The UN chief and Egypt’s president delivered stinging speeches at a summit of developing nations in Iran on Thursday, damaging the host country’s quest for global prestige and support for its nuclear programme and its policy on Syria.
The Iranians had to listen while Ban Ki-moon denounced them for calling for Israel’s destruction and denying the Holocaust.
Nor did Mohammed Mursi, the first Egyptian leader to visit Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, mince his words as he urged Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) members to back Syrians trying to topple President Bashar Al Assad, Tehran’s closest Arab ally.
The United States and Israel had frowned on the decisions by Ban and Mursi to attend the summit but they can only have been pleased with the discomfort the two men caused their hosts. “I strongly reject threats by any member state to destroy another or outrageous attempts to deny historical facts such as the Holocaust,” Ban said in his speech, without naming Iran. “Claiming that Israel does not have the right to exist or describing it in racist terms is not only wrong but undermines the very principle we all have pledged to uphold,” he added.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and this month described Israel as a ‘cancerous tumour’. In 2005 he was quoted as saying Israel should be ‘wiped off the map’ — words that Persian language scholars say should have been rendered: “Israel must vanish from the page of time.” Iran has portrayed its hosting of the high-profile summit as proof that Western efforts to isolate it and punish it economically for its disputed nuclear programme have failed.
Read more: Iran’s policies roasted by Ban, Mursi - Khaleej Times
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