Analyzing the Durban II Conference
" At Durban I, an NGO Forum accepted what can be summed up as a declaration of war against Israel. Participating nongovernmental organizations adopted a strategy for the complete isolation of Israel through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions.
The Canadian Harper government was the first to announce in February 2008 that it would not participate in Durban II, followed nine months later by Israel. Other countries, including the United States, eventually followed suit in refusing to come to Geneva. The withdrawal accelerated when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced his intention to participate. Many funders that had provided large amounts of money for the Durban I NGO Forum, including Canada and the Ford Foundation, did not provide NGO support for 2009.
Although the nonparticipation of so many key countries made Durban II less of a diplomatic disaster for Israel than Durban I, it did not result in any erasure or renouncement of the anti-Israeli “Durban strategy†adopted at the 2001 NGO Forum.
Many UN-sponsored mini-Durbans promoting the indictment of Israel continue to take place, led by the same NGOs active in the Durban I hate-fest. In the dominant narrative, Israel is the world’s worst violator of human rights and must be held accountable through investigations predetermined to find it guilty. Judge Richard Goldstone has become the patron saint of this “Durban process.â€"
http://jcpa.org/article/analyzing-the-durban-ii-conference/From Durban I to Durban II: Preventing Poisonous Anti-Semitism*
"Billed seven years ago as a World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, it quickly became a new form of Passion Play with the Palestinian people as the victim and the Jewish state of Israel as the crucifier. On returning to the United States, the late Congressman Tom Lantos, a member of the U.S. delegation, remarked in a meeting with the American Jewish Committee that "For me, having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand, this was the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I had seen since the Nazi period."[1] "
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Down_with_Antisemitism/message/27408"The Durban World Conference on Racism, which ended only three days before September 11, revealed the intimate connections between anti-racism politics and a key platform in the terrorist agenda, namely, the delegitimation of Israel and the legitimation of terrorism against its citizens. The Durban phenomenon was repeated in the aftermath of September 11 as allegations of racism and displays of antisemitism abounded from terrorists, apologists of terrorism in the media, and at the 2001 UN General Assembly deliberations on terrorism. The linkage between racial hatred and terrorism is a phenomenon which democracies ignore at their peril. Durban uncovered racism as a real root cause of terrorism, a motivation which the terrorist seeks to camouflage by the accusation of racism itself.
The World Conference Against Racism became a forum for racism. Human rights was used not as a facilitator for communication but as a weapon of political interests antithetical to human rights protection. A large group of states sought to minimize or exclude references to the Holocaust, redefine or ignore antisemitism, and isolate the state of Israel from the global community as a racist practitioner of apartheid and crimes against humanity. The vestiges of Jewish victimhood were to be systematically removed by deleting the references to antisemitism and the Holocaust, to be displaced by the Palestinian victim living under racist, Nazi-like, oppression."
http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp468.htm
