If you attend a circus, you should expect to see a clown – and if you get into the ring with him, you shouldn’t be surprised if he throws custard pies at you. You look even more ridiculous than the clown, however, if you then adopt an expression of injured dignity and complain about the mess on your jacket.
Unfortunately, that is the position of Peter Gooderham, our ambassador to the United Nations, who (in the company of a number of other apparently affronted emissaries) walked out during the Iranian president’s address to last week’s UN summit on “anti-racism”. Even the ringmaster himself – the UN secretary-general – affected to be shocked by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks that “following the second world war [the West] resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist state in occupied Palestine . . . They have committed themselves to defend those racist perpetrators of genocide”.
Ban Ki-moon, while sitting po-faced next to the Iranian president during the speech, later released a statement deploring Ahmadinejad’s “use of this platform to accuse, divide and even incite . . . At my earlier meeting with him I reminded the president that the UN General Assembly had adopted resolutions to revoke the equation of Zionism with racism and to reaffirm the historical facts of the Holocaust”.
Ban’s statement was as contrived as the walkout by our ambassador. The UN secretary-general had specifically invited the Iranian president to make the keynote address to the conference in Geneva. Given that a number of nations – the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Holland, Germany, Poland, Italy and Israel – had boycotted the event, in part because they had a pretty good idea of what the keynote speaker would make of his opportunity, Ban’s expressions of injured surprise were unconvincing.
Naturally the secretary-general’s bleating objections were not reported by IRNA, the official Iranian news agency; instead it published a back-up “historical” piece, which claimed that “the word ‘holocaust’ . . . was originally coined to refer to a criminal incident in ancient Yemen committed by Jews who burnt alive a large group of chained and handcuffed men, women and children for their adherence to the teachings of Jesus Christ (PBUH). However, the bitter historical irony is that the word was later exploited by Zionists to establish a regime by building on the false claim that more than 6m Jews had been killed in Auschwitz ovens, thus triggering the sympathy of the western people”.
As far as Israel is concerned, the true irony is that Ahmadinejad’s speech was on the eve of its own Holocaust memorial day and also the 120th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler. This concatenation of circumstances was encapsulated poignantly by the presence in Geneva of Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor and Nobel peace prize winner. In a corridor outside the conference centre this frail old man looked bewildered as he was confronted by members of the Iranian delegation repeatedly yelling at him: “Zio-Nazi! Zio-Nazi!”
One of the tragic aspects of all this is that a number of Iranians helped to save Jews during the Holocaust and Iran remains home to the largest Jewish community in the Middle East, outside Israel itself. After the failure of the Arab armies in their attempt to destroy Israel at birth in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled from riots and retribution in countries such as Egypt, Iraq and Syria; the people of Iran had never been involved in this conflict and did not seek to become so.
The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, however, has observed how its Arab neighbours have long deflected internal anger at corrupt and incompetent administrations by blaming Israel – or “the Zionists” – for all the troubles that afflict them. That is why the anti-semitic forgery known as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (which purports to reveal the Jewish plot to rule the world) has had such wide currency throughout the Middle East; and in the text of Ahmadinejad’s Geneva speech you can see it almost quoted verbatim.
The cause of the Palestinians has been adopted by the Iranian government with equal cynicism: it cares nothing for their particular plight but understands that if it wants to challenge the Sunni regime of Saudi Arabia for leadership in the Middle East, then to appear as the vanguard of the struggle against “the Zionists” is a sure way of appealing to what we might call the Muslim street.
This was observed with great clarity by Victor Kattan, a Palestinian academic based in Britain, who reported in his blog from Geneva: “There was a clear attempt by the Iranian delegation at the UN to hijack the Palestinian event I was attending. They brought their own literature and leaflets with them in which they equated the Star of David with the Nazi swastika. Their literature was promptly removed by one of the Palestinian organisers . . . It was clear the Iranians had little if any interest in Palestine or its people . . . and they made little attempt to inquire about the situation in the occupied territories.”
If the Iranian government were entirely cynical, then Israel would have less cause to feel existentially threatened by Tehran’s clear intention to develop nuclear weapons. Given that Israel has scores of nuclear warheads, is Ahmadinejad actually crazy enough to invite the destruction of his own people by attempting a first strike against Tel Aviv?
Meir Javedanfar, author of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran, is possibly the right person to ask: he was born and brought up in Iran through the period of the Islamic revolution but now lives in Tel Aviv. Javedanfar tells me that he personally does not believe Iran would use nuclear weapons against Israel, but he adds that the very fact that Israelis have such a fear would have profoundly damaging consequences for national morale and the economy – many families would urge their children to emigrate, rather than live under the shadow of an Iranian nuclear capability. In other words: the Israeli government will not let it happen.
It is, after all, the case that Ahmadinejad has called for what he calls “the Zionist entity” to be “wiped from the pages of history” and that Iran supplies the openly anti-semitic Hezbollah with its missiles. It’s easy for us in Britain to say this is mere posturing: we’re not the ones who stand to be annihilated if it turns out to be more than that.
At the least it would have been good to see the British ambassador to the UN take to the platform to reject Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denying tirade face to face – as the Norwegian ambassador managed to do. Better still, we should have played no part at all in a farcical endeavour in which a conference sponsored by a UN human rights council boasting Saudi Arabia, China and Cuba as members takes over every five-star hotel in Geneva to pass 143 non-binding resolutions in favour of greater tolerance for diversity.
Such declarations have all the force of the 1936 Soviet constitution, promulgated by Comrade Stalin, whose article 125 guaranteed: “a) freedom of speech; b) freedom of the press; c) freedom of assembly, including mass meetings; d) freedom of street processions and demonstrations”.
Even if Ahmadinejad had not been invited to make the keynote speech in Geneva on his favourite topic, like so much of the UN’s activities this whole state-sponsored “anti-racism” process is a circus in which we pay to have custard pies pushed in our faces. It might even be funny – if it weren’t so tragic.
Dominic Lawson