Kesher Talk

Lessons from Durban. The UN World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban SA right before before the attack on the World Trade Towers, turned into a festival of Israel-bashing and outright anti-semitism of the type which many of us became better acquainted with as we learned more about the politics and news media of the Arab world, and indeed of many of the Western organizations that went on to oppose US intervention in Iraq.

US Rep. Tom Lantos, who helped plan the conference and was part of the US delegation, believes there are lessons to be learned from the conference about fighting terrorism. He places much of the responsibility for letting the conference get off-track on UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson. He holds the Bush administration responsible for the previous six months of unilateralist US foreign policy that made it difficult to rally support from our allies at the conference. Most of all, he blames several of the Arab nations for deliberately hijacking the conference in the first place.

Lantos' main thesis is that if the US wants liberal democratic societies to replace terrorist-supporting despots, we can't afford to be isolationist or unilateral in our foreign policy. If we do not stay engaged in world leadership, other nations will step into the vacuum. He describes in detail how this happened at Durban.

Among the interesting bits of information in this essay: There were five preperatory regional conferences prior to the global one. All of them went well until the Asian conference, held in Tehran, Iran, when Israeli, Jewish, Kurdish, and Bahai groups were barred from attending. (Remember this is a UN-sponsored conference.) Robinson did not insist the conference be moved to a different host nation that would not act in such a discriminatory manner. Although at the previous three conferences she exhorted the delegates about human rights abuses in their regions, at the Tehran conference she did not criticize Arab violations of human rights. Her avoidance of confronting the Islamic states set the tone for the conference itself, where she repeatedly refused to speak out against the debasement of rhetorical language, the demonization of one country, and the elevation of a regional territorial dispute to a major theme of a conference on racism.

Lantos also describes Jesse Jackson's unsuccessful grandstanding, Yasir Arafat's demagoguery, the parallel NGO conference infested with proto-Nazi imagery to depict Israel, and the "feverish" negotiations that went on in an effort to save the original purpose of the conference.

Although it was quickly overshadowed by the 9-11 attacks, the Durban conference is a useful case study in how international forums can be manipulated to foment the kind of hatred and bigotry that results in terrorism.

(Cross-posted on Command Post)

posted by Judith @ 5/08/2003 11:13:48 AM