US leads mass walkout of Ahmadinejad UN speech

UNITED NATIONS: The United States on Thursday led a mass walkout of the UN General Assembly as Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched an outspoken attack on Western nations.

The Iranian leader again cast doubt on the origins of the Holocaust and the September 11, 2001 attacks and criticized the United States 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 stormed. In a repeat of walkouts at the United Nations 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 European Union 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,” said US mission spokesman Mark Kornblau.

A French spokesman called Ahmadinejad’s attacks “unacceptable” in a message sent on Twitter, and the German delegation said it was protesting the “crude, anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-West tirade 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.

But 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. AFP