mark its own Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Iranian leader has repeatedly claimed the Holocaust never happened and has called repeatedly for Israel's destruction.

The president also criticized the United States, which had boycotted the conference along with a host of other countries, accusing it of invading Iraq and Afghanistan solely to "expand its sphere of control."

The first anti-racism conference, held in Durban, South Africa in 2001, was dominated by condemnation of Israel, which led to a walk-out by the United States and Israel.


UN chief Ban Ki-moon condemned Ahmadinejad for his tirade against Israel.

Ban says the Iranian leader "used his speech to accuse, divide and even incite, directly opposing the aim of the meeting."

"Such outrageous anti-Semitic remarks should have no place in a UN anti-racism forum," said British ambassador Peter Gooderham, whose country chose not to send a minister to Geneva.

UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Ahmadinejad's statement were "offensive, inflammatory and utterly unacceptable."


But he defended the UK's decision to participate in the conference, saying that "nor should we leave the international stage only to those, like President Ahmedinejad, who would take global efforts against racism backwards."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Ahmadinejad's speech an "intolerable appeal for racist hatred."

The French president "totally condemns this speech of hatred," his office said in a press statement, adding that Sarkozy "is calling for an extremely firm reaction by the European Union."


The U.S. deputy envoy to the UN called Ahmadinejad's speech "vile and hateful."


"It does a grave injustice to the Iranian nation and the Iranian people, and we call on the Iranian leadership to show much more measured, moderate, honest and constructive rhetoric when dealing with issues in the region," U.S. Deputy Ambassador Alejandro Wolff said.


Norwegian Foreign Minster Jonas Gahr Store, who was the first speaker to take the floor after Ahmadinejad's speech, said he "strongly rejected" Ahmadinejad's remarks.


Store said that Ahmadinejad had set himself apart from others, violating the spirit of the conference.

"Norway will not accept that 'the odd man out' kidnaps the efforts for the many," he said.

Actor Jon Voight, a staunch Israel supporter, also lashed out at the Iranian president.

"I am here today as a voice - for the love of freedom, for the love of democracy, for the love of life ... freedom to be who we wish to be and freedom to worship how we want to worship ... and to denounce the regime of evil that permeates from Ahamdinejad an all his evil followers," Voight told the press.

Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard University, who was hauled away by authorities on Sunday after attempting to confront Ahmadinejad during his meeting with the Swiss president in a Geneva hotel, said: "Ahmadinejad is trying to turn human rights into human wrongs by excluding from the human rights agenda more than half of humanity - women, Bahais, gays, Jews, non-Muslims and dissenters. He must fail, as tyrants before him have failed."


"If there was any doubt about what Ahmadinejad and conference organizers Iran, Libya, Pakistan and their allies had in mind as they planned Durban II, it has now been made abundantly clear," said Dr. Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish Congress."


It should surprise no one that Ahmadinejad, an avowed Holocaust denier and sponsor of international terror, would vent forth the hatred, vitriol and lies that he spewed during his address to the Durban II delegates."

"President Ahmadinejad's remarks earlier today, describing Israel as a 'racist government' established on the 'pretext' of Jewish suffering, were offensive, inflammatory and utterly unacceptable," said British Foreign Minister David Miliband. "That such remarks were made using the platform of the UN’s anti-racism conference is all the more reprehensible."