Durban II: Heading right down the same anti-Semitic path

UN Watch has another report on the upcoming UN anti-Israel and Democracy Conference The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. It seems that not only is Durban II going after Israel, but it’s really going to try to codify anti-Islamic blasphemy.

UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer, a modern-day Don Quixote who bangs his head against the windmill called United Nations, spoke against the declaration.

The declaration makes only one reference to a country situation, “reiterat[ing] its concern about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupations.” Neuer asked, “Why is a non-African situation mentioned in a declaration about Africa, one that references neither Sudan’s racist killings, nor any other country in Africa?”

“The special reference to the Palestinian issue implies that Israel is practicing racism. This reverts to the discredited rhetoric of the UN’s 1975 “Zionism is Racism” resolution, sponsored by the Soviet and Arab blocs, which was repealed by the United Nations in 1991, and which has since been repudiated by its highest officials,” said Neuer.

But the UN representatives were unimpressed.

“It is only one paragraph that mentions the Palestinians, so the interest of Israel was never badly damaged,” Ibrahim Wani, from the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told Reuters, after the 3-day talks in Abuja.

Durban II is part of a strategy developed long ago by Israel’s enemies to dehumanize her in every forum available.

[…] the “Durban strategy” — a two-pronged tactic launched at the ‘01 conference to paint Israel as a “racist, apartheid” state and isolate the Jewish nation through boycotts, divestment and sanctions.

The Ford Foundation is still funding the Jew-haters. Henry Ford would be proud.

The Ford slice of funds to anti-Israel nongovernmental organizations may pale compared to that provided by Europe and its myriad governmental agencies. But the Ford funding enables the groups to wage low-key, diplomatic and economic warfare against Israel, dragging the Palestinian conflict from the battlefield into international forums, media, the Internet and college campuses.

[…] Despite the revised guidelines, Ford appears unable — or unwilling — to prevent some of its grantees from lending support to the movement that was launched in Durban.

The new JTA investigation, which examined a large cross-section of Ford grantees that speak out on the Middle East conflict, finds that several signed a major 2005 boycott and divestment petition against “Apartheid Israel.”

Signatories agreed they were “inspired by the struggle of South Africans against apartheid, and in the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression.”

There is an organized, well-funded movement to discredit and dehumanize Israel in every aspect. The world media ignore the daily attacks on Israel by the terrorists on her borders and within, while holding up every injured Palestinian as an example of Israeli cruelty or negligence—unless those Palestinians are harmed by their fellow Palestinians or Arabs. Egypt is murdering Sudanese refugees for the crime of trying to enter Israel, and the world media barely touches upon it—or on the cruelty and lack of compassion by Egypt for the refugees within its borders that forces these people to risk their lives to enter Israel.

The only true democracy in the Middle East is demonized and hated. Europeans use the Palestinians as an excuse to rid themselves of the guilt of nearly destroying European Jewry—as poll after poll shows how much Jews are still hated in the countries that the pro-Palestinian left say that Israelis should “go back to” (utterly ignoring the 50% of all Israelis who are descended from the Jews of Arab countries who were forced out after 1948).

As always, Jews are the canary in the coal mine. Because the second great aim of Durban is to strangle democracy’s most precious posession: Free speech.

The new text calls upon states to avoid “inflexibly clinging to free speech in defiance of the sensitivities existing in a society and with absolute disregard for religious feelings.” Other provisions in the text on “incitement to religious hatred,” said Neuer, “mirror efforts by Islamic states at the UN Human Rights Council to insinuate Islamic anti-blasphemy prohibitions into international law. Yet UN expert on religious freedom Asma Jahangir and other international human rights experts have expressly opposed ‘defamation of religion’ resolutions, which seek to alter international human rights law by defining religions — instead of individuals — as the bearers of rights.”

The declaration’s attack on free speech contravenes the Article 19 guarantee of freedom of expression of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Durban II: Bigger. Badder. Bolder. And full of bull.