From the Department of White Phosphorus for Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner:
Israel warns Rudd off racism forum
Jason Koutsoukis
The Age
February 16, 2009SENIOR Israeli diplomat Dan Gillerman has urged Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd not to send a delegation to a United Nations forum on racism, saying it will be used as a platform to bash Israel.
In an interview with The Age, Mr Gillerman, who was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations from 2003 until September last year, also strongly rejected calls for war crimes investigations against Israeli commanders involved in the recent Gaza offensive.
Speaking from his office in Tel Aviv ahead of a scheduled visit to Australia at the end of the month, Mr Gillerman said the 2009 UN World Conference Against Racism, also known as “Durban II”, to be held in Geneva in April, was a charade.
“Keep away from Durban,” Mr Gillerman said…
Doctor Dan (b.1944) is a former banker, CEO, and ♥s the free market. He also called former US President Jimmy Carter a bigot in April 2008, following Jimmy’s meeting with Hamas’ official Khaled Meshaal: ‘Carter “went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands,” he said… The former U.S. president, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has said Hamas’ top official Khaled Meshaal told him during meetings in Damascus last week that Hamas would “accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders if approved by Palestinians”.’
Speaking of Durban, back in June 2008, Anne Bayefsky called on the Australian Government to join the Canadian, US and Israeli governments in boycotting the conference, scheduled to take place in April 2009. Bayefsky writes: “The United Nations is planning a global anti-racism conference that is destined to encourage racism. Known as Durban II, and to take place in Geneva next April, it follows the notorious anti-semitic hatefest held in Durban seven years ago” (“Australia must boycott the next racist hatefest”, Anne Bayefsky, Sydney Morning Herald, July 22, 2008). According to Bayefesky, “There is no doubt that Durban II will use a UN platform to encourage racism, spread anti-Semitism and undermine democracy’s most precious freedoms. The question is whether democracies will deny it legitimacy – in pursuit of the actual protection of human rights.” Bayefesky further notes that:
The US and Israel walked out of Durban I. Australia stayed, making a bitter statement about the Durban declaration adopted by governments in the final moments: “We regret that far too much of our time has been consumed by bitter, divisive exchanges on issues which have done nothing to advance the cause of combating racism … The references to the Middle East contain language which will do nothing to achieve greater peace in that troubled region and nothing to advance the objectives of this conference.” However, the specific reservations Australia made to the declaration have been omitted by the UN ever since.
I’m not entirely sure what Bayefsky means by the UN omitting reservations advanced by the Australian delegation, but in any case the references to Palestinian peoples in the ‘Report of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Durban, 31 August – 8 September 2001’ have been made available by the UN for perusal online.
Bayefsky is a former academic, lawyer, and flack (aka ‘Senior Fellow’) employed by the corporate think tank the Hudson Institute, “a registered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Your gift is tax deductible to the fullest extent provided by the law”, established in 1961. Numerous corporations — including Ciba-Geigy, DuPont, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Heinz, IBM, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Monsanto, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Procter & Gamble and Westfield Corporation — have paid handsomely for Hudson’s allegedly “innovative research and analysis that promotes global security, prosperity, and freedom”: “The Hudson Institute received close to $25 million between 1987 and 2003 in foundation, corporate, and government grants, according to Media Transparency and the Capital Research Center”. On a totally awesome note:
One of Hudson’s founders, Kahn, was one of the more infamous products of the RAND Corporation, where, beginning in 1947, he developed nuclear strategies that downplayed the impact of a thermonuclear war and was supposedly the inspiration for the character of Dr. Strangelove. In a discussion of Kahn’s ideas in the New Yorker, Louis Menand quoted Kahn’s 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War: “Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, objective studies indicate that even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the postwar [i.e. nuclear] world, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants.”
Whatever. Two Australian academics (We must stay in the racism debate, Ben Saul and Andrea Durbach, Sydney Morning Herald, July 24, 2008) reckon Bayefsky got it wrong:
Boycotting international institutions is often ineffective and counterproductive, and countries such as Australia stand to lose much from disengaging. The recent call for Australia to boycott the second United Nations conference against racism in Geneva next year is no exception…
Ben and Andrea also reckon “diplomacy and the UN …remains our best, albeit flawed, “hope” for universal human rights promotion”; Anne, on the other hand, wants the UN abolished, and a United Democratic Nations established — no doubt comprising, at the very least, Canada, Israel, the United States and Australia (if it plays it’s cards right and withdraws from the upcoming anti-semitic hatefest).
- See also : The Durban Declaration : The United Nations World Conference Against Racism Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance was held in Durban, South Africa. “Over 7000 representatives from governments and civil society participated in the Forum from August 31 to September 8, 2001.”
