Racism forum will boil your blood

By FRIDA GHITIS

If you enjoy the theater of the absurd, get a good chair and prepare yourself for some hearty entertainment. On the other hand, if you care about the struggle against racism and discrimination, prepare to see your heart break and your blood boil. On April 20, delegates from dozens of countries — the ones that decide not to boycott — will come together in the city of Geneva for a U.N. event officially aimed at fighting racism.

Like many of the U.N.’s ideas, it sounds good on paper. In reality, however, the meeting has all the makings of a farce. Like its predecessor — the portentously named World Conference Against Racism, Racial Intolerance, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance — held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, this train derailed even before it had a chance to leave the station.

The gathering, according to Hiller Neuer, executive director of the advocacy group U.N. Watch, “is and was designed as a political exercise for the world’s most intolerant regimes to indict the world’s most tolerant democracies.”

Instead of fighting discrimination, Durban II, as it is ominously known, will become a hate-fest aimed at attacking Israel and the West. But even Israel’s critics should worry about the aim of this event, already hijacked by the undemocratic countries that have subverted the U.N.’s human rights agenda. This conference will launch a new assault on freedom of speech by pushing for measures to outlaw a ban on any expression that someone might deem unkind to Islam.

Cynical maneuver

Efforts to outlaw criticism of Islam have become increasingly frequent, particularly within the United Nations, in a cynical maneuver that cloaks itself in the language of human rights to attack the freedom of expression of the individual by demanding special protections for one religion. The move could make it a crime to draw cartoons, stage historical operas or quote the statements of historians. All of these instances of free expression have caused offense to Muslims in Europe in recent years.

The planning meeting that drafted the racism conference’s final document, under the guidance of Libya and Iran, horrified representatives of democratic societies. The foreign minister of the Netherlands said he was “deeply disturbed by the turn this event is taking.” The text, he said, was being “used by some to try to force their concept of defamation of religion and their focus on one regional conflict on all of us.” Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said his country will not participate because of “aggressive and anti-Semitic statements” in the draft document.

Already Canada said it will have nothing to do with what is sure to become a travesty. The entire European Union is seriously contemplating a boycott. An EU spokesman said the 27-country bloc would not subscribe to a document that “would limit or undermine human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

The Obama administration considered participating, but after sending a delegation to observe the planning, the United States, too, decided to boycott, unless major changes are made to the draft text. Israel is also staying away, even though it is sure to be one of two principal topics of discussion in Geneva. If history proves prologue, Israel will be the one country singled out for criticism, possibly by delegates of the same countries that perpetrate and excuse ethnically motivated killings of hundreds of thousands of people in places like Darfur.

Maximizing intolerance

Preparation for Durban II is in the hands of countries that should have no business speaking about intolerance, unless, of course, they want to teach us how to maximize it. Libya chaired the planning meetings of a panel that included Iran, Pakistan and Cuba, hardly paragons of freedom.

The original Durban meeting turned into an orgy of anti-Semitism. The entire conference became a forum for demonizing Israel, while the delegates somehow managed to forget ethnic massacres in Darfur, tribal slaughter in the Congo or ongoing discrimination anywhere else on Earth.

X Frida Ghitis writes about global affairs for The Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.