http://www.yahoo.com/s/1060423

By Laura MacInnis Laura Macinnis – 1 hr 1 min ago
GENEVA (Reuters) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prompted a walkout from his speech to a U.N. racism summit on Monday when he accused Israel of establishing a "cruel and repressive racist regime" over the Palestinians.

The summit had already been badly undermined by a boycott by the United States and some of its major allies over concerns that it would be used as a platform for attacks against Israel.

The boycott left Ahmadinejad, who has in the past cast doubt on the Nazi Holocaust, as the only head of state in attendance. His speech produced the kind of language that the Western countries and Israel had feared.

"Following World War II they resorted to military aggressions to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering," Ahmadinejad told the conference, on the day that Jewish communities commemorate the Holocaust.

"And they sent migrants from Europe, the United States and mother parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine," he said, according to the official translation.

"And in fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine."

Dozens of diplomats in the audience promptly got up and left the hall for the duration of the speech.

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

Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store told the conference after Ahmadinejad had spoken that his words amounted to incitement to hatred. He said Iran had made itself the odd man out by undermining agreement on a conference declaration.

"Norway will not accept that the odd man out hijacks the collective efforts of the many," he said.

FEARS OF CONTROVERSY

Eight Western nations including the United States were avoiding the entire meeting, fearing it would be dominated by what U.S. President Barack Obama called "hypocritical and counterproductive" antagonism toward the Jewish state.

However, a number of the delegations that remained behind applauded Ahmadinejad's speech.

Arab and Muslim attempts to single out Israel for criticism had prompted the United States to walk out of the first U.N. summit on racism, in South Africa in 2001.

Although the declaration prepared for the follow-up conference does not refer explicitly to Israel or the Middle East, its first paragraph "reaffirms" a text adopted at the 2001 meeting which includes six paragraphs on those sensitive issues.

U.S. President Barack Obama, the first African-American leader of the United States, said on Saturday that Washington wanted a "clean start" to engage with the United Nations on the issues to be tackled at the meeting.

Rupert Colville, spokesman for Navi Pillay, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights who convened the meeting, said she deplored the language used by Ahmadinejad.

"This speech was completely inappropriate at a conference designed to nurture diversity and tolerance," he said.

Earlier Pillay had urged participants to do all they could to ensure the declaration is adopted at week's end.

She said this was necessary to restore confidence in the United Nations as a forum to address frictions that can explode into xenophobic attacks, as occurred in her native South Africa last year, when 62 foreigners were killed.

"We all should be mindful that a failure to agree on the way forward would negatively reverberate on the human rights agenda for years to come," Pillay said at the meeting's opening.

This guy has some balls. I just wish a European would say something like this.