Delegates walk out on Ahmadinejad

At the controversial U.N. anti-racism conference in Geneva today, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad quite predictably began railing about how the Holocaust had been used as a pretext for establishing a "totally racist state" — Israel — in the Middle East. Dozens of delegates promptly stormed out of the conference hall: Embedded video from <a href="http://www.cnn.com/video" ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

At the controversial U.N. anti-racism conference in Geneva today, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad quite predictably began railing about how the Holocaust had been used as a pretext for establishing a "totally racist state" -- Israel -- in the Middle East. Dozens of delegates promptly stormed out of the conference hall:

At the controversial U.N. anti-racism conference in Geneva today, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad quite predictably began railing about how the Holocaust had been used as a pretext for establishing a "totally racist state" — Israel — in the Middle East. Dozens of delegates promptly stormed out of the conference hall:

Earlier in the speech, a heckler put a new spin on the "shoe-ing" trend by "clown-nosing" Ahmadinejad:

Israel is still fuming about the conference, even recalling their ambassador from Switzerland in protest. But in a lot of ways, Ahmadinejad’s speech and the delegates’ reaction to it was the best PR Israel could ever have hoped for. 

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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