After two-thirds of the world’s countries listened silently Thursday to Iranian
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launch an anti- Semitic diatribe against
Israel at the Non-Aligned Meeting summit in Tehran, Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu announced he would respond at the UN General Assembly next
month.
“In Tehran today, the representatives of 120 countries heard a
blood libel against the State of Israel and were silent. This silence must
stop,” Netanyahu said.
“Therefore, I will go to the UN General Assembly
and, in a clear voice, tell the nations of the world the truth about Iran’s
terrorist regime, which constitutes the greatest threat to world
peace.”
Khamenei, speaking to the NAM gathering that included UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said “an independent country with a clear
historical identity called ‘Palestine’ has been taken away from its people
through the use of weapons, killings and deception, and has been given to a
group of people the majority of whom are immigrants from European
countries.
“This great usurpation – which at the outset was accompanied
by massacres of defenseless people in towns and villages and their expulsion
from their homes and homeland to bordering countries – has continued for more
than six decades with similar crimes and continues to this very
day.”
Khamenei said the political and military leaders of the “usurping
Zionist regime” killed the people, destroyed their homes and farms, arrested and
tortured men, women and children, humiliated and insulted the Palestinians and
tried to digest it all into the “usury-eating stomach of the Zionist
regime.”
“Even now after 65 years the same kind of crimes marks the
treatment of Palestinians remaining in the occupied territories by the
blood-thirsty Zionist wolves.
They commit new crimes one after the other
and create new crises for the region,” he continued.
Khamenei said the
Zionists controlled the world’s media and were responsible for America’s
“hateful image” in the region.
“Our standpoint is that Palestine belongs
to the Palestinians and that continuing its occupation is a great and
intolerable injustice and a major threat to global peace and security,” he said.
Khamenei called for a referendum among all the Palestinians – “both the current
citizens of Palestine and those who have been forced to immigrate to other
countries but have preserved their Palestinian identity, including Muslims,
Christians and Jews” – to chose the country’s political system.
Ban,
whose presence at the parley is widely seen in Jerusalem as giving legitimacy to
the Iranian regime, addressed the gathering and said he “strongly” rejected
threats by one UN member state to destroy another, and “outrageous attempts to
deny historical facts, such as the Holocaust.
Claiming that another UN
member state, Israel, does not have the right to exist, or describing it in
racist terms, is not only utterly wrong but undermines the very principles we
have all pledged to uphold.”
His words, however, did little to soothe
Israeli anger at his very participation in the event.
Foreign Minister
Avigdor Liberman, at a gathering in Jerusalem marking 60 years of
Israeli-Japanese ties, characterized the event in Tehran as “a march of folly
and hypocrisy not seen since the 1930s. Against the background of all the
threats to destroy the State of Israel, erase the State of Israel, attack Jews
wherever they are, we see the representatives of 120 counties, with the UN
secretary- general, come to Iran and give legitimacy to the regime of the
ayatollahs.”
Liberman asked what Israel was supposed to understand from
the willingness of so many world leaders to take part in the conference, and how
this would impact on the future.
“How can we rely on them,” he asked.
“What is the meaning of international guarantees of our security?” Liberman
slammed the Palestinian Authority presence at the conference.
He said
that a speech delivered by PA Foreign Minister Riad Maliki – accusing Israel of
ethnic cleansing, apartheid and crimes against humanity – could have been
written by Joseph Goebbels.
Maliki said Israel had stepped up military
attacks against Palestinians and the sources of their livelihood.
“To the
military attacks have now been added violent, provoking and inciting attacks by
settlers through organized and systematic terror, which recalls the bloody
events taken by the settler and armed gangs – like the Hagana and others –
during the Nakba in 1948.”
Netanyahu, meanwhile, is scheduled to leave
for the UN on September 27, immediately after Yom Kippur, and return to Israel
on September 30, just before the onset of Succot.
Although there has been
talk of a meeting at the UN with US President Barack Obama, no meeting has yet
been officially announced.
Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin
Dempsey said Thursday that he did not want to be “complicit” if Israel chose to
strike Iran’s nuclear program, saying a premature attack would dissolve the
international pressure on the Islamic Republic, The Guardian
reported.
Speaking to journalists in London, Dempsey said an attack would
“clearly delay but probably not destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” but added that
the “international coalition” pressuring Iran “could be undone if it was
attacked prematurely.”
“I don’t want to be complicit if [Israel] chooses
to do it,” he added.
The White House said on Thursday that it was closely
studying a UN report that showed Iran has possibly expanded uranium enrichment
machines and increased stockpiles of nuclear material.
“We are closely
studying the details of the report, but broadly speaking it is not surprising
that Iran is continuing to violate its obligations,” White House Press Secretary
Jay Carney told reporters when asked about the UN International Atomic Energy
Agency’s quarterly report on Iran.
“As the report illustrates, we are in
a position to closely observe Iran’s program,” he said.
The report showed
Iran has doubled the number of uranium enrichment machines it has in an
underground bunker. Carney said the US has made it clear to Iran that they have
a limited window of time to stop its atomic work and diplomatic terms offered by
the Western world will not remain open “indefinitely.”