Tuesday, December 11, 2007

The United Nations And the New Anti-Semitism, Part 2


Back on Sept. 3rd, 2001, just eight days before the World Trade Center attacks, the United Nations held an anti-racism conference, the sole purpose of which turned out to be to brand Israel an apartheid state.

The conference, which was held in Durban, South Africa, has been described as the birth of the new anti-Semitism. Here's an article from Ken Timmerman on the first Durban conference:


The "ideological prologue" to September 11 was a raucous and hate-filled event that played itself out half a world away in Durban, South Africa, a normally stately and elegant coastal city along the Indian Ocean.

The third United Nations "World Conference Against Racism" was intended to counterbalance the G-8 summits so the "forgotten peoples" of the world could make their voices heard amid the clamor of globalization and international capitalism. Jesse Jackson was there, demanding that America pay trillions of dollars in reparations for slavery, an institution America led the world in abolishing more than 140 years ago. Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat were there, as were AIDS activists, homosexual groups, women's rights organizations, former Communists, Maoists, environmentalists and animal-rights and global-warming activists.

In the end, neither Jesse Jackson nor anyone else said one word about actual slavery – the real kind, still going on today in Sudan. Nor was racism – the real kind, that led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tsutsis in Rwanda – on the agenda. Anti-Semitic violence was not on the table, despite the continuing murder of Israeli civilians and foreign tourists in cafés, restaurants and street markets and the desecration of Jewish synagogues across Europe.

The nations of the world and some 6,000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) had come together for a different purpose. It was so overwhelming that it united such otherwise opposing groups as radical Islamic fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Malaysia, and sexual libertarians and abortion-on-demand activists from Europe. It united Yasser Arafat, Jesse Jackson and the 16 governmental delegations of the European Union whose representative, Swedish ambassador to Switzerland Johan Molander, helped prepare the documents and resolutions that were to be adopted in Durban. That purpose was a deep-rooted, unquenchable hatred of America and of the only successful democracy in the Middle East, Israel.

In the documentation packets handed out at the official registration desk, the tens of thousands of delegates who attended the conference received a pamphlet distributed by the Arab Lawyers Union, which contained caricatures of hook-nosed Jews worthy of the Nazi propaganda newspaper, Der Sturmer. On the cover, the booklet bore the title: "That is the fact … Racism of Zionism & 'Israel,'" over a huge swastika that was intertwined with the Israeli Star of David. On the back cover, the booklet reproduced the official logo of the United Nations conference.

"It was clearly designed to look to a casual observer like an official conference document, which it definitely was not," Samuels recalls. "I gave it to Mary Robinson just before she rose to give her speech at the opening dinner for the NGOs." Robinson, a former president of Ireland, was the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights and secretary-general of the conference.
What happened next shocked nearly everyone at the dinner, especially Samuels, who had seen Mrs. Robinson bow and scrape to every demand from the Arab and Islamic groups.

"She stood up at the podium and waved the book, and said it had no place at a conference dedicated to human dignity. 'When it comes to this,' she said, 'I am a Jew.' She repeated it three times: 'I am a Jew.'"

The reaction to her speech was so childish it would have been amusing if it weren't indicative of the rabid anti-Semitism swelling the Durban conference halls. The next day, Samuels says, he "received a call from a puzzled reporter from the German Press Agency, asking me, ' Is it true? Is she really a Jew?' That evening, Hamas sent out an e-mail saying, 'We knew it all along. Now she's going to get it.'"

Beyond the words, violence was never very far away. When the handful of Jewish groups who attended the conference sought to present evidence of how they had been "harassed and discriminated against" during the pre-Durban meetings, Arab activists stormed the hall and "began shouting, singing and pushing in front of the speakers" until they had to cut short the press conference.

"This is typical of how we have been treated during this conference," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who had joined Samuels in Durban. For Anne Bayefsky, a professor from New York's Columbia University Law School, "It couldn't get much worse. Some of the Jewish delegates are hiding their accreditation badge because it identifies them as from Israel or as Jewish."

Fierce anti-Israeli demonstrations on the streets of Durban became "a venomous carnival of incitement," with demonstrators handing out flyers "portraying Jews with fangs dripping blood and wearing helmets inscribed with Nazi swastikas." One flyer showed a picture of Hitler, saying: "What if I had won?" Underneath were two possibilities. "The good things – there would be NO Israel and NO Palestinians' blood shed. The bad things – I wouldn't have allowed the making of the new Beetle." Full-size posters of Hitler were on display at the stand of the Arab Lawyers Union in the Conference Documentation Center.

Lord Greville Janner, a member of the British Parliament and longtime pro-democracy activist, called Durban "the worst example of anti-Semitism that I have ever seen."


Now, the United Nations wants to hold Durban part 2:


The whole idea of Durban 2 is a nightmare come true. A conference against racism became almost wholly a conference against Zionism and the Jewish State. The Ford Foundation finally repented its financial support for the sewer which the project had become.

Now there's an appropriation before the United Nations to appropriate money for a second conference which, if the activities of the U.N. Human Rights Council is any precedent, will be another jamboree of hatred towards Israel. Apparently U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Zalmay Khalilzad, is pressing the State Department for instructions to vote such an appropriation. There is little time to prevent such an enormity. Khalizad is a fool, as was proven by his tenure in Iraq. He should not be rewarded by being able to call the shots on this matter.

Here's a question for the Democratic candidates: do they think that bloated and biased assemblies such as the one held in Durban deserve duplication? If not why don't they stand up and say so? Let's hear from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for whom this query should not put them between a rock and a hard place. And, if it does, God save the Democratic Party.


Pamela, at Atlas Shrugs has an excellent post up on the subject.

1 comment:

Jason Pappas said...

Ah, yes, Durban ... I remember it well. See my post paragraph four where I accuse the UN of fomenting irrational hate against the USA and Israel; and laying the groundwork for 9/11.