UNITED NATIONS: The annual United Nations General Assembly in New York has long been a magnet for world leaders great and small, so it’s hosted some performances that are memorable more for entertainment value than for their import.

The session that just concluded is no exception, having featured reggae lyrics, a lamentation about the loss of Libyan ruler Muammar Qadhafi and a cartoon bomb.

The most memorable moment was Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu producing a drawing of a bomb with a lighted fuse to illustrate the danger of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. “How much enriched uranium do you need for a bomb? And how close is Iran to getting it?” he asked. “Well, let me show you.”

“Netanyahu and his cartoon bomb saved this General Assembly from being a dramatic dud,” said Richard Gowan, associate director for crisis diplomacy and peace operations at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. “Everyone secretly still misses Qadhafi at the UN. He just took crazy to another level.”

The Israeli leader’s lighted fuse, which triggered an explosion of online commentary and cable television reviews, was the latest in a long history of attention-grabbing performances on the world body’s stage.

In 1960, Fidel Castro travelled to New York for the General Assembly, meeting African-American Muslim leader Malcolm X, plucking chickens in his hotel room in New York’s poverty-stricken Harlem, and blasting American imperialism from a lectern before a green-marble backdrop.

The bearded Cuban communist revolutionary’s marathon speech broke records and set a standard for bizarre appearances at the UN.

In 1960, the same year Castro plucked chickens, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev responded to a comparison of his country’s domination of Eastern Europe to Western imperialism by brandishing his shoe, or according to some contemporaneous accounts, banging it on his desk.

Six years ago, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez brandished a copy of political activist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or survival: America’s quest for global dominance”. (Chomsky repaid the favour last year by accusing Chavez of concentrating too much power in his hands.)

In 1974, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat showed up in a military uniform, though he did check his gun at the door, and Qadhafi tried to rip up the UN Charter in 2009.

The self-professed “King of Kings” of Africa made his debut at the UN wearing orange-coloured Bedouin robes. In his first and only time addressing the General Assembly, Qadhafi showed his contempt for the world body in a 90-minute ramble, tossing a copy of its 1945 rulebook over his shoulder. Two years later, Qadhafi was on the run and pulled out of a drainage pipe by rebel forces before he came to a violent end.

The task of mourning his death a year ago was left this year to Zimbabwe’s 88-year-old ruler, Robert Mugabe, back at the United Nations in spite of his advancing years and showing few signs of slowing down.

While Netanyahu’s Iranian bomb stole the show, there were a few gems in store for those delegates awake enough to sit through 12 hours of speeches a day.

Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller paid homage to her Caribbean island’s most famous citizen, Bob Marley, by closing her address with words sung by the reggae star, who died in 1981: “One Love, One Heart.”

Another Caribbean leader compared the power dynamics in the UN to those of the animal kingdom.

“It is well known that the lion’s view of history does not coincide with that of the gazelle or the lamb; the elephant and the ant do not see things eye-to-eye,” said Ralph E. Gonsalves of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Ending the General Assembly’s week of debate on Monday, North Korea’s representative said the US was plotting his country’s demise, justifying its pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

“The US has already finalised different Korean war scenarios and it is waiting for a chance to implement them,” Deputy Foreign Minister Pak Kil Yon said, as a camera panning the audience showed a vacant seat for the American representative and two Moroccan diplomats joking among themselves.

Perhaps the biggest surprise this year was that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at his last General Assembly before leaving office, played the lamb rather than the lion. In previous years, the Iranian president called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that had to be removed and declared the Sept 11, 2001, attacks an inside job.

Instead, President Ahmadinejad’s swan song was an ode to a new world order that touched on the Occupy Wall Street movement and digressed to “woman’s sublime role and personality, as a heavenly being, a manifestation of divine image and beauty”. He didn’t mention that in Iran, women are required to conceal their beauty at all times in public.

“Ahmadinejad flopped,” Gowan said in an interview. “The chief rabble-rouser didn’t deliver on the day.”

With the North Korean and Cuban leaders’ no-shows, the latest country to join the ranks of shunned speakers at the tail end of this year’s General Assembly is Syria, whose 18-month rebellion against President Bashar Assad’s government was a dominant theme of the UN’s summit.

Speaking to a largely empty room, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al Muallem attacked the US and its Arab and European allies who, he said, “support terrorism in my country”. He said: “Under the pretext of humanitarian intervention, these countries interfere in the domestic affairs of states.”

Indeed, the star of the show this year may have been the UN secretary general, a man better known for trying to extinguish fires than for lighting them.

“The fact that Ban Ki-moon was generally praised for giving a strong and provocative speech tells you something about how dull a lot of the rest of the speeches must have been,” Richard Gowan said in an email.

By arrangement with Washington Post/Bloomberg News Service