NEW YORK (Reuters) – US President Barack Obama yesterday condemned as hateful and inexcusable suggestions by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the US government may have been behind the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Ahmadinejad responded to the US criticism of his remarks by saying that Washington and its allies “need to listen.”
In an interview with the BBC Persian news service, Obama lashed out at Ahmadinejad for the latest of what the White House called a long list of outrageous comments that would deepen Tehran’s isolation from the international community.
“It was offensive. It was hateful,” Obama said according to interview excerpts released by the White House.
“And particularly for him to make the statement here in Manhattan, just a little north of Ground Zero, where families lost their loved ones,” he said. “For him to make a statement like that was inexcusable.”
Ahmadinejad told the UN General Assembly on Thursday that US statesmen were isolated in saying that al Qaeda militants carried out the suicide attacks that brought down New York’s World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon outside Washington and called for a UN investigation.
He said most Americans and others around the world believed the US government orchestrated the attacks to rescue the economy and save Israel, comments that prompted the US delegation, all 27 European Union member states and several other delegations to leave the assembly hall in protest.
Obama had made his decision to sit down for the interview with the BBC Persian news service before Ahmadinejad made his 9/11 comments as a way of speaking directly to the Iranian people. BBC Persian is broadcast in Farsi, the dominant language in Iran.
Ahmadinejad returned to the issue during a news conference yesterday, saying he met four groups of US citizens in New York who disagreed with the US government’s explanation for 9/11. He said he was not surprised by the angry response his remarks had elicited from US officials.
“The US government, if it’s upset, it should be,” he said, adding that an unidentified poll showed that 80 percent of Americans found the events of September 11 to be suspicious.
“Their (US and EU) tolerance seems to be low,” Ahmadinejad said. “Their nerves get disrupted too fast. They need to listen.”
He said 9/11 had caused two wars — in Afghanistan and Iraq — leading to the deaths of “hundreds of thousands.”
“Now they recently starting bombing Pakistan,” Ahmadinejad said. “What’s going on? How many terrorists are there? Is nine years or 10 years not enough time to get rid of them?”
British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said Ahmadinejad’s 9/11 remarks were “bizarre, offensive and attention-grabbing pronouncements.” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also said he strongly condemned the comments.
A senior White House official told reporters the remarks were part of a pattern from Ahmadinejad, including denial of the Holocaust, that would further isolate the country and harm the interests of its people.
Several Western diplomats, however, said that “conspiracy theories” about possible US government and Israeli involvement in the September 11 attacks are popular in the Middle East and Ahmadinejad may have been playing to that audience.
For more than seven years, the United States and its Western allies have been locked in a standoff with Iran over its nuclear programme, which Washington believes aims to produce weapons but which Tehran says is for solely peaceful purposes.
In Obama’s speech at the United Nations on Thursday, he reiterated the US position that the door to diplomacy with Iran remained open but that Tehran must fulfill international obligations over its nuclear programme.
Ahmadinejad told a news conference yesterday he was ready for talks with the international community and that an Iranian official might meet next month with a representative of one of six world powers offering Iran political and economic incentives in exchange for halting uranium enrichment.
