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Article on the Sunday Tribune on the UN conference on racism walkout and EU hypocrisy

category international | migration / racism | non-anarchist press author Tuesday April 28, 2009 02:43author by Eithne Tynan - Sunday Tribune Report this post to the editors

"Outside the Ferrero Rocher-stacking dinner parties of the west, the UN security council looks like an organisation run by a cabal of domineering nuclear powers and arms dealers"

We must think up a new collective noun for diplomats, in honour of last week's 'Durban II' international conference on racism in Geneva. A kennel of diplomats, perhaps, since they resembled nothing so much as a group of dogs meeting for the first time – sniffing one another's backsides, barking idiotically, piddling in corners, and putting their tails between their legs at the first sign of trouble.

First there was the mystifying decision by the US, Poland, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Italy, Germany and Israel to boycott the conference altogether, for fear there might be racism at it (or in the case of Israel, for fear anybody might mention the two-state solution).

Then there was the surreal moment when all those white delegates walked out over Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech. Because the text of his speech included the words "ambigious and dubious" to describe the Holocaust, many delegates must have made up their minds to walk out before they had even sat down. Those words were dropped from the actual speech (thanks, we are led to believe, to the reasoned intervention of UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon), but by then it was too late: the diplomats had spotted an opportunity for grandstanding.

To sit as docile as a lapdog while the Israeli defence forces murder hundreds of civilians in Operation Cast Lead (despite the army's surprise-surprise conclusion last week that no civilians were deliberately targeted), and yet to foam at the mouth because of mere words: the hypocrisy of the thing is staggering.

(In an interesting side story on the use of words, Ha'aretz reported on Friday that the Israeli government now admits the naming of Operation Cast Lead was "a public relations faux pas". Seemingly cast lead is a reference to Hannukah dreidels, and has nothing to do with spewing bullets around. "The English translation wasn't the most effective way to get our message out and it's an important point because if you can control the terminology of the debate, you can win the debate," said the prime minister's spokesman, sounding creepily Orwellian.)

Much of the commentary that followed this "stunt" at Geneva mused on the fact that it served only to publicise Ahmadinejad's ideas. But if the delegates had actually stayed to listen to the speech, they could have found almost nothing objectionable in it.

It can't have been Ahmad­in­ejad's description of Israel as a "racist" regime that scandalised them. Only a meathead would be scandalised by that. You don't even have to consider its treatment of Palestinians for evidence. The simple fact is that all ethnic Jews, all over the world, are entitled to live in Israel, while many ethnic Palestinians, who were actually born there, are not. The state of Israel was founded on the principle of racial isolation; until recently Israel did not even think it necessary to deny this.

The problem can only be the man himself, or more particularly his nuclear aspira­tions. Ahmadinejad of course has a beam in his own eye when it comes to racism and human rights. Like many people in the region, he wishes there were no Israel, which is like wishing for a united Ireland, and about as probable. He is regarded as a Holocaust denier, and certainly the phrase in his speech about post-war global powers making an entire nation homeless under "the pretext of Jewish suffering" was badly chosen if he is not.

Yes, on the whole, possibly Ahmadinejad's closest rival for out-and-out pottiest Middle Eastern politician would have to be Israel's deputy prime minister, the child-beating racist Avigdor Lieberman, advocate of a form of Final Solution for Palestinians.

However, if people would stop being hysterical for a second, Ahmadinejad did make some cogent arguments in his speech. He criticised the UN's own discriminatory practices, and specifically the veto power of the five permanent members of the security council – the US, Britain, Russia, China and France.

"Powerful countries have been authorised to decide for other nations, based on their own interests and at their own discretion, and they can easily violate all laws and humanitarian values, and they have done so," he said, and he is right.

Like it or not, this is what the UN looks like outside the glass-clinking, Ferrero Rocher-stacking dinner parties of the Christian west. It looks like an organisation run by a cabal of domineering nations – nuclear powers all of them, arms dealers all of them. It looks an organisation which has to excise every potentially inflammatory reference to Israel from its documents before its craven members will agree to them, until its documents have about as much chutzpah as a get-well card. It looks like an organisation that watches Israel commit one unspeakable war crime after another, and does nothing.

Instead of turning tail, diplomats ought to be straining at the leash.

Related Link: http://www.tribune.ie
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