Ban confronted Ahmadinejad on speech
By Itamar Sharon
October 14, 2008
The Jerusalem Post
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UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has said that he personally confronted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over his address to the UN  General Assembly last month, in which the Iranian leader accused Zionists of covertly influencing world powers and said that Israel was on its way to collapse. 
On Monday, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said it was told by an aide to  the secretary general that the secretary general was disturbed to hear the comments made by President Ahmadinejad of Iran in which he predicted the collapse of Israel and alluded to racial stereotypes. The secretary general raised this issue with both President Ahmadinejad and  Iranian Foreign Minister [Manuchehr] Mottaki, who met with him at their request, and urged the Iranian officials to refrain from making such remarks. Ban also pledged to continue to advocate full respect of the UN resolutions against Holocaust denial. 
But officials in the Wiesenthal Center said such protest, while admirable, was not enough. 
While we welcome the secretary's personal protest, there will be no change in Iran's state-sponsored anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, so long as the world's diplomats hug and applaud the Iranian president after his hate-filled speech, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, adding, It is no coincidence that just days after Ahmadinejad's address, Iran's education minister attended the official release in Teheran of a Persian-language book entitled 'Holocaust' which presented commentaries supporting Holocaust revisionism and contained such illustrations as a Jew with a crooked nose, religious Jews drawing outlines of dead bodies on the ground and Jews entering an oven in a concentration camp and leaving the other side as gun-toting 'terrorists'. 
We urge the permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany and Austria to publicly sanction Iran for its threats against the Jewish people and Israel and its leadership and for its continuing state-sponsored denial of the Shoah, Cooper stated. 
In his September 23 speech, which has been slammed by Israeli and Jewish leaders, Ahmadinejad said Zionists were dominating the US in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner. European nations were being coerced into opposing the Islamic Republic's nuclear program by a shadowy Zionist minority because of its financial clout and proximity to power, he said. 
These nations are spending their dignities and resources on the occupations, crimes and threats of the Zionist network, Ahmadinejad said.
He added that Israel and America were on their way to ruin. Today, the Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse, he added.