Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemned Israel as a “racist” state at the U.N. racism conference, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. 23 European leaders then walked in protest.
While the West and Iran have been approaching diplomatic talks, Iran and Israel are ratcheting up threats towards each other.
The U.S., Canada, Israel, Germany, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Australia had already boycotted the event. But while the U.S. and E.U. objected to Iran’s condemnation of Israel, many third-world nations did not.
This moment reveals a divide between the white world and the rest of the world. Many compare Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with white apartheid toward blacks in South Africa. Yet white nations were unwilling to join Ahmadinejad’s conversation.
The boycott and subsequent walk-out stemmed from Ahmadinejad’s criticism of Israel. The president has denied the history of the Holocaust and even talked about Israel being “wiped off the map.”
Ahmadinejad was critical of Israel’s displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 war that occasioned the birth of Israel as a modern nation-state.
“Following World War II they resorted to military aggressions to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering, and they sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine.”
According to an AFP article, Israel is seething over the comments, which came on the day it remembered the Holocaust.
Israeli officials consider Ahmadinejad’s words to be anti-semitic. Israeli deputy prime minister Silvan Shalom had strong words of response.
“What Iran is trying to do right now is not far away at all from what Hitler did to the Jewish people just 65 years ago,” Shalom told reporters.
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