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...
The High Commissioner's office surely knows what the problem is -- it's not about a "misreading" or a "mistake". While nothing of the Z=R sort is explicitly stated in the current draft, there's a rubric in the 2001 document that states very frankly, "Sources, causes, forms and contemporary manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance" and then "Victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance".
And under that rubric we find..."63. We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination
and to the establishment of an independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion;
So there you have it -- a rubric speaking of "victims" ... followed by discussion of Palestinians, a people under foreign occupation, as just such victims. Under this rubric, then, falls Israel -- and by mentioning Palestinians and Israel -- alone among all states of the world -- the implication is that Israel allegedly has some sort of state policy of racism -- like the South African government once had a policy of apartheid, that somehow occupation itself, and the suffering of the Palestinians, comes out of an alleged racist policy of the Israeli state.
It's incendiary language, it's there, and it shouldn't be. You can't pretend it's *not* there or say that interest groups or the media are "misrepresenting" the problem. These paragraphs, under these rubrics, with this language of victimology and policy, are exactly what made the U.S. and Israel walk out back in 2001. These continued back-door claims, in the form of dozens of repeated affirmations of the 2001 document in the 2009 review document draft, mean that the canard of "Israeli state racism" is reiterated. You can't pretend it isn't.
Why? Why single out Israel alone among all states, and imply that the occupation is motivated by some kind of deliberately racist policy, as opposed to security concerns? That's simply wrong, and immoral, and the UN High Commissioner, and reputatable NGOs, and democratic states do not in fact ever make that claim officially. Whatever individual acts of racism Israel may be accused of, they are similar to the kinds that other states commit, including the U.S., without being charged in any way of maintaining a deliberate, state racist policy. There are lots of situations of ethnic minorities around the world, some of them aspiring to statehood, that need peace talks, that need majority populations or states persecuting minorities to stop what they're doing. Chechnya and Russia, anyone? They aren't mentioned in the Durban document. Only Israel is.
If you believe that in fact Israel's occupation of Palestine *is* racist -- I certainly don't -- then you will still have to pause in front of a political reality: neither Russia (enthusiastic booster in the Soviet era of the Z=R concept), nor the High Commissioner's Office, nor even, at the end of the day, the Arab states, are claiming in so many words *now*, in the final text, that Israel maintains some kind of "racist policy". They don't dare. To do so would not only add to the number of boycotters, it would fuel an arms race to find which of them are guilty in fact of having racist state policies themselves. So you actually don't have company if you have that kind of extremist viewpoint about Israel -- at least not officially. It's only through the back door.
“This document does not say anything about Israel being a racist State. That’s just simply not in the document and I think it’s been misreported," says the OHCHR. And yet, as I've explained, that's exactly what the text does do -- in the interpretation of not only Jewish groups in the U.S. and Europe, or the governments of or Canada or Israel, but anyone looking at the text in good faith and seeing the rubric, the terminology, and the implications made very explicitly.
If it is NOT there, then you have to ask: what does it mean to say in this document that Palestinians are victims of racism? Victims of...what kind of racism, from whom, where? They may be victims of an occupation that has proved harmful -- but racism? What does it mean to single out only Israel? Why is only Israel singled out? These are all questions left hanging by any claim that there is a "misrepresentation" of this text. Where's the "better" interpretation we're supposed to extract out of all this?
Aside from the hateful implications of the language about Israel and Palestine, there are other dangers rife to this Durban II process that threaten our freedoms of speech and the media, as curtailed as they are already in international law. The effort of the Organization of Islamic Conference to impose restrictions on free speech is very real -- they have already succeeded in getting resolutions passed at the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, despite ample Western and other resistance -- and they are trying to get it incorporated further into treaties. The chief effect of this effort, motivated by the Danish cartoons uproar, is to prevent criticism of fundamentalist Islamic groups and Islamacist states.
The High Commissioner's Office stressed its own role into "guiding" the negotiations on the references to incitement -- but stopped shy of trying to explain how something like the Danish cartoons -- insulting speech that incited anger in religious believers -- could be compared to incitement of war -- as in Rwanda, when radio show hosts urged killings. Indeed, the document would be helped by adopting the language used in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling about "incitement of imminent action" (Brandenberg v. Ohio).
To understand what is driving all of this ideological turmoil, you have to realize that the Durban conference was scripted almost entirely back in the day out of the Cuban mission to the UN, and other Soviet pupils in the Third World eagerly seized on the idea as a way to cause a real royal pain in the ass to the West, with whom they were already embroiled in all kinds of political and economic ideological wars.
The Cuban ideological prescription for Durban, contained in their early proposals circulated among UN members, in fact undercuts human rights definitions of racism, and its remedies, by insisting that racism isn't a wrong of its own, but is merely a by-product of rapacious capitalist countries looking for cheap labour. The Cuban and South African ANC focus was exclusively on the trans-Atlantic slave trade -- which was rightly called a "crime against humanity" at this conference. But other kinds of racism that you could hardly claim were motivated by capitalist evil or slavery -- like the black-on-black racism of the African continent itself, or the white-on-white racism of Eastern Europe and Eurasia -- were simply dismissed by Durban scripters as not fitting ideologically. The Dalits couldn't fit anywhere in this Cuban schematic, and of course weren't mentioned in the politically-correct final document -- imagine the fit that India would have thrown, along with the Group of 77, if one of its own were singled out just like Israel was! The entire exercise seemed calculated mainly to attempt to embarass and goad the West in the usual rabid, hateful, anti-Western and anti-capitalist campaign for which Cuba and its allies are infamous.
Again, I think the way to address this vestige of the Cold War is for President Obama to show up briefly at the Durban review, oh, with an announcement that he's going to love-bomb the Cubans now by lifting the embargo and encouraging business and educational exchanges -- and help undermine oppressive Cuban communism in the way the Soviet Union's communism was ultimately eroded. It's only a matter of time. And announcing other types of program to address such issues as post-9/11 racial profiling, which is said to be among the greatest of problems in the U.S. and Europe (start by documenting this claim, which is contested by some groups looking at actual hate crimes investigated by the FBI).
And yet, in showing up, the leader of the free world should show firm, unswerving moral, liberal leadership at this world conference by standing firm, negotiating to the end, and refusing to accept the affirmation of the 2001 document -- because it makes the false claim, through the use of the overall rubric and the inclusion of par. 63 -- that Israel somehow has some kind of "racist" state ideology. It doesn't. If you think it does, remember, you do not have even the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for company on this -- the office says in fact that is a "misreading".
There are any number of ways around this stalemate if there is real sincerity on the part of the world's democracies, and even Russia, which has shepherded the document this far, and attempted to keep out the worst of the OIC's hateful language (and even after it was negotiated and removed, Iran and others kept jumping up like jack-in-the-boxes in subsequent sessions trying to put it back in).
The states could keep the final document extremely short and simple -- nothing like the 62-pager that led to the walk-outs in 2001. It could evade the issue of seeming to confirm the 2001 hate speech by simply not affirming it. Some ambassadors say you can't possibly have a review conference if you don't affirm the original conference's fnal document. Who says? These procedures aren't cast in stone, and negotiating an even shorter text, that removes numerous references to the 2001 document, and attempting to get it signed before the conference, would then force the review itself to really focus on actual implementation of the many issues of law, education, and state action required to address real problems of racism around the world.
But...I think that in fact the U.S. is very likely to duck this historical challenge to set the liberal tone in the endless ideological battle with both right and left. Why? Because...this time next month, the conference will be over -- and over for at least another 5 years before somebody demands a "review". It will be over, and not matter. Obama has many other fish to fry in the Middle East and Africa and Eurasia, and can afford to let this one go by. He has somewhat mollified UN supporters by promising that the U.S. will run for election to the UN Human Rights Committee again. By reaffirming the willingness to work against racism and other human rights issues at the much-flawed but still "there" HRC, and by perhaps outlining a few other things to be done (reanimating US involvement in the UN Committee to Eliminate all Forms of Racial Discrimination), he can "get by". Everyone knows you don't *really* fight racism by going to this time-wasting, posturing UN conference in expensive Geneva. Call it an austerity measure both economically and ideologically (there's only so much resources you can throw at foreign policy!), stay home, and promise to do other things to fight racism -- better.
If Obama refuses to go to Durban II, he pisses off the Nation, the High Commissioner's Office, the American Friends Service Committee and several dozen other leftist NGOs that wrote petitions urging the U.S. to go (which was despicable in and of itself for their one-sided condemnation of Israel and silence about Hamas) -- and a handfulof liberals around the world who bother to watch this.
Yet by not going, Obama gains credibility with Jewish groups in the U.S. who have either vocally campaigned against the Durban debacle or let it quietly be known that they expect nothing less than non-involvement -- and other constituencies that hate the Cuban and other third-world mauling of the US at the UN. Those chits are far more important in his long-term plans for peace talks with Iran and Syria, and for pressure on Israel on subjects like the Gaza war. And they are chits that are really a small price to pay -- passing up a contentious and ideologically complicated UN conference with numerous diplomatic pitfalls that will be a 3-day wonder in the press, and then be instantly forgotten.
Veterans of Durban still in the Administration know that it really does not matter hugely in the actual war on racism or relations with other countries or the UN if the U.S. goes or stays to this particular conference -- Durban is an ideological virtual world where some countries try to put over their ideological subterfuges on other countries, and if the honor and prestige of the US can't be marshalled to stop some of the worst of these subterfuges, then it should refrain from involvement.
The hard left's critic of the Obama platform will not go away -- Durban was merely one venue for playing it out. But Obama has already said he will not go for reparations to specific racial groups as the hard left around Durban envisions them in that virtuality -- he has articulated several times that he is for other kinds of all-purpose programs that will help the victims of historical racism on a needs basis.
Once again -- this time next month, Durban II will be over, and over perhaps for more than five years. Then we will be free to have this Administration focus on rejoining the UN Human Rights Council, fighting the good fight there, and taking all kinds of other measures to stop racism at home and abroad.
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