Ahmadi-nejad covered the rhetorical waterfront in a 40-minute speech Sunday to the International Youth Conference on the Islamic Awakening, which is what the rest of the world calls the Arab Spring.
The president told the audience, “The great God did not send several separate religions—Judaism, Christianity or Islam. His Eminence Abraham, peace be upon him, was a Muslim. His Eminence Moses was a Muslim. His Eminence Jesus was a Muslim. God sent only one religion.”
He did not mention Buddha or the multitude of Hindu gods.
But he said the West intends to cause religious and ethnic strife and is determined to suppress the popular movements now raging across the region and to sow seeds of discord to attain its sinister goals.
Ahmadi-nejad denounced the West’s claim of advocating democracy and justice. He said democracy doesn’t come out of the barrel of an American gun. The US and its cohorts, he said, only want to impose poverty and humiliation on nations.
Ahmadi-nejad claimed the US and other Western countries sold over $60 billion worth of weapons to Middle Eastern states in 2011. He didn’t say where he got that figure. But he asked, “Are these weapons used for peace, freedom and democracy or for massacre, war, and development of disputes?”
Ahmadi-nejad said justice, freedom and dignity are the rights of all nations, but today the colonial powers are pursuing the same goals of domination the old colonial powers pursued, but doing so under the motto of democracy and human rights.
He said the very existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to the dignity of human beings and disrespect to the peoples of the world.
Ahmadi-nejad said the hegemonic powers of the world installed the Zionist regime in the Middle East in an “historical scheme” to gain control over the region. “Why did they install the Zionist regime? To gain control over oil, as well as the popular and revolutionary uprisings in the Middle East,” he said.
