Ahmadinejad proves why everybody should have boycotted Durban II...

I'm happy some delegations walked out...I'm more interested in who stayed...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prompted a walkout from his speech to a U.N. racism summit on Monday when he accused Israel of establishing a "cruel and repressive racist regime" over the Palestinians.

The summit had already been badly undermined by a boycott by the United States and some of its major allies over concerns that it would be used as a platform for attacks against Israel.

The boycott left Ahmadinejad, who has in the past cast doubt on the Nazi Holocaust, as the only head of state in attendance. His speech produced the kind of language that the Western countries and Israel had feared.

"Following World War II they resorted to military aggressions to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering," Ahmadinejad told the conference, on the day that Jewish communities commemorate the Holocaust.

"And they sent migrants from Europe, the United States and mother parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine," he said, according to the official translation.

"And in fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine."

Dozens of diplomats in the audience promptly got up and left the hall for the duration of the speech.

"Such outrageous anti-Semitic remarks should have no place in a U.N. anti-racism forum," said British ambassador Peter Gooderham, whose country chose not to send a minister to Geneva.

Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store told the conference after Ahmadinejad had spoken that his words amounted to incitement to hatred. He said Iran had made itself the odd man out by undermining agreement on a conference declaration.