“I AM a Jew,” UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson declared Wednesday at a dinner in Durban, South Africa, a guest reported. Robinson, a former president of Ireland who is in fact Roman Catholic, was responding to an anti-Jewish cartoon booklet distributed at a forum of non-governmental organisations meeting ahead of a UN conference on racism which starts on Friday. Jose Luis Diaz, Robinson’s representative, did not attend the dinner and was unable to confirm her off-the-cuff comments, but said: “She has been concerned during the pre-conference period about the use of both hate-speech and cartoons in literature in denigrating specific groups such as Jews.” The guest, Shimon Samuels, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, reported Robinson as saying: “The purpose of this conference is primarily to achieve human dignity”. “My husband is a cartoonist; I love cartoons, but when I see the type of racism in the cartoon booklets of the Arab Lawyers’ Union distributed at the conference I can only say that I am a Jew .. I am a Jew .. because these victims are hurting. “I will not allow this fractiousness to torpedo the conference,” Samuels reported Robinson as saying at the dinner for sponsors of the NGO forum thrown by the Absa bank. – AFP
‘I believe I can do more outside the UN’ March 28, 2001