Ahmadinejad joins list of rogue visitors to U.N.

updated 12:44 a.m. ET Sept. 22, 2007

NEW YORK - Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on his desk, Fidel Castro delivered torturously long rants, Yasser Arafat showed up wearing a holster and Hugo Chavez called President Bush the “devil.”

Now, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is securing his place in this rogues’ gallery of world leaders who have visited New York for the U.N. General Assembly, the annual gathering where petty tyrants and powerful heads of state alike get their say.

Ahmadinejad will be making his third appearance in the past three years. Tensions with Iran are escalating as the United States accuses the country of trying to develop nuclear weapons and arming insurgents in Iraq with powerful roadside bombs that kill U.S. troops.

A defiant and unpredictable Ahmadinejad is not expected to defuse the situation when he appears at a forum at Columbia University on Monday and addresses the General Assembly on Tuesday.

“You should treat this as an off-Broadway production,” former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said, describing the United Nations as a “Twilight Zone” that gives a platform to “tinhorn dictators.” “The General Assembly is the theater in which Ahmadinejad and others perform.”

Shoe banging, empty holster
The show has been going on practically since the United Nations was founded in 1945 after World War II.

Soviet Premier Khrushchev banged his shoe on his desk after a diplomat criticized the USSR in 1960. On his first visit to the U.N., in 1960, Castro warned the world about American “aggression” in a speech that lasted more than four hours.

Arafat came to the General Assembly in 1974 and delivered a fiery oration while wearing an empty holster, trying to legitimize the Palestinian struggle.

“I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun,” Arafat said. “Do not let the olive branch fall from my hands.”

A year later, the murderous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin exhorted the United States “to rid their society of the Zionists” and called for the “extinction of Israel as a state.”

Last year, Venezuelan President Chavez called Bush “the devil,” “an alcoholic” and “a sick man.”

For his part, Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a “myth” and has said Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

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