The election of an Iraqi diplomat, Ismat Kittani, as President of the 36th session of the General Assembly was sharply denounced by Israel last night. Kittani, Iraq’s Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, was selected by lottery after two secret ballots failed to produce the required majority for any one of the three candidates for the office.
In a statement issued immediately after the election, Yehuda Blum, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, declared: “It is a measure of the regretable decline of the United Nations’ standards that the UN General Assembly should have elected as its President the representative of a country which, as a result of multiple and ongoing acts of aggression, is in a state of war with a number of countries in the Middle East. “Iraq is actively engaged in war with Iran and remains officially in a state of war with Israel.
Blum added: “It is inconceivable that the League of Nations would have rewarded Italian aggression against Ethiopia by the election of the representative of Mussolini as president of its assembly in 1936 and now, strangely enough, the aggression of Saddam Hussein (President of Iraq) is being rewarded with the election of his representative to the presidency of the General Assembly of the United Nations.”
Kittani, a Kurd, said in his inaugural speech immediately after the election that the General Assembly must implement its resolutions of past years, including those on the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and statehood.
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