Qadhafi…
… never fails to entertain:
“The Israelis are idiots and the Palestinians as well,” Kadhafi said Wednesday 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.
The leaders, including Abbas who is making his debut at a an Arab summit after he succeeded Yasser Arafat who died in November, broke out into uncontrolled laughter.
The unpredictable Kadhafi rambled on for more 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.
Unpredictable? Stark raving mad more like.
Categories: Libya.
Gaddafi’s speech, taken as a whole, made a good deal of sense in fact and was much admired by many of the Arabs who listened to it. Even the Algerian president gave him credit for expressing so frankly the views of many in the region. Of course, the news reports concentrated on the most bizarre and sensational of his remarks. And Gaddafi was speaking, inevitably, from the point of view of an aging autocrat who basically believes that his way of governing has been sound. But his remarks on ‘terrorism’, Syria/Lebanon, Iraqi democracy, the tyranny of the Security Council and cultural arrogance were certainly not the rantings of someone who is ’stark raving mad’.