ALGIERS, March 23: Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi grabbed the spotlight at an Arab summit on Wednesday, calling Israelis and Palestinians idiots for seeking separate states and saying the UN Security Council was a terrorist organization. The Algerian hosts of the two-day meeting gave the maverick leader a star role on the closing day, allowing him to vent at length on Arab grievances about international relations.
He said the world should thank Syria for maintaining peace in Lebanon and argued that what he called “Islamic terrorism” was mainly the result of the West’s cultural arrogance.
On the issue of a state for Palestinians, Mr Qadhafi went against the grain, preaching the minority view that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for the two peoples to live together in a single state.
His targets, including Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, took it lightly, chuckling at his one-hour speech.
But he drew sustained applause for airing views which many Arabs express in private but which their leaders rarely utter in public. Among the dignitaries present was UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose own speech was conventionally diplomatic.
Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the host of the summit, hailed Mr Qadhafi’s frankness, if not his statesmanship.
“I believe most of his opinions and ideas are real and correct but the difference...is that I am responsible for the state and the people,” he said.
“If an ordinary person (speaks like that) it doesn’t matter, but I am responsible and I do not want to harm my people.”
Mr Qadhafi said Israel had no right to exist because the Palestinian inhabitants of the country never accepted it.
But he added: “I cannot recognise either the Palestinian state or the Israeli state. Don’t be angry, Abu Mazen, but the Palestinians are idiots and the Israelis are idiots.”
The Israelis were wrong to try to hold on to the West Bank in the face of Palestinian attacks and the Palestinians were wrong not to have set up their own state after 1948, he said.
“The solution I think is to have a single state. We cannot have two states,” added Mr Qadhafi.
Mr Qadhafi dismissed the argument that poverty is at the root of violence by militant Islamists and pinned the blame on “oppression, injustice, arrogance, insults, contempt and the humiliation of this (Arab) nation”. —Reuters
