Who’s Watching the (Racism) Watchers?

The "Durban II" UN conference on human rights dealing with racism is set to meet next March.  The first meeting of this type in 2001 became so obsessive about Israel that Colin Powell pulled the US out of it.  In a Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this week, they suggested we not even show up this time.  A little harsh?  Premature, perhaps?

Consider this:

"Durban II," planned for April in Geneva, promises to be an encore of the same old Israel-bashing. The draft declaration says Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians amounts to no less than "a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity, a form of genocide and a serious threat to international peace and security." We’ll spare you the rest.

Israel will be the main obsession, but it’s not the only target. The draft declaration also goes after the West’s freedom of speech and antiterror laws under the guise of protecting religion (read: Islam) from "defamation." The entire West will be in the dock for allegedly persecuting Muslims. "The most serious manifestations of defamation of religions are the increase in Islamophobia and the worsening of the situation of Muslim minorities around the world," the draft reads. "Islamophobia" is a term used to brand any criticism of Islam as a hate crime.

The Islamic terrorists who have killed hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists get a free pass. Instead, the draft calls for a media code of conduct and "internationally binding normative standards . . . that can provide adequate guarantees against defamation of religions." If this sounds like censorship, that’s because it is.

Well, can’t we just reason with them?  If we don’t show up, we can’t make a change, right? 

But we may not be able to make a change anyway, given who’s in charge.

The conference is being organized by the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, like its discredited predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, has been taken over by the world’s main abusers of human rights. The Organization of Islamic Countries, the most powerful voting bloc at the U.N., put Libya in charge of preparing Durban II, assisted by such other pillars of the international community as Iran and Cuba.

Yeah, those stalwarts of human rights and tolerance.    The inmates are in charge of the asylum.  The UN continues to be an exercise in futility, giving evil regimes legitimacy regarding their actions, under the cover of "international cooperation". 

In fact it was so bad, that the name of the body was changed 2 years ago to avoid the (well deserved) bad PR it was receiving for doing exactly what this body is doing; making human rights abusers arbiters of human rights violations.  And how well has that worked out?  The blog UN Watch has been watching.

In its two years of existence, the Arab-controlled council has systematically undermined the cause of human rights and eviscerated the UN’s few existing tools that work. Human rights monitors in Belarus, Cuba, Liberia, Congo (DRC), have all been scrapped. Genocide by Sudan has been ignored, with the monitor of that country’s atrocities now on the  chopping block as well. Watch the March 2009 session, when the Sudan mandate is set to expire.

Violations by 189 other countries have been equally ignored, while Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism was encouraged. A full 80% of all country censures were directed at one nation, Israel. The list goes on and on.

Never in the history of international human rights has one of its own institutions inflicted so much damage.

On what basis will time be a healer? On the contrary, with each session, another remaining country monitor gets eliminated, more Islamic resolutions are adopted to curtail free speech in the name of “defamation of religion”, and human rights as a whole suffers.

The UN is fatally broken.  Its own attempts at fixing the problems simply keep the status quo.  If it is to survive, it must be remade from outside, or simply abolished.  The suggestion of a league of democracies has, I think, a much better chance at succeeding than the UN.

Some define madness as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I give you Exhibit A.

Filed under: Doug • Race Issues • United Nations

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