Transcript: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks at the U.N. General Assembly

ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU DELIVERS REMARKS AT THE U.N. GENERAL ASSEMBLY, NEW YORK CITY

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

SPEAKER: ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU

(JOINED IN PROGRESS)

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: The United Nations recognized the rights of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland. I stand here today as the prime minister of Israel, the Jewish state. And I speak to you on behalf of my country and my people.

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II, after the horrors of the holocaust. It was charged with preventing the reoccurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that mission, nothing has impeded it more, than the systematic assault on the truth.

Yesterday, the president of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he, again, claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

Last month, I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on January 20th, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided to exterminate my people. They left detailed meetings — or minutes of that meeting, and these minutes have been preserved for posterity by successive German governments.

Here is a copy of the minutes of the meeting of senior Nazi officials instructing the Nazi government exactly how to carry out the extermination of the Jewish people. Is this protocol a lie? Is the German government, all German governments, lying?

The day before I was Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz Buchenwald concentration camp. These plans — these plans of the Auschwitz Buchenwald concentration plans, I now hold in my hand. They contain a signature by Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s deputy himself. Are these plans of the Auschwitz Buchenwald concentration camp, where one million Jews were murdered, are they a lie, too?

This June, President Obama visited another concentration camp, one of many. The Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie? And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie, too?

One-third of all Jews perished in the great conflagration of the Holocaust. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife’s grandparents, her father’s two sisters and his three brothers and all the aunts and uncles and cousins, all murdered by the Nazis.

Is this a lie?

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come and to those who left in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity, and you brought honor to your countries. But to those who gave this holocaust denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere, have you no shame? Have you no decency?

A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies the murder of 6 million Jews? While promising to wipe out the state of Israel, the state of the Jews? What a disgrace. What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations.

Story Continues →