Cards, dominoes, whatever gaming analogy you choose - it’s collapsing. After the US decision that the UN’s Durban Review Conference was beyond redemption, The Netherlands and Australia have now followed suit.
“We cannot be confident that the Review Conference will not again be used as a platform to air offensive views, including anti-Semitic views,” said the Australian Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith. “Some countries that still have a long way to go in the human rights domain are misusing the summit to put religion above people’s rights and to unnecessarily restrict freedom of speech,” said the Dutch Foreign Minister, Maxime Verhagen.
One day before the Conference is supposed to begin in Geneva, a faultline is already visible. On one side, those states which have pulled out because they are opposed to racism and the abuse of human rights - aka, the democracies, those states with liberal institutional arrangements, more of whom may well decide to withdraw before the day is out. On the other, those states still attending in order to adorn their own racist and abusive practices with the mantle of anti-racism - at least, anti-racism as defined the by the original Durban Conference of 2001.
So now we are faced with an event which enables the same vile regime that jailed a young female journalist for eight years on trumped-up charges to take the moral high ground. To paraphrase Marx, if Durban 1 was the tragedy, Durban 2 is emerging as the farce.
This post deserves to be better known:
“Durban II Dispatch: Libya on Trial”
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2009/04/19/durban-ii-dispatch-libya-on-trial.aspx#comments
Oh my god, Jacob, I read your link: what this El Hagog had to endure — it’s absolutely sickening to read that. Frankly, I can’t quite get myself to think much about this DurbanII affair; racism and all the other human rights issues are so important, and to see them mocked like this… Perhaps it would be best if the farce, as Ben calls it so politely, went all the way and Ahmadinejad came and gave a speech like last fall in front of the UN (Ah-mad-in-the-head’s version of the protocols), and maybe then some warm embrace by a Swiss politician…
Given Marx’s own pronounced anti-Semitism, there’s more than a touch of irony at the end.
“Frankly, I can’t quite get myself to think much about this DurbanII affair; racism and all the other human rights issues are so important, and to see them mocked like this…”
My own view, Petra, is that antiracism as an ideology has been so corrupted (and Durban 1 and 2 are merely the visible marks of that corruption) that the best that could happen is if Durban 2 did “go all the way” as you said. Does anyone remember Idi Amin and how he was able to justify his brutality by passing himself of as someone fighting racism and colonialism? This happpened in the late 70’s. The ideology of “antiracism” has become as bad as the disease of racism.
However, I don’t expect that it will make much of a difference either way since the worst human rights offenders will still use the language of antisemitism to justify their horrific behavior and repress those opposed to their barbarities and too many “human rights” groups in the West will go along or at least keep quiet about it.
Marx was quoting Hegel when he used “first time as tragedy, second time as farce…”