Few spectacles more clearly demonstrated what is wrong with the United Nations than the UN World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in September 2001. Thanks to the domination of that conclave by a substantial majority led by the most despotic – and racist – regimes on the planet, “Durban” became synonymous with unbridled vilification of the United States and Israel. Even the most pro-UN Secretary of State in memory, Colin Powell, was so infuriated by the proceeding that he felt constrained to walk out.
Ironically, the insights Durban provided into the extraordinary mutation of the United Nations – from an instrument the United States was indispensable to creating after World War II in the hope of preventing future conflicts into what amounts to the diplomatic equivalent of mob-rule in the hands of America’s enemies – were obscured by what happened within days of the conference’s conclusion: the September 11 attacks. Ironic because, as the most indefatigable journalistic observer of the UN, Claudia Rosett, has observed, those “hijackings [were] driven by the same kind of hate stoked at the Durban conference.”
It may well be that, because of our preoccupation with al Qaeda’s acting out the Durban agenda, we failed to respond properly as a nation to this 2001 orgy of anti-Western hate-mongering and racism. There is no excuse, however, for what is about to happen: American taxpayers are poised to be charged for the preparation of a follow-on conference that promises, if anything, to be even worse than what is now known as Durban I.
As Ms. Rosett and the Hudson Institute’s indispensable Anne Bayefsky have warned, the UN is now launching “Durban II,” a conference to be held in 2009 for the purpose of reviewing “implementation of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action.” Given that these products of the first conference were so defective, one might think a review conference could be justified, provided it had any prospect of rectifying their myriad shortcomings.
Unfortunately, in the farce the United Nations has become, the job of preparing to review the Durban I conference is being entrusted to none other than Muammar Qaddafi’s despotic and Islamofascism-supporting regime. Worse yet, the Libyans are being helped in their work by other preposterous members of the UN’s Human Rights Council, including Pakistan, Cuba and Russia, and by non-Council member Iran.
(You might be confused by all this if you thought one of the “reforms” the United States wrested a few years back from the would-be “world government” on Turtle Bay was a panel on human rights that actually respected and strengthened them. If so, see John Bolton’s excellent – albeit dispiriting – account in his just-released memoirs, Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad. Amb. Bolton lays bare how the State Department, Europeans and others hostile to U.S. interests begat a new council essentially indistinguishable from its appallingly bad predecessor.)
In the UN’s inimitable fashion, there are now no fewer than five organs charged with advancing the Durban agenda. In addition to Qaddafi’s preparatory commission, these are: the Intergovernmental Working Group on the Effective Implementation of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action; the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent; Five Independent Eminent Experts (I am not making this up) to Follow-up the Implementation of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action; and the Ad Hoc Committee of the Human Rights Council on the Elaboration of Complementary Standards.
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