Will the racism conference be hijacked?
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David Saks
It was always predictable, if deplorable, that the forthcoming World Conference Against Racism would be used by certain lobbies as a diplomatic weapon against Israel. Indeed, preparations for the conference have been the occasion for a vast amount of violently anti-Israel rhetoric. It remains to be seen whether the conference itself, instead of being a genuinely disinterested international effort to combat racism, will end up degenerating into another Israel-bashing circus.
The build-up to the conference has in fact underlined a disturbing trend in international relations, one whereby various power blocs make use of world peacekeeping bodies to gang up against selected opponents. Perhaps no country has been singled out more than Israel. For decades, but particularly since the mid-1970s, the Arab lobby has sought to isolate the Jewish state in international forums, most notably the United Nations where an astoundingly disproportionate number of resolutions condemning Israel have been passed over the years. Considering that ranged against the single Jewish state are the members of the 56-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference, within which can be found the 22-member Arab League, the number of anti-Israel resolutions is hardly surprising.
A closer look at the present campaign against Israel reveals a degree of hypocrisy and selective morality that would make for an excellent surrealist black comedy were the implications not so disturbing. Iran, for example, has been in the forefront of the drive to put Israel in the dock, yet Iranian Jews continue to suffer officially sanctioned discrimination, particularly in the areas of employment, education and public accommodation.
In the 1950s Arab countries like Libya and Iraq drove their entire Jewish communities into exile through state-sponsored discrimination and harassment, yet these same countries now loudly accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing”.
Another disquieting instance of selective morality is how the international community has ignored the extent to which anti-Semitism of the most virulent kind is being disseminated throughout the Arab world, including the Palestinian territories. Jews are routinely accused of infecting Arab children with Aids, plotting world domination through alleged manipulation of the world media and economy, using the blood of gentile children for religious rituals, fabricating the story of the Holocaust for blackmail purposes and in general of being evil, cunning and a thorough menace to humanity. It is precisely this kind of demented hate mongering that the conference is ostensibly committed to eradicating, yet no draft resolution has as yet even alluded to it.
Examples abound of countries which carry out discrimination and persecution without ever being called to account by the international community. Cuba is one of those countries strongly supporting the anti-Zionist drive, yet today tens of thousands of native Cubans live in exile following four decades of totalitarianism in the Castro fiefdom.
After four decades of Chinese occupation, Tibet faces the threat of extinction as a unique culture and society, yet the world’s response has been to award to China the honour of hosting the 2008 Olympics.
It is, of course, a great deal easier to lean on five million Jews in Israel than it is to call 1,3-billion Chinese to book. Meanwhile, Hindus in Afghanistan are being compelled to wear identity badges on their clothing, something chillingly reminiscent of how Jews in Europe were singled out in bygone years. As for Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s persecution of white farmers in order to shore up his crumbling support base is nakedly racist, and should be unambiguously declared as such.
Perhaps the most egregious example of a country whose wretched human rights records will not be coming up for discussion at the conference is Sudan, described by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom as “the world’s most violent abuser of the right to freedom of religion and belief”. An estimated two million people have thus far been killed in the country’s 18-year-old civil war, and tens of thousands of Christians and animists have been abducted into slavery with the acquiescence and probable cooperation of the ruling Muslim-dominated government.
One can go on, but the point has surely been made. Establishing international watchdog bodies with a mandate to collectively strive for world peace and fight injustice is and remains a noble ideal, but not when national or ideological self-interest become the real driving forces.
Many commentators have expressed concern at the fact that individual nations are being singled out for opprobrium at the conference while others avoid censure completely. Joseph Farah, a prominent Arab-American journalist, has for example lashed out at what he has termed the “international public-relations lynching of Israel by a UN-sponsored kangaroo court”. This double standard is even worse when many of those calling most vociferously for Israel to be targeted would themselves fare extremely badly were the international human rights spotlight to be focused on them.
At the end of the day, if the anti-Israel lobby is allowed to hijack the conference, it will have ominous implications, not only for the people of Israel in their ongoing quest for survival in a hostile world but also for the very future of international efforts to eliminate discrimination and injustice.
David Saks is senior researcher at the South African Jewish Board of Deputies