Anti-racism efforts must be lead by figures of respect

By Gregg J. Rickman for DurbanReview.Org

The 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, otherwise known as the Durban Conference, was a parley hijacked by radicals betraying the real purpose of the event. The April 2009 Durban II conference however promises to top that fiasco as human rights abusers have taken over this anti-racism conference.

The Durban II preparation process has already shown itself to be a Holocaust-denying, anti-Israel hate-fest. The United States, the Europeans and all other democratic nations should boycott this cynical effort to incite racist hatred and religious bigotry. Those who attend this fraudulent conference only legitimize and sanction the bigotry and racism practiced by the world's most intolerant, anti-democratic nations.

It is the nations running the conference, with their long and hostile records on human rights, that cause the most concern. Let's look at a few of them.

If you had to choose a responsible chair for the Conference Preparatory Committee, a safe bet would be to pass over Libya. Yet as the upside-down logic of Durban II goes, the Libyan representative was elected by his peers along with vice chairmen from human rights-abusing nations such as Iran (where homosexuals are regularly hung from cranes in the street) and Cuba (where the communist state prevents any dissent).

Libya's twisted worldview, if there were any doubts, was on exhibit last April when its deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Ibrahim Dabbashi, appeared before the Security Council and brazenly compared Israeli actions in Gaza at the time to the Nazis' systematic killing during the Holocaust.

Last year, Iran added its peculiar brand of democratic practices to the Durban II process when it protested the credentials registration of the Canadian Council on Israel and Jewish Advocacy, in a preparatory meeting on the conference. As Hershell Ezrin, the council's chief executive officer, told the Canadian Jewish News last May, "The whole process had become so discriminatory to us, we felt that no matter how many times we answered their questions and responded to shorter and shorter deadlines, we were asked the same questions over and over again." With Iran proudly serving as the center of Holocaust denial today, we can only imagine what it has up its sleeve for this conference.

Syria is also seeking to play a role in Holocaust denial and trivialisation. In a Durban II planning meeting Syria objected to a passage in the draft conference outcome document which stated that one third of Europe's Jews (which is six million people) were killed by the Nazis. "We don't want to go into a statistical discussion, you know it is unclear what percentage of Jews were killed in the Holocaust, some say three million, some say one, some say even less", the Syrian delegate said. Iran also objected to Holocaust references in the anti-racism document, complaining that banning denial was a restriction on freedom of expression.

Yet these countries and their allies have been staunch defenders of the insertion of blasphemy legislation in numerous other U.N. forums, a policy that violates freedom of expression through the suppression of any criticism of Islam or its leaders.

The Human Rights Council, the successor to the Human Rights Commission, also has been active in the planning of the conference at the request of the U.N. General Assembly. Yet the council, like its predecessor, has become irrevocably tarred with anti-Semitism and bias against Israel.

As the State Department's March 2008 Report on Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism explained about these two organizations, "For many years before its abolition, the Commission on Human Rights had a separate agenda item focusing solely on alleged violations of Israel -- namely, Item 8, 'Question of the violation of human rights in the occupied Arab territories, including Palestine.' This allowed multiple resolutions against Israel, while no other country could have more than one resolution run against it each year. No other country beside Israel had an agenda item exclusively scrutinizing it. This tradition has been continued by the new U.N. Human Rights Council."

The report said later that "Several important countries, including established democracies, follow a policy of voting 'on principle' against all resolutions that criticize a specific country regardless of the merits -- unless that country is Israel, in which case they consistently vote in favor of critical resolutions." This institutional racism which has grown in the UN is feeding into the Durban Review process. The conference itself has been timed to clash with Israel's national Holocaust Memorial on April 21st.

Many of the problematic demands being made in the planning session come from the OIC (a group of Islamic states) who reject the universal declaration of human rights and say Sharia law (Islamic religious law) takes precedence. How can we have an effective conference against discrimination when some of those organising it don't believe in underlying principles, such as human right being universal?

In encouraging this conference to reconvene and worse, leaving it in the hands of the likes of Iran, Libya and other terrorist states, the United Nations again dishonors itself by allowing these tyrants a platform to impose their racial and religious bigotry on the world.

Anti-racism efforts must be lead by figures of respect. Racism should not be allowed on to the agenda of an anti-racist conference. A World conference against racism must be about human rights that apply equally to all. It must be run by those willing to respect universal human rights and not those who reject them.

Gregg J. Rickman was appointed by the US President as the first U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. While in that role (2006 to early 2009) Mr Rickman reported on an international rise in antisemitism, efforts to combat it, and the concerns amongst antisemitism experts over the approaching Durban 2 conference.

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