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immediately called someone I knew in the Obama administration, who phoned the US Embassy in
Geneva and I was allowed back in the hotel with an apology. The photograph of me being
forcibly removed from the hotel was flashed around the world, with the following caption:

“Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, is led away after declaring he planned to
challenge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about his views on the Holocaust and
Israel minutes before the meeting between Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz and the
Iranian president in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 19, 2009.”

The next day Ahmadinejad was scheduled to give his address to the Durban Conference. We
were not allowed into the Chamber in which he was speaking, but were told to go to a special
room where we could watch and listen to his talk. We assembled in that room and watched as
Ahmadinejad was greeted with applause by many of the delegates. When he began to speak, we
discovered that his words, delivered in Farsi, were not being translated to those of us in the
separate room, but only to those in Assembly Chamber. This was not acceptable and so I
marched to the Assembly Chamber and simply walked in. Several delegations were absent and so
we simply took their seats. But not for long. As soon as Ahmadinejad denied the Holocaust,
which he did near the beginning of his speech, I stood up and shouted “Shame” and walked out,
passing directly in front of his lectern. Many others walked out as well, including several
European delegations. Ahmadinejad’s talk was a fiasco, and was so reported by the media. He
had made a fool of himself, with little help from us.

The following year, the Durban Conference on human rights was once against convened, this time
in New York. Once again, we convened parallel conferences. In my address, I made the
following point:
One important reason why there is no peace in the Middle East can be summarized
tragically in two letters, UN. That building dedicated in theory to peace has facilitated
terrorism, stood idly by genocide, given a platform to holocaust deniers, and
disincentivized the Palestinians from negotiating a reasonable two-state solution.

...

How dare states such as Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Iran, Bahrain, Syria,
Belarus and other tyrannies too numerous to mention -- but if you want to see the list, just
go over to the next building -- read the list of nation states and you'll see more than half of
them fit this definition of undemocratic tyrannies. How dare those tyrannies lecture Israel
about human rights? How dare states such as Turkey, that have attacked their own
Kurdish minorities and Armenian minorities, and Russia, which has attacked its own
Chechnyan minority, how dare these warmongering countries lecture Israel about peace?

How dare Norway with its long and sordid history of anti-Semitism and collaboration with
evil, a history which tragically persists to this day, how dare Norway lecture Israel on
equality? How dare South Africa, which continues to practice de facto, though not de
jure apartheid, call Israel, which is far more integrated than South Africa, an apartheid
state?

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