‘Disgusting hypocrisy’: Israeli protest during Raeisi’s UN speech backfires

By Press TV Staff Writer

As President Ebrahim Raeisi took to the podium at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday night, the Israeli regime’s ambassador to the world body was seen protesting inside the hall.

Gilad Erdan, looking visibly agitated but unnerved, briskly walked across the conference hall holding a sign that read “Iranian women deserve freedom now.” It also included an image of Mahsa Amini.

At the same time, President Raeisi was commenting on last year’s deadly West-backed riots in Iran, which were triggered by the death of 22-year-old Amini while in police custody.

He spoke about "the biggest media offensive and psychological warfare in history" against the Islamic Republic and said certain Western countries and their intelligence services, a reference to the US and its European allies, made a "miscalculation" by underestimating the nation's strength.

Amini’s death, which was due to natural causes as established by medical reports, was hijacked by the Western governments and their media to push the “regime change” agenda in Iran.

Erdan, who attempted to interrupt the Iranian president’s speech, was soon kicked out of the hall by the UN security staff, videos shared on social media showed.

The action of the Israeli regime’s envoy sparked widespread criticism from social media users, who called out the hypocrisy of the representative of the child-murdering regime on human rights.

Omar Baddar, a Washington-based political analyst, in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, said the Israeli envoy’s own nuclear-armed apartheid regime is “holding hundreds of Palestinians in dungeons without charge or trial.”

“But yes, sure, more opportunistic stunts and shameless displays of hypocrisy at the UNGA please,” he wrote, slamming the so-called protest in the UNGA hall.

Seamus Malekafzali, a journalist and writer on West Asian affairs, also took to X to denounce the Israeli envoy’s hypocrisy, reminding him of the crisis facing the apartheid regime inside and outside. 

“They're still really trying to do the "we're on the high road, unlike you" stuff even amidst everything that's going on in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,” he wrote.

Ariel Hold, a New York-based Jewish social justice activist, said Erdan had “deported and banned” her from the occupied Palestinian territories “for peacefully advocating for equal rights for Palestinians.”

“He called me “an extreme activist” but somehow now is adopting protest tactics and wants the world to applaud,” she wrote in her tweet.

Mehdi Hassan, a prominent journalist with MSNBC based in Washington DC, in a post wrote that he is guessing the US ambassador to the UN “won’t be holding up a photo of Shireen Abu Akleh during Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at UNGA.”

Mehrub Awan, a media practitioner from Karachi, echoed Hassan, asking whether the Israeli regime representative “forgot to pick up a picture of Shireen Abu Akleh.”

Den Kervick, a socialist from the US, in his X post advised Erdan to “let Palestinian women go back to the villages and towns and cities from which their grandparents were violently ethnically cleansed.”

Tikun Olam, a Seattle-based journalist, described the act as “disgusting hypocrisy.”

“Disgusting hypocrisy. I hope the Iranian UN ambassador will hold up a similar picture of murdered Palestinian mothers or Israeli Jewish women raped or murdered in honor killings,” he wrote.

Shabnam Nafisa Kalim, a social media activist from India, in a post said talking about human rights “does not suit murderers” like Erdan.

"It was today when Israelis raided Palestine houses and killed a 19 y/o (year old) young boy. We've seen u (you) dragging Palestinian women by their Hijab, ur (your) army is killing 'em (them) every day,” she stated in her post on X.

Ali Abunimah, Director of news portal Electronic Intifada, denounced those praising the act of the “representative of a brutal apartheid regime that routinely sends snipers to murder children, journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh and medics like Razan Al-Najjar.”

Erdan has a history of endorsing the Israeli regime’s crimes against Palestinians at the United Nations and has in the past been directly involved in the crimes of the apartheid regime.

In June, he said the regime will sever relations with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) if it was blacklisted over its mistreatment of Palestinian children.

Ahead of the UNGA summit last week, he was quoted as saying that the UN must not allow demonstrations scheduled against the Israeli regime premier Netanyahu in New York.

Despite the Israeli representative’s futile protest, which proved counter-productive, President Raeisi’s powerful speech to the UN General Assembly resonated widely and earned him plaudits.

He reiterated his country’s unwavering position against the Zionist occupation of Palestine and repression of Palestinians, criticizing countries that are in secret alliances with the Zionist regime.

He described the Israeli regime as the world's last entity that is "based on apartheid and racism, which has been founded based on war, occupation, terrorism, and violation of people's rights," adding that such an entity "cannot be a partner in peace."

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