Strasbourg, 21/10/2010 (Agence Europe) - MEPs from the three main political groups in the European Parliament (EP) have spoken out after Ban Ki-moon's speech to the plenary session in Strasbourg on Tuesday 19 October, criticising the UN Secretary General's silence of the diatribe of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against Israel during his visit to Lebanon last week. Ahmadinejad again called for the destruction and annihilation of the Hebrew state. “Never since the creation of the UN in 1945 has one of its member states explicitly and so regularly called for the destruction of another member state. All clubs have rules. If it is not in the Charter, the rule, the practice within the United Nations, even between countries which are in conflict with one another, is not to call for, or worse incite, the destruction of one of its members,” say Jean-Marie Cavada (EPP, France), Miguel Angel Martinez (S&D, Spain), Thijs Berman (S&D, Netherlands), Frédérique Ries (ALDE, Belgium) and Jean-Luc Bannahmias (ALDE, France) in a joint press release. They go on: “Ban Ki-moon's silence of more than five days is all the more deafening as in any other case, with any other protagonist, it is the Security Council that would probably have responded. MEPs applauded the UN Secretary General who had come to set out for them the UN objectives in tackling poverty, nuclear proliferation and climate change. But (we regret) this continuing silence on the comments of the Iranian president”. “This failure in the democratic heart of the EU, which is the largest donor to the Middle East to help build peace between two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine, is reminiscent of the deafness of the League of Nations to the desperate call by Negus Hailli Selassie just before the invasion of his country (Ed: Ethiopia by Italy),” they say, calling on Ban to “assume his responsibilities before history and unambiguously condemn this bellicose statement by Ahmadinejad”. (E.H./transl.rt)