The Second World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance took place last week, once again in Durban, South Africa. For those of you who don’t remember, the last time this conference was held was in August 2001, and at that time it turned into such an obvious propaganda platform for anti-America and anti-Israel rhetoric, that Secretary of State Colin Powell ordered the American delegation to return home early. This year’s conference proved to be no different.
The conference opened by electing that bastion of human rights, Libya, as the conference chair. Among the 19 vice-chairs were similar paragons of virtue, such as Cuba and Iran. The Egyptian delegate managed to find time both for a condemnation of Israel’s “continued occupation of Palestine and violations arising therefrom,” and criticism of the Danish cartoon incident as a “new and dangerous incitement against religion”. This meshed particularly well with Syria’s statement that 9/11 opened the door to new forms of racism and associated intolerance against “Semitic” people, continuing Durban I’s tradition of defining Anti-Arab racism as “another form of anti-semitism and Islamaphobia.” These are just a few examples, from only the first day of the conference, that demonstrate the agenda that guided the week-long international event. Instead of reviewing and implementing the results of Durban I, as intended, Durban II quickly became focused on charging the West with a wide variety of “Islamophobic” actions in the wake of 9/11.
The Durban meetings are in preparation for a major international conference on racism in 2009. If that event is allowed to look anything like these farces, then it would be in the best interest of every Western nation to avoid it entirely, or even better, to pressure the UN to cancel the event. There’s no reason we need to lend credibility and media coverage to a forum whose goal is to turn our own institutions and ideals against us.
