Keith M. Landy
Montreal Gazette
You know something is wrong when Iran grabs the lead in the global fight against racism. But that is precisely what happened when the United Nations Durban Review Conference began on Monday in Geneva.
The 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa reveled in the presence of the chairmen, Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat, then the avatars of rabid anti-West, anti-Israel, anti-U.S. and anti-globalization causes. Eight years later, the Durban Review Conference featured their current poster boy, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
One would have thought that Ahmadinejad’s presence would be enough to undermine any last shred of legitimacy for the conference appropriately dubbed “Durban II.” Iran is, after all, among the world’s most egregious violators and suppressors of basic human rights.
But then again, if the DRC is looking for a symbol of hypocrisy, they have certainly found their man.
Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust of the Jews while seeking nuclear weapons to finish the job. He pays lip service to the UN and multilateralism while advocating the liquidation of one of its sovereign members. He claims there is no homosexuality in Iran while executing gays. He suggests Iran is a bastion of free expression while jailing dissidents and critical journalists and shutting down opposition media and academic institutions that fail to toe the party line.
The Iran of his vivid imagination supports freedom of religion while Baha’is are harassed and imprisoned on trumped-up charges and progressive Muslims face capital punishment for heresy and apostasy. Women’s rights advocates are routinely attacked and imprisoned. Overall, Iran is second only to China in the number of annual executions of its citizens. It leads the world in public hangings.
During the many months of planning for the DRC, the conference’s agenda has been shaped by Iranian negotiators along with Libya and Cuba among other human rights luminaries. Ahmadinejad was thus most welcome at the DRC, which has been organized under the auspices of the UN’s Human Rights Council. The Council may not be seeking the destruction of Israel, but it is certainly obsessed with painting the Jewish state as the world’s worst violator of human rights.
The Canadian Jewish Congress has said from the outset that this conference is a human-rights fraud that is setting back the cause of the international anti-racism agenda as badly, or worse, than the 2001 gathering it is supposed to be reviewing. Almost immediately, the DRC’s planners abandoned its narrow mandate of simply reviewing the “progress” since 2001 in order to further their aims of delegitimizing Israel, combating racism with hatred, and singling out Islam for insulation against “defamation.”
Canada is once again leading the global fight against international racism. The Harper government sniffed out the toxic nature of the DRC over a year ago. For many months, Canada courageously stood as the sole country dissociated from the coming fiasco. To their great credit, the Liberals and the New Democrats have supported this position throughout.
Israel, Italy, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Australia and New Zealand then followed Canada’s lead and stayed home. In an attempt to forestall an even wider withdrawal, the DRC planners made some last-minute cosmetic changes to the agenda, but it was all smoke and mirrors and too little, too late. The core objectives of this so-called anti-racism conference remain to propagate anti-Semitism and vilify Israel while ignoring such genuine human-rights catastrophes as the ongoing genocide in Darfur. That is an unspeakable tragedy.
As it turned out, the irony of Ahmadinejad lecturing the world on human rights and morality was not lost on much of the audience, as dozens of envoys from a wide variety of countries walked out in protest as he began his address. The Iranian president was also heckled, including by someone dressed in a clown suit, apparently out of professional courtesy. That, of course, did not stop Ahmadinejad from following in the longstanding UN tradition of singling out Israel, referring to the Jewish state as “the most cruel and repressive racist regime” and “racist perpetrators of genocide.”
So despite the important solidarity of the diplomats who shunned Ahmadinejad, the sad fact remains that yet another golden opportunity to advance a realistic, practical global anti-racism agenda will have been sacrificed on the altar of hatred and politicization.
Worse yet, the language of demonization that will emerge from the DRC will set the stage for many more years of hate, vilification and violence aimed at Israel, the West and the Jews. History shows that evil words lead to evil deeds. Or was it merely a coincidence that the Durban World Conference Against Racism concluded just a week before Sept. 11, 2001?
Keith M. Landy is chair of Canadian Jewish Congress’s Durban II Committee. He was a participant at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban.
