Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has provoked his share of walk outs at the U.N. In 2009, European delegates stormed out of a U.N. conference on racism when Ahmadinejad called Israel the "most cruel and racist regime." The next year, at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, the U.S. delegation and other diplomats headed for the exits when the Iranian leader suggested the U.S. was behind the 9/11 attacks. Well, he's done it again, using much of the same inflammatory language that he's used before. Several outlets are reporting that the U.S. and several European delegations have walked out of Ahmadinejad's U.N. General Assembly address this morning.

According to The Guardian, which is live-blogging Ahmadinejad's speech, asked how the "flower of democracy" could blossom from from "NATO's missiles, guns or bombs." He also reportedly declared that "arrogant powers" threaten sanctions and military action against anyone who questions the Holocaust or 9/11 (which he called "mysterious") and lashed out at the U.S. for waging wars, sparking the financial crisis, and killing Osama bin Laden "to hide the truth about 9/11" (he thinks bin Laden should have been put on trial). "Basically the same Ahmadinejad speech we've heard before, but he cut a lot quicker to the punch lines," The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders tweets. Andrew Quinn at Reuters points out that the Iranian leader "did not take on the 'Zionist entity' (tho he did take on Zionism) and did not mention Palestinians." Here's the full text of the speech.

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Uri Friedman