The Arab racists' & Islamic bigots' campaign at: DURBAN - racists cry "racism"

UN's Durban II Conference Against Racism?

By: Sam Harari, The Bulletin

08/20/2008

The Durban World Conference against Racism, organized by the United Nations and held in South Africa in 2001, was driven by noble and just ideals. Its stated hope was to achieve recognition and prevention of crimes related to intolerance, racial discrimination and xenophobia.

To the dismay of the many who shared the spirit of the conference's goal, the debate degenerated into a festival of overt bigotry. According to the Canadian government, it spiraled into "a circus of intolerance."

And now, in anticipation of Durban II planned for 2009 in Geneva, human rights advocates and government officials alike predict it will be just more of the same.

Some Background

The first Durban conference's condemnation of Western European colonialism became tainted when it omitted mention of far more recent colonial crimes, including that of Armenia, and China's ongoing repression of Tibet.

Arab and Islamic states attempted to impose an agenda declaring Palestinian victimhood at the hands of Israeli "colonialism and oppression."

Further, they attempted to equate modern Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland, with racism.

The Sudanese Minister of Justice displayed perhaps the most overt example of the hypocrisy of the conference; representing a country guilty of ongoing slavery and genocide, the minister demanded reparations for historical slavery.

French philosopher and writer Pascal Bruckner put it best when he said, "It was like a cannibal suddenly calling for vegetarianism."

At the NGO forum, hatred for Jews (and by extension for the U.S.) was not veiled behind politics.

Anti-Semitic cartoons were circulated. Copies of Mein Kampf and the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" were handed out. A mob screaming, "You are killers," shut down the only session on anti-Semitism, one of the most ancient and virulent forms of intolerance. A number of delegates were physically threatened, amidst calls of "Death to the Jews."

Australia and Canada issued statements condemning the conference's hypocrisy. The Israeli and U.S. delegations walked out....
http://www.thebulletin.us/site/index.cfm?newsid=20082298&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=8

Arab history, Arab hypocrisy.(United Nations World Conference against Racism, 2001)(Brief Article)
Midstream, November, 2001 by Rodman, David
It's sadly ironic, but not really surprising, that the summer 2001 United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, turned into a racist conference -- indeed, a racist farce. By attempting to delegitimize Jewish nationalism and the Jewish state through vicious and preposterous condemnations, the Arabs (and their sycophants around the word) once again hijacked an international forum in a blatant effort to blot out the Jewish people's right to a national existence in its homeland...
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6522/is_/ai_n25877138

The United Nations of Reparations Hypocrisy ...
Singling out Israel to blame for the Middle East's problems was probably the straw that broke the camel's back, leading both the U.S. and Israel to withdraw their delegations from the conference in Durban. Arab caricatures of Jews with big noses and bloody fangs were hardly a way of being against racism.
http://www.capmag.com/articlePrint.asp?ID=1063

UN Watch Briefing - UN Watch
UN Watch Exclusive from Nigeria: Today's Durban II Text Date: 8/26/2008 ... [Arab] Racism and Historical Truth: Jewish Refugees [expelled] from Arab Lands Date: 4/15/2008 ...
http://www.unwatch.org/briefing

Durban 2001 myth debunked... 9/17/08 Iran to Execute Minority Arabs after Bogus Trial - 1/11/07 ...
http://www.unwatch.org/site/apps/nl/newsletter2.asp?c=bdKKISNqEmG&b=1317481&printmode=1

[How far will Arab Muslim bigots go at the UN? The Arab Muslim apartheid against Israel's ambulances] Arab Red Cross societies seek to censure Israel and Magen David Adom - 11/26/07
http://www.unwatch.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=bdKKISNqEmG&b=1317481&ct=4686993

The disgrace of Durban - five years later

Irwin Cotler
National Post, September 12, 2006

It was said in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that "the whole world changed." I don't know if the world is any different. But it is clear that 9/11 had a transformative impact on our politics and collective psyche.

But if 9/11 was a transformative event, the same description must apply to another event that ended on the eve of 9/11. I am referring to "The World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance" in Durban, South Africa, which was the "tipping point" for the emergence of a new wave of anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-racism. Unfortunately, the 5th anniversary of this event has gone largely unremarked.

As one of my colleagues put it at the time, if 9/11 was the Kristallnacht of terror, Durban was the Mein Kampf. Those of us who personally witnessed the Durban festival of hate -- with its hateful declarations, incantations, pamphlets and marches -- have forever been transformed. For us, Durban is part of our everyday lexicon as a byword for racism and anti-Semitism, just as 9/11 is a byword for terrorist mass murder.

When the World Conference Against Racism was first proposed some 10 years ago, I was among those who greeted the news enthusiastically. This was to be the first world conference of its kind in the 21st Century. Anti-racism was finally going to be a priority on the international human-rights agenda. The underrepresented human rights cases and causes, such as those of the Dalats of India and the Roma of Europe, would now have a platform and presence. The fact that Durban was chosen as host city was a commemoration of the dismantling of South African apartheid, itself a watershed event in the international struggle against racism.

But what happened at Durban was truly Orwellian: A conference purportedly organized to fight racism was turned into a festival of racism against Israel and the Jewish people. A conference intended to commemorate the dismantling of South Africa as an apartheid state resonated with spurious calls for the dismantling of Israel's alleged apartheid state. A conference dedicated to the promotion of human rights as the new secular religion of our time increasingly singled out Israel as a sort of modern-day geopolitical Anti-Christ.

How did this happen?

The World Conference Against Racism was organized around four regional conferences -- in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Each regional conference was to formulate a declaration against racism and a plan of action. Then the four regional declarations and plans of action were to be collated in Durban into a composite draft declaration against racism.

The problem originated with the Asian regional conference, held in Tehran in February, 2001. Although Israel belonged to the Asian group, the conference organizers excluded Israel and Jewish non-governmental organizations from participation: Contrary to the United Nations' own principles with respect to universality and equality, a member state was made a pariah. The Tehran conference also supported a country-specific indictment of Israel, yet another breach of international human-rights principles and the UN's own procedures in this regard.

The six-point indictment emanating from the Tehran regional conference, which became a dominant blueprint for Durban, has emerged as one of the more scurrilous documents relating to Israel and the Jewish people to appear since the Second World War.

The first specific indictment of Israel spoke of the "occupation" of disputed territories in the West Bank and Gaza as a crime against humanity, as a new form of apartheid, as a threat to international peace and security. While UN Security Council Resolution 1373 adopted in the aftermath of 9/11 would characterize terrorism itself as a threat to international peace and security -- which no cause or grievance could ever justify -- Tehran and later Durban would characterize terrorist acts against Israel as "resistance" to occupation. In both Tehran and Durban, delegates would ignore the fact that the root cause of the Middle East conflict was, and is, the denial of Israel's right to exist in any boundaries.

Second, Israel was characterized as being an apartheid state. And since delegates at Durban saw "resistance" against apartheid states as eminently praiseworthy, Durban served to validate terrorist acts against Israel.

Third, Israel was cast as being responsible for all the evils in the world, the "poisoner of the international wells," the contemporary analogue to the medieval anti-Semitic stereotype of the scheming, murderous Jew. In this regard, the delegates at Tehran and Durban were very much taking their cues from the larger UN itself: In March, 2001, one month after the Tehran conference, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights condemned Israel, and Israel alone for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Fourth, Israel was accused of the "ethnic cleansing" of "Mandatory Arab Palestine" in 1947-48; of being, in effect, an "original sin" in its very creation, though its international birth certificate was sanctioned by the UN Partition Resolution of 1947. (The Jews, readers will recall, accepted the Partition Resolution, the Arabs rejected it, and launched, in their words, a "war of extermination" against the embryonic Israeli state.)

Fifth, the documents emanating from Durban introduced a new perspective on the notion of "holocausts," intentionally written in the plural and in lower case. A large number of states even sought to minimize or exclude any references to the Holocaust, or to marginalize and ignore anti-Semitism, while holding up Israel's treatment of the Palestinians as an example of a "real" holocaust. Zionism was characterized not only as "racism," but as a violent expression of racist supremacy. In the ultimate Orwellian inversion, Zionism was held out to be a form of anti-Semitism itself.

As it happens, all of this hateful Durban-speak became a legitimizing instrument for a new wave of anti-Semitism in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, as evidenced by the following examples:

1. The Jews were blamed for 9/11 in a set of new "protocols" reflective of what some see as a new international Jewish Conspiracy. For example, in many Arab and Muslim countries, teachers, religious leaders, and the media propagated the theory about the 4,000 Jews who supposedly had been tipped off to stay away from work at the World Trade Centre, and the Jewish film crew that supposedly had advance notice to be on the scene to film the planes plowing into the Towers. Today, five years later, polls show that some 50% of British Muslims believe 9/11 to have been an American-Israeli conspiracy.

2. In the anti-terrorism debate that took place at the UN in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Arab states and their supporters opposed any attempt to classify "resistance" as terrorism, thereby appropriating the Durban rhetoric of the de-legitimization of Israel, on the one hand, and the legitimization of terrorism as "resistance" against Israel, on the other.

3. A global campaign against Israeli "apartheid" was launched in the form of post-Durban calls for boycotts and divestment. In an astonishing but revelatory development at a pro-divestment conference in Michigan, a resolution calling for a two-state solution "if Israel were to transform itself and become a real democracy" was defeated, but a resolution calling for the dismantling of Israel as a racist apartheid state was adopted.

4. The first UN Human Rights Commission meeting in the aftermath of Durban -- not unlike the one on the road to Durban -- sought to single out Israel for differential and discriminatory treatment, with 40% of all the resolutions passed at the meeting indicting Israel, while the major international human rights violators, such as China, Sudan or Iran, enjoyed immunity. This Alice in Wonderland human-rights perversion has been replicated by the newly formed UN Human Rights Council.

5. The convening, in December 2001, of the contracting Parties to the 1949 Geneva Conventions on international humanitarian law was a particularly egregious discriminatory act. For 52 years, the contracting Parties had never met -- notwithstanding the genocide in the Balkans, the unspeakable and preventable genocide in Rwanda and the killing fields in Sierra Leone. The first time, and still the only time, that the contracting Parties have ever come together to put a country in the docket was in the aftermath of Durban. That country was Israel, an offensive singling-out that undermines the whole regime of international humanitarian law.

In sum, Durban became the tipping point for the coalescence of a new, virulent, globalizing anti-Jewishness reminiscent of the atmospherics that pervaded Europe in the 1930s. In its lethal form, this animus finds expression as state-sanctioned genocidal anti-Semitism, such as that embraced by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran, and its terrorist proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah.

None of this is intended to suggest that Israel is somehow above the law, or that Israel is not accountable to the international community like any other state. On the contrary, neither Israel nor the Jewish people are entitled to any privilege or preference because of the horror of the Holocaust or the threat of anti-Semitism. But human-rights standards should not be applied selectively. If they are applied to Israel, which they must be, they must be applied equally to everyone else. If Israel must respect human rights, the rights of Israel deserve equal respect, including the right to live in peace and security.

There They Go Again, Those Arab Racists... No, as Arabs, they are part of the greater Arab Nation... There They Go Again, Those Arab Racists
Jul 5, 2004
http://www.michnews.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/124/4241

CULTURE OF HATE--JIHAD RACISM ACROSS THE WORLD - The Durban World Conference Against Racism — where the culture of hate was ... This Arabization and Islamization of the Bible thus robs not only the Jews ...
http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/cultuHre.htm

UN World Conference Against Racism But the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist campaign is not uninformed bigotry, it is conscious politics.
http://www.adl.org/durban/adl_quotes.asp

Durban & Islamo Arab Apartheid
http://www.dhimmi.com/durban.htm

The Bigotry of Jihad, They stand ? admirably ? ever-prepared to expose that bigotry to the light ... the prejudice that animates anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=3538

Durban Alert, August 27, 2007 Aug 27, 2007 ...This surge in racism adopted new forms
http://www.eyeontheun.org/durban.asp?p=357

Arab Racism

One of the accusations which the various Arab countries (including Egypt and Jordan which have peace treaties with Israel) often make against Israel is that "Zionism is racism". Defining Zionism, the national liberation movement of jews, the victims of racism, as racism is particularly cynical, yet it seems that the Arabs have succeeded to convince the leaders of some nations, themselves victims of racism, to support this vicious accusation.

The latest attempt to define Zionism as racism was at the 2001 UNESCO conference which was held in Durban, South Africa. The resolution which was initiated by Arab countries enjoyed the support of most participants. Especially painful was the support of such African leaders as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Some Western countries, however, notably Australia and Canada, objected and accused the conference of hypocrisy. The Canadian delegation, for example, issued the following statement:

"Canada is still here today only because we wanted to have our voice decry the attempts at this Conference to de-legitimize the State of Israel and to dishonor the history and suffering of the Jewish people. We believe, and we have said in the clearest possible terms, that it was inappropriate - wrong - to address the Palestinian-Israel conflict in this forum. We have said, and will continue to say, that anything - any process, any declaration, any language - presented in any forum that does not serve to advance a negotiated peace that will bring security, dignity and respect to the people of the region is - and will be - unacceptable to Canada."

It was for that reason that both Israel and the United States under the leadership of Secretary Colin Powell, himself no stranger to racism, pulled their delegations from the conference. The final text adopted by the conference drops all direct criticism of Israel, but does recognize the Palestinians' right to self-determination and expresses concern at their plight under foreigh occupation.

That was only the latest attempt to define Zionism as racism. In November 1975, the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 declared that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination" In December 1991, the General Assembly rescinded this resolution through Resolution 4686.

http://www.peacefaq.com/zisr.html

http://www.beth-elsa.org/be_s1026.htm

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/Zionism_Is_Not_Racism.html

Israelis aren't 'racist' - they're worried