Today at the United Nations General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — as he has in years past — prompted a massive walkout of his speech after he dredged up a number of conspiracy theories, including that the U.S. government was complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

There were some other outlandish statements in Ahmadinejad’s speech. He accused some Europeans of still using the Holocaust “as the excuse to pay fine or ransom to the Zionists.” The Iranian president added that the circumstances surrounding Osama bin Laden’s death pointed to the larger 9/11 conspiracy:

“Instead of assigning a fact-finding team, they killed the main perpetrator and threw his body into the sea,” Ahmadinejad said. “Would it not have been reasonable to bring to justice and openly bring to trial the main perpetrator of the incident?

“Is there any classified information that must be kept secret?” he asked.

What was missing from Ahmadinejad’s speech? His own government violent repression of its own people, particularly during the Green Movement uprisings in 2009, as a U.S. Mission spokesperson observed:

“Mr. Ahmadinejad had a chance to address his own people’s aspirations for freedom and dignity, but instead he again turned to abhorrent anti-Semitic slurs and despicable conspiracy theories,” said Mark Kornblau, the spokesman for the US Mission to the United Nations.

Delegations from many Western nations, including France and the United States, walked out during the speech. Watch it (starting at 12:48):

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Speaking on MSNBC this morning, former President Bill Clinton said GOP presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry (TX) may well believe that Israel in entitled to keep the occupied Palestinian West Bank because of a “biblical mandate.”

Clinton, citing his own background as a Southern Baptist, said that American evangelical Christians like Perry often believe that the West Bank belongs to the Jewish state of Israel.

Clinton, who referred to the West Bank several times by its bibilical name Judea and Samaria (the name also used by Israel’s settler movement), noted that Christian evangelicals are often more hardline on these issues than are most Israelis:

I also believe that Rick Perry — look, that’s my culture. I’m from next door. There is an enormous resevoir of support for Israel in the Christian evangelical community. And a lot of them believe, as some of the more militant settler groups do, that God meant for all of Judea and Samaria to be in the hands of Israel, and that Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, when he was prime minister, and all the — and Shimon Peres and everybody that’s signed all these peace agreements have violated the biblical mandate by wanting to give the West Bank to the Palestinian State. [...]

That’s what they believe: that Judea and Samaria is a what God intended to be Israel. So, those Congressmen that were over there working on Netanyahu during the break, they’re more militant than the Israelis are — or than a lot of them. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if Rick Perry really believes that. I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of people that never miss church on Sunday in Texas who believe that.

Earlier in the interview, Clinton expanded on his view of the congressional delegations that traveled to Israel last month sponsored by a group with close links to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the flagship of the Israel lobby in Washington. A week after a Democratic delegation, a Republican delegation followed. The 55-member GOP trip was the largest ever to go to the Jewish state. Clinton said their message was that Israel could continue to occupy the West Bank indefinitely if a Republican was able to take the White House:

[Perry's statement] was good politics and it was sort of like the trip that 70 — I think there were 70 [sic] Republican House members that went to Israel during the break and basically said, “You guys do whatever you want. Keep the West Bank. We’re comin’ back. We’ll have the White House and the Congress and then we’ll let you do whatever you want.” I believe that’s essentially what was going on.

Watch the video of the Clinton interview:

Our guest blogger is Laura Heaton, the writer-editor for the blog, Enough Said.

The New York Times reports on Somlia:

In the damp, gray dawn in this remote Somali bush town, 25,000 men, women and children, their rib cages protruding, their eyes listless, shuffled with their last bit of strength today toward outdoor kitchens for a scoop of food. Hundreds, too feeble to eat, died while they waited. […]

“Here is hell,” said Mr. [Geoff] Loane [of the Red Cross], who worked in Ethiopia during the 1984-85 famine. “I thought I would never see Ethiopia again, and I didn’t think we would allow it to happen again.”

But Mr. Loane made that exasperated remark to the Times in 1992. And it has happened again.

A Google search for “Somalia famine” turns up a host of articles from the past 20 years about recurring periods of drought and devastation unfolding in the Horn of Africa. They have taken place with such frequency and little variation in details that it is a wonder how often disaster relief is discussed with little or no reference to root causes.

But the epic proportions of the 2011 Somalia famine should force a conversation, argues longtime Somalia specialist Ken Menkhaus, beginning with a focus on how the political actors largely responsible for the country’s dysfunction are now blocking aid delivery as well.

“The international response to date has been shockingly inadequate not just because funds for humanitarian aid have fallen short, but because of the absence of political will to take bold diplomatic action to remove impediments to the delivery of aid,” Menkhaus wrote in a paper published by the Enough Project yesterday.

The 2011 Somalia famine — the worst in 60 years — currently threatens three-quarters of a million people. Nearly half of the country’s population needs emergency assistance. The region is inherently more prone to drought than almost anywhere else in the world, but war and the absence of a functioning government has shredded Somalis’ ability to cope and survive, Menkhaus told Enough in an interview last month.

Despite the long lead-time the international community had to prepare for famine this time around, and years of experience providing relief in this part of the world, assistance fails to reach those who need it most because of blockages and diversions by both the militant al-Shabab group and its sworn enemy, Somalia’s U.N.-backed Transitional Federal Government, or TFG. As a result, the bulk of the assistance can only get as close as the Kenyan border region, a walk of several days. Writes Menkhaus:

This is not a famine relief strategy – it is a macabre game of “Survivor,” rewarding those lucky and strong enough to straggle across the border with a prize of shelter, food rations, and the prospect of being warehoused in a refugee camp for the next 20 years.

So what Menkhaus proposes is a “diplomatic surge” leveled simultaneously at the Shabab and the TFG to open routes for aid delivery. It must be clear to both sides that anyone found diverting or withholding aid from civilians will be held accountable. Condemnation of Shabab’s tactics is a given, but Menkhaus advocates taking a similarly hard line with the TFG.

The time frame for organizing a diplomatic surge is short, and the strongest public pressure must come from a range of Islamic actors, including some newly liberated societies in the Middle East who may still be too preoccupied internally to engage beyond their borders. But the United States has a key coordinating role to play. President Obama must personally get involved, Menkhaus argues, to jump start the initiative.

The alternatives — doing nothing beyond the typical, unsatisfactory relief effort or enabling a regional military operation to develop — are deeply unappealing, especially when diplomatic options still exist.

The 2011 Somalia famine risks spurring the post-mortem regret of other humanitarian catastrophes — Rwanda, Darfur — where hundreds of thousands of victims fell prey to the motives of ideologically driven, self-interested, and powerful in their countries. Menkhaus asks: “Will the same be true for the Obama administration and other world leaders when they look back on the 2011 Somalia famine and ask: Was that the best we could do?”

Last year, President Obama recess appointed career diplomat Robert Ford to be U.S. ambassador to Syria after Senate Republicans refused to confirm him to the post. Republicans claimed that sending an envoy to Damascus would be rewarding bad behavior. Now that Ford has shown the merits of a high-level U.S. presence in Syria, particularly since the pro-democracy uprisings there, some who opposed Ford’s confirmation have changed their minds. Yet the Washington Post reported last week that a Senate GOP aid said some Republican senators will probably place a hold on Ford’s confirmation (his recess appointment expires at the end of the year).

In an interview with the Daily Caller, Ford urged these senators to reconsider:

Also significant, Ford said, is his presence as a personal representative of the American president, which is why he says it is imperative the Senate officially confirm him.

“Lower level diplomats are great, but they don’t carry the weight, they don’t carry the prestige of the president’s personal representative,” he explained.

Ford also expanded on the nature of the Syrian opposition. “I’m sorta amazed that they’re not fucking crazy,” he said, adding that it’s likely that any government that emerges in a post-Assad era will be a secular one:

“My own sense is, from my own discussion with Syrians, is that the Islamist element is actually not very strong in this country,” he argued. “The Muslim Brotherhood is pretty much stamped out by Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad. And so most of the Islamists that are active politically are outside of Syria.”

“I think the internal opposition, there are absolutely Islamists among them,” he continued. “When you look at the street protests, they are on Fridays, so there is probably an element of people being in mosques and then going to the protests, but there are plenty of people who don’t go to the mosques but are also marching… It is a pluralistic kind of opposition.”

Ford also said that while demonstrators welcomed him when he traveled to Hama in July to join them in “solidarity,” they aren’t necessarily waving American flags. Why not? The invasion of Iraq and baggage from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “I will be honest with you, the reputation of the United States after Iraq and after our policies with respect to the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, a lot of Syrians look at us with very mixed emotions,” he said.

The New York Times reported this week that the Obama administration is leaving Ford in Damascus “so he can maintain contact with opposition leaders and the leaders of the country’s myriad sects and religious groups” in order to avoid chaos in the event of the fall of dictator Bashar Al-Assad.

Last year, Islamophobic activists, allied with a number of right-wing politicians, attacked the construction of the Park 51 Islamic community center, maligning the project as a “Ground Zero Mosque” being built blocks away from the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City.

Yet despite all the heated rhetoric from opponents of Park 51 in the recent past, the cultural and community center opened its doors in lower Manhattan yesterday with an official ribbon cutting ceremony that faced no protests or public controversy:

There was no sign of protest at the Park51 community center last night. It opened its doors to the public in lower Manhattan Wednesday, without the opposition that had surrounded the project for a year.

The center was crowded for most of the evening — with visitors who said they came to see the new photography exhibition and others who were interested in the place itself. Brooklyn’s Jean Stevens said she’s not surprised the event went off without a hitch. “It seems like there’s not much of huge response to this reception or to the mosque anymore, and so I wonder whether if people have forgotten it now that its not such a hot topic.”

Joyce Oliver, who works at a bank nearby, dismissed any thoughts of protesting the location of Park 51, noting that its attendees are no more controversial than anyone else in the area: “They come, they pray, nothing has happened, so I don’t see what the issue should be. It’s historical building so let it be use.”

The opening event for the center was a photo “exhibit of Danny Goldfield’s NYChildren project, which aims to photograph a child from every country in the world living in New York City.” Goldfield “started his photography project in 2003 after meeting Rana Sodhi, a Sikh whose brother was murdered in a hate crime four days after 9/11. During their chance meeting at an Arizona gas station, Goldfield was inspired by Sodhi’s description of his efforts to reach out to his neighbors, taking proactive steps toward eliminating people’s prejudices and fears.”