UN-tethered

Defense of Mary Robinson Should Be Tempered with Conceding that Jewish Groups Have a Point

In a blog that is no longer accessible at Daily Kos, Jonathan Hutson (jhutson) wrote:

Re: "AIPAC’s accusatory press release (PDF) on Mary Robinson’s role misrepresents what she did and said in Durban. In a single sentence, AIPAC makes two incorrect statements, saying that the final conference text passed by participating states included a passage that Zionism equaled racism, and that she supported such a text. Neither is true. Thanks in part to her tireless work, and that of others, the final conference resolution of the participating states eliminated all references to such vicious sentiments. And after a forum of NGOs issued a declaration that equated Zionism with racism, Robinson stood resolutely before hundreds of people associated with the statement, and told them that their resolution was so unacceptable to her that she would not forward it to the conference of states."

This statement is NOT true itself and is very misleading itself. It's tendentious, and misrepresents what happened in Durban. I was there. As I've explained at length, it was more complicated than either the Jewish groups or now the human rights groups are portraying this.

AIPAC is *technically* incorrect in that they invoked the term "Zionism is racism" which indeed was not literally in the final document in Durban and was indeed removed --and not only by Mary Robinson's efforts -- leading up to the Durban conference in August 2001, 8 years ago.

But the concept and spirit of what "Zionist=Racism" *means* was brought in the back door, with Mary's consent and without her objection. And that was wrong on her part, even though she did other individually good things in and around Durban. This happened because she reached the limit of her political flexibility.

As I've explained repeatedly -- people need to become familiar with the line-by-line negotiations on these documents -- and I've parsed that here.

The Durban 1 document singles out only Israel for condemnation, as if only Israel alone among all horrible country situations in the world was worthy of international scrutiny and reaction. That was wrong.

The Durban 1 document then put in a rubric called "victims of racism" and stated "We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation" -- and thereby stuck the Palestinians under a topic making them appear a victim of state racism -- again, along among country situations mentioned. That fed the Israel-apartheid meme and that was wrong. That this paragraph also balances a rightful concern anyone should have about the plight of the Palestinian people under occupation with a nod to Israel's need for security (i.e. from terrorists, which is not explicitly stated) doesn't therefore sanitize the Durban document from vicious Z=R vestiges. In fact, they are still riddled into the document and more importantly, into the entire follow-up process which continues to spin out tendentious exercises like the "defamation of religions" gambit that the Islamic countries are using to prevent any criticizing of their theocratic states.

By Fisking on this and being literalist about what the Jewish groups are saying that is "technically wrong", I believe human rights defenders as well as those chosing leftist blogs for this defense of Mary Robinson are leaving themselves a wide-open, glaring vulnerability to themselves when someone -- as I will, and many others will -- say -- but why can't you condemn the singling out of Israel? But why are you incorrectly and tendentiously portraying Israel as guilty of apartheid-like state-sponsored racism? Israel shouldn't be singled out; more people have died in Chechnya or Sudan in the space of a year than ever have been killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Numerous conflicts around the world from the DRC to Afghanistan to Nigeria lead to hundreds of civilian deaths each month dwarfing the Gaza drama without 1/100th of Gaza's remedies for a solution.

Plenty of states have ugly state-sponsored policies against minorities -- the genocide in Sudan comes to mine -- or really well-documented cases of official neglect and complicity in racist movements -- like Russia. These types of situations were *not* mentioned in the Durban outcome documents and should have been listed -- or none mentioned at all -- or the countries that negotiated the document should have walked out. Which is what the U.S. and Israel did in Durban 1, and a number of other countries did for Durban 2 including Canada and Australia.

THAT is the problem and THAT is what Mary Robinson did not and does not grapple with. It would cost her nothing but the angry hate of a few extreme Palestinian groups that she already got for not taking the NGO document if she would condemn the Durban outcome. But she had too much politically at stake trying to portray it to Africans and the third world as a success of her career to take that simple step.

Many people have their own heavily blogged opinions about what they think Israel is guilty of, or their not-so-suppressed private opinions that rise to the surface with the energy and animus that this issue has incited among some. Yet even Mary Robinson doesn't accuse Israel of state-sponsored apartheid or racism as an institutional device.

I think the way to have handled this ideally would be not to enter the political fray. But if you do, you simply must say "Even though the right-wing Jewish groups technically got it wrong, there are some troublesome ways in which obsession with, and demonization of Israel did occur in the Durban documents and we sympathize with those concerns. Mary Robinson did what she could to mitigate some of this but did not go far enough. The document outcomes should be condemned, even if there are some useful aspects of Durban that can be invoked to fight racism." It would be a simple qualifying remark that would a) be true and b) not pit human rights groups so adamantly against Jewish groups which actually *do* have a point, even though some of them are hysterical about Mary.

A key reason they can get hysterical about Mary and Human Rights Watch -- and soon Physicians for Human Rights -- is that this simple accurate and truthful concession about the wrongfulness of Durban isn't being made. It can easily be made, and I hope it *will* be made before this is all through.

The final document did NOT remove all references to vicious sentiments. Far from it. It left them in, in the form of singling out Israel and putting Palestinians under the rubric of racism specifically. I've explained this in detail in my blog earlier this year.

The Daily Kos blog also completely misrepresents Mary Robinson's refusal to take the NGO document. Yes, she did refuse. But it's not accurate to say she "got up in front of hundreds of people" as if that implies she robustly condemned the contents of the statement to the public and the press -- which is what some of us did there and that's why we understand the difference. She merely refused to accept the document at the morning OHCHR briefing as a bureaucratic measure. That's great; that's grand. It is not a condemnation of the NGO forum, however, nor is it addressing the spirit of Z=R in the final document -- which then was all reiterated in Durban 2.

The Obama administration did not go to Durban 2, and did not re-engage, not because they were "under pressure from the Zionist/Israeli lobby/Jewish groups" of the U.S. They didn't go because the Durban 2 was still unacceptable as an international document, reaffirming 1 in 2 meant that Israel was singled out, and put in a bracket as state-sponsored racism.

Human rights groups should agree with the reasons why the Obama administration did not sign Durban 2. They could disagree that Obama should have gone anyway and tried to get a better document (my position). They could applaud the decision of Mary Robinson to get a medal of freedom, given all her work for freedom over the years in many difficult places. They should not condemn the opinion of Jewish groups who express their own disatisfaction with Mary Robinson's role in the Middle East citing many contentious incidents unless they are willing to get into a wrangle on each and every incident -- and certainly they have to concede to the Jewish groups that they have a point about the spirit of Z=R not being eliminated truly.

To start chiming in with the leftist blogs on hate of the conservative Jewish lobby in the U.S. is as wrong as their condemning Mary Robinson for the medal. That the Jewish lobbyists made a technically incorrect statement about Z=R doesn't make it more noble to bash them, and the malicious fury with which some are doing this is the very reason why people in the Jewish community feel that anti-Israel invective verges on antisemitism. Criticism of the Jewish lobbyists if it must be made must be tempered  with a forthright acknowledgement that it is WRONG to single out Israel out of all the countries of the world in an international conference document like this and that the UN has proven time and again that it is a tendentious and malicious atmosphere to be trying to resolve the Middle East conflict precisely because it has institutionalized an imbalanced approach constantly singling out Israel, a democratic state under the rule of law, and ignoring Palestinian suicide bombers and the authoritarian Islamic states that support them.

There are a numbe of unhappy consequences that will come of this, and I will not get into all of them now, but I have to say one obvious consequence is that we can see it is correct to call human rights groups "lobbyists" and ask them to be registered as such and to make that an issue in examination of whether they are suitable for certain offices. There is nothing wrong with being a lobbyist. This is America. This is how our system works. But you can't hide the work of lobbying under the umbrella of more narrowly-constructed pure human rights work.

In Defense -- and Criticism -- of Mary Robinson

We thought we had put the contentious Durban conference to bed for awhile at least, but here it comes rearing its ugly head in President Obama's decision to award Mary Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A number of Jewish groups, AIPAC and some congressmen like Eliot Engel have denounced the president's selection, angered by what they see as Mary Robinson's anti-Israel bias and mismanagement of the World Conference Against Racism -- which indeed did turn at times into an antisemitic spectacle and an anti-Israel hate fest that should never have been allowed under UN auspices. I was there, I saw it.

In part, I'm going to come to Mary Robinson's defense, but in part criticize her and her supporters for what happened at Durban. There is very little space for doing this in a nasty, polarized debate which pits international human rights groups against Jewish groups and friends of Israel, and pits some mainstream and Jewish press against various leftwing bloggers and new media commentators. Yes, Mary Robinson courageously stood up to some antisemites in Durban and should be applauded. But that the Durban conference came to the awful pass it did is due to her refusal to nip the growing debacle in the bud far earlier in the prepcom process, both with the states of the Organization of Islamic Conference and bad actors like Cuba, as well as in liaison with NGOs  -- when hostile Arab League states and their supporters and leftist sectarians derailing the process should have been faced down far earlier and more often.

I am not sure of the process by which Mary Robinson was selected for the award, but my sense is that it is an effort to deflect criticism of the United States coming furiously from some leftist groups for the U.S. decision not to participate in the follow-up review conference in Durban in April. It also comes from some members of the international human rights circuit (more on that below) who want to empower their clan with such honorifics. If I were asked to make up a list of people who deserve this award, quite frankly, I would not include Mary Robinson simply because I think it is an award that is better given to those who exhibited personal courage in the face of oppressive circumstances in their country, not UN officials who are sometimes forced to compromise for what they perceive as higher goals (and for which sometimes, they are proven wrong, as Mary Robinson has). Having said that, I would never advocate withdrawing such an award once announced, which is to become like Stalin or Ceaucescu pulling medals and doctoral degrees when an individual becomes politically incorrect. At the end of the day, the Obama Administration chose Mary Robinson because they felt she was one of their own, and if you do not like that choice, you have the electoral process to change it.

First, praise for Mrs. Robinson. If I had to sum up the accomplishments of Mary Robinson, the first woman president of Ireland, I would say this: she stood up to all the great powers, and advocated on behalf of the victims of massive human rights violations. During her tenure, with her office, unlike other parts of the UN mired in paralysis and exigencies of politics and "geographical distribution," she actively took on the Chechnya  issue with the Russians; the Tibet issue with the Chinese; the Guantanamo and Iraq issues with the Americans; East Timor with the Indonesians; and many other situations around the world to which she brought hope by invigorating her office's field missions and supporting the special procedures, the investigations into human rights abuses.

I vividly remember an early meeting with Mary Robinson, who was new to the UN bureaucracy, when a group of us eager human rights groups gathered around her with great hope and encouragement but also with pressure to do more. "It's as if I have 192 bosses," she said wearily, referencing all the members of the UN in the General Assembly. "And many don't wish me well." I remember remarking that as High Commissioner, she should see that her office remained "high," serving as a conscience above the fray. I think she mainly tried, but in the face of a constant stream of unhappy diplomats wearing out her waiting room with complaints of bias or neglect or incitement, sometimes she  punted. 

ACTIONS TO MARY ROBINSON'S CREDIT

In Durban, when we all faced the overwhelming challenges of a raucous and out-of-control meeting in a large cricket stadium (note to world leaders: don't hold events in stadiums, people are never at their best in them), I can say that here, too, Mary showed leadership, and did a number of good deeds:

o Taking the stage at the NGO Forum after a very long-winded and tendentious Fidel Castro who incited the masses to wave hateful flags printed "Cuba Si, Yanqi Non!", Mary Robinson was actually booed by the extreme leftists in the crowd who felt she hadn't done "enough" for Palestine. When she mentioned the racism against blacks in Cuba, some of them went absolutely livid and tried to shout her off the stage. She held her ground and continued her speech.

o When the NGO forum produced its odious document singling out Israel for special attack and repeating hateful and wrongful claims about "an apartheid state" and other invective, she simply refused to accept it. That enraged the hard left, too, but she didn't waver.

o She made an effort to hear all sides of the conflict and told Jewish groups that she felt their pain, even saying in one meeting "I am a Jew," in a statement of solidarity and condemnation of the antisemitic literature and posters littering the Durban grounds.

o After the Durban conference for some years, she continued to meet with both local and international groups, human rights, solidarity, and Jewish groups, hearing their complaints and trying to address concerns, and certainly took the message that Durban II was headed for a road wreck and did what she could there

Yet in all of these courageous and caring actions, there was a kind of shortfall or gap that many found major in retrospective, and which I was troubled about then, as now. And that was the inability to take on the hard left and the sectarians frontally, invoking universal human values, while taking the visible political actions needed to avoid conferring legitimacy on those whose platform was not the liberal value of human rights, but sectarian secular or theocratic ideologies.

To understand what I'm talking about, you'll have to get into the weeds a bit, hear some vignettes from Durban and contemplate some difficult documents, and see the larger philosophical points. I warn you in advance the text is long but keep Googling if you would rather find more dramatic invective.