Soon, Soon, the Durban Debacle Will Be Over!

This time next month, the dreadful Durban Review Conference will be over -- and we should all breathe a sigh of relief, as the contentious and contemptible process has not done a thing to really combat racism around the world, but has only fueled it further. The U.S. walked out of the conference in 2001, along with Israel; currently, Canada, Italy and Israel are boycotting the review conference and the U.S. is still refraining from participation, despite negotiating briefly for a time last month to improve the draft final document.

I marvel at how the left keeps scrambling to defend this tainted process -- no, actually I don't marvel, because I was there at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001, so I remember standing with a Russian anti-racism activist in a cricket field with a huge, rabid crowd chanting "Cuba Si, Yanqi Non!" who were disgustingly cheering Fidel Castro. Minutes later, they were jeering then-UN High Commissioner Human Rights Mary Robinson for daring to mention racism in Cuba among other scourges of racism around the world -- and from this and many other sordid scenes in Durban I understood just how deeply entrenched the old Soviet line was among its pupils, and of course the ANC-inspired NGOs who ran the discredited NGO forum.

For two years, a group of NGOs who protested all the ideological shenanigans at Durban have tried to keep it kosher, so to speak, as I have written, working to get out all the anti-Israel hate speech that so marred the original conference, and trying to mitigate new Arab League inspired interventions, such as demands to incorporate a global blasphemy law into UN treaties.

Now, there's a frantic last-ditch attempt to get the Obama Administration on board, and the first African-American president himself to attend the UN meeting. I've always thought it would be great if President Obama attended, too -- but for only one purpose, which would be to repudiate the bad elements of the document now being negotiated, to demonstrate really strong liberal leadership against the erosion of human rights values by the hard left in the Third World, and withstand the efforts of conservative Islamic states to impose barriers on criticism of religion through international law. Such American leadership has been missing all along -- the U.S. shrank from any such ideological confrontation, preferring to walk out of the conference in 2001, and only half-heartedly negotiating for a time to improve the text now -- leading some EU members to dismiss the U.S. as "unable to take yes for an answer".

The High Commissioner's Office is now trying desperately to get more nuanced coverage of the conference, saying there have been "misrepresentations" in the media -- and frankly to spin the process in a better light to try to allay fears that the review will turn into a "hate fest". But such claims simply can't fly, when you can easily pull up the 2001 final document itself and take a look at the problem.

The claim is made that there is no more anti-Israel or anti-semitic speech in the draft  final document now. True enough -- thanks to persistent negotiating by the EU -- but the document still affirms the 2001 final declaration. THAT document in turn most certainly does contain what Jewish groups -- and any persons concerned about balance and fairness in international processes -- see as an insidious effort to bring the hated "Zionism=Racism" canard, finally repudiated by the UN, back again through the back door.

The current draft of 2009 says this, among other affirmations of the 2001 document:

Joining together in a spirit of renewed political will and commitment to universal equality, justice and dignity, we salute the memory of all victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance all over the world and solemnly adopt the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action...