Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s U.N. appearance undermined the forum’s moral authority, Israel’s foreign minister said.
Tzipi Livni said Monday that the Iranian president, who regularly questions whether the Holocaust happened and inveighs against the Jewish state, should not have been allowed to deliver his speech to the U.N. General Assembly last week.
“This placed a very big question mark over the ability of the United Nations to make good on its founding pledge after World War Two, the pledge of ‘never again’,” Livni told Israel’s Army Radio in a telephone interview from New York.
“I think that a country which calls, out loud, for the destruction of another country should in principle be ostracized,” she said. “As far as this international community is concerned, this was problematic.”
But the Israeli foreign minister, who is scheduled to deliver her address to the General Assembly later Monday, said she discerned no change in international jitters about Iran and its nuclear program, despite Ahmadinejad’s media-saturated appearances in New York.
Indeed, according to Livni, the zeal with which the Iranian president tried to win foreign support is cause for some optimism.
“The very fact that he wants international legitimacy attests to the fact that we have the ability to act in this arena to influence him,” she said.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
