Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been speaking for mere seconds during a speech at a United Nations conference before he was interrupted by hecklers. Two men wearing multicolored clown wigs left their seats during the April 2009 anti-racism conference in Geneva, Switzerland, and began running up and down the aisles, shouting words of protest. According to the New York Times, one of the men “threw a red clown nose at the Iranian president and yelled ‘you are a racist.'” Security escorted the men out, although they wouldn’t be the only ones to leave. Dozens of delegates at the conference walked out of the speech amid Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic tirade, in which he referred to Israel as a “racist government.”
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