Mort Zuckerman
http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- A GREAT evil stalks the world-again. Who would have believed, after the Nazi Holocaust and the free world's triumphant Declaration of Human Rights, that anyone would openly again foment hatred of Jews? But that's just what happened at the Durban conference against racism last week. The criticisms of the United States for walking out of the U.N. conference are, in a word, perverted. Durban degenerated into such vileness and hypocrisy, the troubling question is why so many stayed when the mask of "anti-Zionism" slipped to reveal the hideous face of antisemitism.
Martin Luther King Jr. saw through the whole repellent stunt decades ago. "When people criticize Zionism," he said, "they mean Jews . . . . Anti-Zionist is inherently antisemitic and ever will it be so . . . . And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews. In short, it is antisemitism."
We have come to expect antisemitism of the Arab world and the Muslim world and the so-called nonaligned world. Still, it is shameful that well-meaning American activists who belong to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International virtually stood by while Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization hijacked the Durban conference and its ideals.
Propaganda. Durban reflects a three-pronged antisemitic campaign. The first is to trivialize the Holocaust by adding after all references to it the words "and the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population in historic Palestine." As if the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are morally comparable. The campaign is a barefaced effort to delegitimize the historical specificity of the Nazi killings as the cornerstone of the moral argument for Israel's existence as a haven from antisemitic persecution. The second prong is to insist that references to antisemitism be linked with the "racist practices of Zionism" or, even more absurdly, "Zionist practices against Semitism."
Finally, Israel is caricatured as practicing a new kind of apartheid, with Zionism portrayed as a movement based on racist supremacy. To characterize Judaism as a race instead of a religion is racist propaganda. Israel, of course, provides a special place for Jews, but that's because of their history of persecution. The first President Bush had it right: "Zionism is not a policy. It is an ideal that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people."
The claim that Israel is responsible for ethnic cleansing of the Arab population turns truth squarely on its head. Anyone visiting Israel is immediately struck by the fact that it is one of the world's most multiethnic societies. Not only are there over a million Israeli Arabs with the right to vote, but even an Arab-sponsored study recognized that the Arabs who left during the 1948 war did so overwhelmingly at the urging of Arab governments pending the Arab armies' "purging" of Jews from the land.
The same Arab countries have actively sought to deny Palestinian refugees the chance to reintegrate into the economic life of the region, rendering them dispossessed and unemployed. And the Arabs have cast out more than 800,000 Jews since 1948, men and women who now make up a very sizable portion of Israel's population. Now that's ethnic cleansing.
Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary general, called on conferees in Durban to admit that "all countries have issues of racism and discrimination." Fat chance. It was too much to ask of the masters of hypocrisy who singled out Israel. The double standard is not just latent. It is blatant. Who dared mention Afghanistan's vengeful Taliban extremists? Or Russia's destruction of Chechnya? Or China's assault on Buddhism in Tibet? And what of the murder of thousands of Africans by rival tribes? Or the racist campaign of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, the long history of oppression against minorities in Arab countries, the slaughter of the Kurds, and the Iranian clerics who jail or beat women if they walk unescorted or appear without being fully covered? The list goes on.
At Durban, the inmates, finally, took over the asylum. They supported a definition of human rights that, incredibly, appears to make no reference to the right to vote, the right to assemble, the right to protest, freedom of religion, or equality under the law. Instead, they oppose the only democratic country in the Middle East, Israel, which has an independent press, an independent judiciary, freedom of religion and speech, and genuine political opposition.
No wonder the United Nations has been morally compromised. The
United States has lived up to its long and honorable history of rejecting
the equation of Zionism and racism. President Bush and Secretary of
State Colin Powell (who surely would have liked to confront racism in the
former cradle of apartheid) are to be commended for refusing to have
truck with such naked
JWR contributor Mort Zuckerman is editor-in-chief and publisher of U.S. News and World Report. Send your comments to him by clicking here.
08/29/01: Hail, brave consumer
06/14/01: Blackouts --- or blackmail?
06/01/01: A time to reap --- and sow
05/25/01: A question of confidence
05/18/01: A question of confidence
05/04/01: Making the grade
04/26/01: The caribou conundrum
04/19/01: Chinese boomerang
03/27/01: The man of the moment
03/20/01: The Fed must be bold
03/15/01: Japan on the brink
03/01/01: Rethinking the next war
02/09/01: The education paradox
01/08/01: How the bottom fell out
01/03/01: Quipping in the new year
12/20/00: A time for healing
11/13/00: The need for legitimacy
10/30/00: Arafat's bloody cynicism
10/18/00: Arafat torches peace
10/03/00: A great step backward
09/08/00: The Perfect Storm
08/29/00: Don't blow the surplus
08/15/00: Voting for grown-ups
08/01/00: Arafat's lack of nerve
07/17/00: Can there be a new peace between old enemies? Or will new enemies regress to an old state of war?
07/11/00: A time to celebrate
06/19/00: A bit of straight talk
06/08/00: Using hate against Israel
05/26/00: Is the Federal Reserve trigger-happy?
04/18/00: Tensions on the 'Net
04/13/00: A paranoid power
03/10/00: Fuel prices in the red zone
02/25/00: Web wake-up call
02/18/00: Back to the future
01/21/00: Whistling while we work
01/11/00: Loose lips, fast quips
12/23/99: The times of our lives
12/14/99: Hey, big spender
11/18/99: Fountain of Youth
11/04/99: An impossible partner
10/14/99: A nation divided
10/05/99: India at center stage
09/21/99: Along with good cops, we need a better probation system
09/08/99: Though plundered and confused, Russia can solve its problems
08/31/99: The military should spend more on forces and less on facilities
08/05/99: Squandering the surplus
07/06/99: More than ever, America's unique promise is a reality
06/24/99: The time has come to hit the brakes on affirmative action
06/15/99: America should take pride in honoring its responsibilities
06/02/99: The Middle Kingdom shows its antagonistic side
05/11/99: Technology's transforming power is giving a lift to everything
05/04/99: The big game gets bigger
04/30/99: On Kosovo, Russia talked loudly and carried a small stick
04/21/99: No time to go wobbly
04/13/99: The Evil of two lessers