Maverick Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi on Wednesday upstaged the final session of the Arab summit with an unscheduled address describing Israel and the Palestinians as “idiots”, leaving his audience in fits of laughter.“The Israelis are idiots and the Palestinians as well,” Kadhafi said in the speech at the closing session of the two-day summit in Algiers which is usually reserved for a reading of the final resolutions.“The Jews are dying by the dozen because they are in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. If these regions are so important to them, why didn’t they occupy them before” seizing other Arab land, Kadhafi said.“The Palestinians, too, are idiots because they lost these territories in 1967. So we must admit that both are idiots,” he added.
This coming from someone who claims that if Israel lays down all of its weapons, allows in 7 million PLO Arab ‘refugees’, and leaves the Golan heights, then we can live together in a peaceful, binational state.
But notice why he considers the PLO Arabs to be idiots. Because they lost the territories (actually, Jordan and Egypt lost the territories – ed). Not because they chose murder as their strategy, and in so doing, caused suffering to both Israelis and their own people.
Gaddafi’s stand-up routine, however, did not end there.
The unpredictable Kadhafi rambled on for than one hour, giving advice on topics as diverse as women’s rights in the male-dominated Arab world, Iraq, the Syrian-Lebanese crisis, democracy, terrorism, Uganda and Ghana.At the start of his speech, Kadhafi noted that the summit proved to the world that the Arabs “are not racist” because it welcomed several foreign dignitaries who addressed the meeting.
[Laugh]
Kadhafi, who until recently was ostracised by the West, defended Syria for “the numerous sacrifices it made in Lebanon”
[Laugh]
“The world’s perception of the Arabs is that we carry no weight, that we are sheep,” he said.
[Laugh]
Ahh, Muammar..he would almost be funny if he wasn’t such a lunatic.
“Idiots! Heh heh heh heh heh. That Muammar really cracks me up!”
Update: According to Israel Radio, the PLO Arabs want Gaddafi to apologize for calling them idiots. I guess they will also be demanding an apology from their own leader, who didn’t seem to mind.
The leaders, including Abbas who is making his debut at an Arab summit after he succeeded Yasser Arafat who died in November, broke out into uncontrolled laughter.
Update: The Ha’aretz report on Gaddafi’s speech reveals that the man actually made a few good points.
Gadhafi also asked why Palestinians hadn’t established a state between 1948 and 1967, when the West Bank was under Jordanian sovereignty and Gaza under Egyptian control.Gadhafi shocked the Arab leaders by saying, “Terror is identified with Islam.” He dismissed the argument that poverty is at the root of violence by Islamists, and put the blame on “oppression, injustice, arrogance, insults, contempt and the humiliation of this [Arab] nation.”
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev also made a good point.
Asked about the “idiot” reference, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said: “It takes one to know one.”
