Walk out on Ahmadinejad? Why listen to him in the first place?

It is hard to know what is more risible: the predictable hatemongering from Iran's puppet President at the UN today or the subsequent walkout by US diplomats. President Ahmadinejad gave a speech at the General Assembly in which he suggested that Americans were behind the September 11th attacks and had engineered them in order to protect the 'Zionist regime'. For those expecting an ill informed diatribe against the Jews, he did not disappoint. He talked of a 'small minority' that was trying to 'dominate the politics, economy and culture of major parts of the world by its complicated networks.' It's the Protcols all over again, in other words.

But it is now standard fare for American (and British and European) diplomats to make a public protest whenever Ahmadinejad speaks. Not a bad reaction, you may think, except that it is based on the absurd premise that Ahmadinejad is actually worth listening to in the first place. It is as if they are prepared to give him a chance provided that he adopts a moderate tone and resists the temptation to indulge in insidious Jew bashing. What exactly are these diplomats expecting when the President takes to the podium? A peace poem for the West, perhaps? A repudiation of Islamism? An end to the sponsorship of terror? Can we live in the real world please?

The Iranian leadership is intrinsically hostile to Western democracy, America and her allies and the Judaeo-Christian values that underpin them all. Ahmadinejad cannot repudiate this ferocious anti Westernism because it underpins the whole wretched system of Iranian theocracy. He is its pin up boy; the voice of the 1979 Revolution. That is why no Western diplomat should be listening to him and why no respectable international institution should be hosting him.

Yet the UN has a track record of hosting every terror regime on the planet. Syria was a member of the Security Council at the time of the Iraq war. Libya has served on the 'Human Rights Council' together with a host of autocratic regimes. Arafat's PLO was feted in the 1970s despite its campaign of murderous violence. The UN is thus one of the most morally compromised organisations in the world today.

That is why Obama's obeisance to the General Assembly today, in which he reiterated his 'hand of friendship' to the Iranian leadership, was a truly sickening spectacle. It is not just that Ahmadinejad is morally beyond the pale (which is obvious) but that the UN is the institutional embodiment of tyranny and dictatorship, and thus provides the perfect forum for extremists like Ahmadinejad.