U.N. anti-racism conference: To boycott or not to boycott?

The U.N.’s second conference against racism was a “farce,” just like the first one, said Keith Landy in Canada’s Gazette. The first meeting, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, quickly degenerated when Arab countries and other Islamic states voted to condemn Israel as a racist state, equating Zionism with racism. The U.S. and Israel stormed out. The second conference, billed as “Durban II,” was held this week in Geneva, and this time around, many countries rightly refused to attend. “The core objectives of this so-called anti-racism conference were to propagate anti-Semitism and vilify Israel.” That should have been obvious from the guest list: The only world leader to attend was the notorious Holocaust denier Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the end, the boycotters included the U.S., Israel, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Italy. Unfortunately France, Great Britain, and many smaller EU countries chose to attend.

Those who stayed away made a mistake, said France’s Le Monde in an editorial. To boycott the conference is to allow it to be controlled by “dictators and fundamentalists from all over who try to exploit the language of human rights” for their own repressive ends. The final document, for example, included ill-advised language calling for a ban on all speech that “denigrates” Islam. Somebody from the West had to be present to defend the true values of tolerance, anti-discrimination, and multiculturalism. “It is unfortunate that all Europeans did not share that determination to resist.”

Yet ultimately, all Europeans ended up walking out, said Pierre Rousselin in France’s Le Figaro. On the conference’s first day, Ahmadinejad predictably delivered a diatribe against Israel, calling it “the most cruel and racist regime,” planted in the Middle East “under the pretext of Jewish suffering” in the Holocaust. The French and British representatives, followed by the rest of the Europeans, rose and left the room while the Iranian president was still speaking. That reaction, at least, “showed how the world has changed since the 2001 Durban conference. The democracies are unanimous and the partisans of the mullahs are on the defensive.”

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But it’s the racists who got a forum at the U.N. conference, said Gerd Appenzeller in Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel. Just as at the 2001 conference, Islamic states hijacked the discussion. Practically every civil war in Africa has tribal or religious origins, yet in Geneva that was never discussed—only Israel was singled out for condemnation. The irony is stark: “If Islamic and African countries would obey the principles of democracy like Israel does, we wouldn’t even need a conference against racism.”