Prime Minister Netanyahu to address UN next month

This is the third year in a row the prime minister will deliver a speech before the United Nations General Assembly.

By HERB KEINON
Binyamin Netanyahu at UN 370 (photo credit: REUTERS)
Binyamin Netanyahu at UN 370
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced on Thursday that he will address the annual UN General Assembly meeting next month to deliver a speech expected to focus on Iran.
According to the Prime Minister’s Office, Netanyahu will deliver the speech on September 30. This will be the third year in a row that he will address the UN, demonstrating the importance he attributes to those speeches.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani is also expected to address the world body.
Last year, Netanyahu chose the General Assembly to unfurl a cartoonish-looking picture of a bomb, and then drew a thick red line on it that he said delineated the point in Iran’s nuclear development process beyond which it must not be allowed to proceed.
Though ridiculed at the time by pundits and politicians, that speech remained embedded in the minds of many. In April, The Washington Post editorialized that Netanyahu’s explicit setting of a red line in that speech “appears to have accomplished what neither negotiations nor sanctions have yielded: concrete Iranian action to limit its enrichment.”
The prime minister is expected to meet with a number of world leaders on the sidelines of the General Assembly. While a meeting with United States President Barack Obama is possible, nothing has been finalized or announced.