Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi upstaged the final session of the Arab summit with an unscheduled address describing Israel and the Palestinians as "idiots", leaving his audience in fits of laughter.
"The Israelis are idiots and the Palestinians as well," Kadhafi said in the speech at the closing session of the two-day summit in Algiers which is usually reserved for a reading of the final resolutions. "The Jews are dying by the dozen because they are in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. If these regions are so important to them, why didn't they occupy them before seizing other Arab land," Kadhafi said.
"The Palestinians, too, are idiots because they lost these territories in 1967. So we must admit that both are idiots," he added. The leaders, including Abbas who is making his debut at a an Arab summit after he succeeded Yasser Arafat who died in November 2004, broke out into uncontrolled laughter.
The unpredictable Kadhafi rambled on for more than one hour, giving advice on topics as diverse as women's rights in the male-dominated Arab world, Iraq, the Syrian-Lebanese crisis, democracy, terrorism, Uganda and Ghana. At the start of his speech, Kadhafi noted that the summit proved to the world that the Arabs "are not racist" because it welcomed several foreign dignitaries who addressed the meeting. "We have transformed this Arab forum into an international tribunal," he said, draped in a flowing African-style brown robe and wearing a black cap.
Kadhafi, who until recently was ostracised by the West, defended Syria for "the numerous sacrifices it made in Lebanon" and said he was "furious" that Damascus was under international pressure to pull its troops out of Lebanon. "Why don't they ever ask Israel to respect United Nations resolutions?," he asked, just after UN Secretary General Kofi Annan addressed the Arab summit and called on Syria to complete a troop pullout from Lebanon by May.
And he concluded his speech by telling the Arabs that the world has "no respect for us". "The world's perception of the Arabs is that we carry no weight, that we are sheep," he said.
Kadhafi was the first leader to arrive in the Algerian capital to attend the summit, putting an end to speculation on his participation at the two-day gathering. As usual he was accompanied by his female bodyguards and brought with him a tent that he pitched near his official residence just outside the Algerian capital.
The flamboyant Libyan leader has ruffled many feathers at past Arab summits. 2004 in Tunis, he stormed out of the opening session, telling reporters: "Libya feels obliged to boycott the Arab summit as it does not agree with the agenda."
2003 in Cairo, he had a blazing row with Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz. Once an ardent Arab nationalist, Kadhafi has voiced mounting exasperation with Arab politics in recent years and has reoriented Libyan foreign policy toward Africa, where he maintains close ties with post-apartheid South Africa.
