Stop Durban II  

By http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.aspx?Name=Joseph%20Klein Joseph Klein
January 01, 2008
FrontPageMagazine.com 
Original Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=CB01C060-320D-49D2-AAAA-F775BEB24AC4
U.S. taxpayers subsidize 22 percent of the UN’s regular budget. A budget of $4.17 billion for the UN’s 2008-2009 regular budget cycle was just approved by the General Assembly’s Fifth Committee (Budgetary Committee) on December 21, 2007, which is tantamount to General Assembly approval. Our UN delegation’s objections to how our citizens’ money will be spent were regularly ignored during the deliberations leading up to the final vote. The United States was the lone vote against this budget. However, our spokesperson unfortunately stated afterwards that the United States would go along with the budget anyway, which is eventually expected to exceed $5 billion with the approval of separate add-ons. 

One of those add-ons will be nearly $7 million in additional funding, for starters, to prepare for what is known as the Durban Review Conference (Durban II). By a separate recorded vote -- 94 in favor to 40 against, with 6 abstentions (Iceland, Japan, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland) -- the General Assembly’s Fifth Committee approved a text informing the General Assembly that “preliminary additional requirements” of up to $6.79 million would be required, should the General Assembly adopt a draft on the follow-up to the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in 2001 (Durban I). That conference had turned into the most hate infested anti-Semitic and anti-American global forum that the United Nations has ever sponsored. The General Assembly will surely give the green light to Durban II, which promises to be even more of a venomous blockbuster. 

The United Nations General Assembly is under occupation by the Islamists and their many allies in the developing world. Particularly when it comes to the UN’s regular budget, their 130 member bloc (known as G-77) gets what it wants because each state in the 192 member General Assembly – large or small – has only one vote including the United States. This gives the G-77 voting bloc an automatic majority, which invariably supports the Islamists’ agenda in return for all the influence and money the powerful Islamic countries are able to confer on their allies. In effect, we are being told by the gaggle of free-riding G-77 countries which control the General Assembly, and thus its Budgetary Committee, to contribute millions of dollars for a global soapbox that will be used to attack everything we stand for. Our UN delegation’s ultimate decision to go along with the Budgetary Committee’s actions was a shameful act of capitulation in direct opposition to the interests and values of the American taxpayers who will be forced to subsidize this rot. 

Thankfully, only $200,000 of funding came out of the UN’s regular budget for Durban I. The rest of the approximately $10 million budget was funded mostly out of voluntary contributions. Not any more! 

Anne Bayefsky, editor of http://www.eyeontheun.org/ \t _blank www.EYEontheUN.org and participant in Durban I, wrote shortly thereafter about the dubious value derived from this $10 million expenditure: 

A large group of states sought to minimize or exclude references to the Holocaust, redefine or ignore anti-semitism, and isolate the state of Israel from the global community as a racist practitioner of apartheid and crimes against humanity. The vestiges of Jewish victimhood were to be systematically removed by deleting the references to anti-semitism and the Holocaust, to be displaced by the Palestinian victim living under racist, Nazi-like, oppression…inside the drafting committees, states such as Syria and Iran objected to the inclusion of anti-semitism or the Holocaust on the grounds that anti-semitism was a “complicated,” “curious,” and “bizarre” concept, and reference to the Holocaust would be imbalanced…The dangerousness of the Durban rhetoric and its program of action were immediately evidenced by the events of September 11 and their aftermath. Political actors and commentators continued to weave the same distorted pattern which Durban purported to legitimize. At the UN, which was seized throughout the fall 2001 General Assembly with the subject of terrorism, Arab states pressed the Durban racist strategy in response to September 11. A successful war against terrorism demands clarity of the target, and the Durban result threatens its identification. 

The United States and Israel had pulled out of Durban I when its true agenda of hate came to the fore. Undaunted, the Durban I enthusiasts continued to sing the praises of the Palestinian terrorists as freedom fighters and to condemn Israel for its ‘Nazi-like’ behavior. They also singled out oppressive countries like Cuba for special commendation. An enthusiastic Non-Governmental Organization participant in the conference reported at the time how excited everyone was to see their hero, Fidel Castro. “The excitement was so palpable that the crowd literally gasped in unison when Fidel finally made it to the stage”, the participant wrote. “His Excellency was easily the indisputable star of the proceedings.”

If we were dealing with any rational institution, one would have expected its leadership to disassociate itself completely from such a monstrous affair. However, the UN is anything but a rational institution. The General Assembly shortly after the conclusion of Durban I passed a resolution to keep Durban I’s malevolent spirit alive. A resolution calling for the comprehensive implementation of the results of Durban I was adopted in March 2002 by a vote of 134 in favor of the resolution to 2 against (Israel, United States), with 2 abstentions (Australia, Canada). Then the turn from voluntary funding to mandated funding out of the UN’s regular budget began in earnest. 

The General Assembly backed up its endorsement of the results of Durban I with more than a million dollars of new funding from the UN’s regular budget, over the strong objections of the United States which would be paying nearly a quarter of the cost of this exercise in lies, hatred and hypocrisy. The funding was to be used to establish an anti-discrimination unit in the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and a body of five “eminent” persons to monitor the implementation of the Durban I documents. The precedent was set. Presumably, the funding for these bodies out of the UN’s regular budget has continued each year since. 

Now the ante to fund the preparations for Durban II is about to go way up. The $6.79 million for 2008-2009 referenced in the separate resolution approved by the General Assembly Fifth Budgetary Committee last Saturday is an estimate of “preliminary additional resources” which are over and above the level of resources already being used in connection with implementation of Durban I and included in the approved 2008-2009 budget. This add-on will be merely a down payment. It will inevitably balloon as the date of the 2009 Durban II conference approaches. 

The money will be administered by Libya, the chair of the Preparatory Committee to plan Durban II, with help from committee co-members such as Iran, Cuba and Pakistan. 

As an early indication of the direction they intend to take in planning for Durban II, they have insisted on “reopening the Durban 2001 package to introduce new accusations against the West for purported post-9/11 crimes such as defaming Islam with cartoons or persecuting Muslims by profiling”, according to UN Watch which has been monitoring the proceedings.

Last week Pakistan, on behalf of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, led the successful charge in the General Assembly to pass a resolution on religious defamation in which Islam is the only religion specifically named in the text. It is intended as an instrument to equate anti-terrorist security measures and free expression critical of extremist Islamists with Islamophobia. The resolution focuses on the negative projection of Islam in the media and voices deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism. Of course, the truth is that most terrorists today act in the name of Islam, and the Islamic law of Sharia is used as the pretext for the commission of heinous crimes against humanity. The most racist, misogynist and religiously oppressive regimes in the world are the ones who have clamored for this resolution. It is as if the semantics of the UN resolution, backed up by the UN’s supposed legitimacy as the voice of international law, will confer immunity from the truth about the violent impulses that dominate Islamic ideology today. 

The Islamist members of the Durban II Preparatory Committee have indicated their intention to force the implementation of their religious defamation resolution onto the Durban II agenda, including the expenditure of UN funds for a Special Rapporteur on the freedom of religion in addition to the Special Rapporteur on racism. Pakistan called for the summary of objectives of Durban II to enumerate various forms of racism, including “religious hatred, racial profiling in the fight against terrorism, and the rejection of diversity and multiculturalism.” Iran, whose President called for Israel’s extinction as a Jewish state, declared that new forms of racism against Muslims are rising. 

It is even being said that one item on the agenda for Durban II may be the redefinition of anti-Semitism as hatred against Arabs, who are portrayed as the true Semites and victims of anti-Semitism rather than Jews. This would be in keeping with the teachings of Joseph Massad, professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, who believes that Israel is a racist settler colony and that, because of Israel's existence, there has been a transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew. George Orwell could not have conjured up a better example of double-speak. 

High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour will be the Secretary-General of the Durban II Conference. Based on her record, it appears that she would agree with Professor Massad’s sentiments. UN Watch has analyzed her record and found not one example of Arbour publicly confronting true anti-Semitism against Jews while serving as the UN's chief advocate of human rights. Its report says that Arbour failed to rebuke Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his calls to wipe Israel off the map and for his holocaust denials. Arbour also failed to publicly denounce comments made in 2005 by UN Right-to-Food expert Jean Ziegler, who compared Israeli soldiers to concentration camp guards. She has regularly condemned Israel for responding to Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorist attacks that are aimed at killing as many Jews as possible. Yet this Israel hater is slated to lead the Durban II Conference. She will be following in the footsteps of Mary Robinson, who presided over the Durban I debacle without forcefully protesting its blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric. 

In sum, Durban II will pick up where Durban I left off. Only this time we will be forced to pay for it. Durban II will elevate Islamophobia into the number one manifestation of racism today. Any attack on Islam thereby will automatically be considered racist behavior. It will continue to fuel anti-Semitism in the name of fighting the Zionist ‘racists’. Like the farcical UN Human Rights Council, the planning for the Durban II Conference is being manipulated by some of the world’s worst human rights abusers who will get to spend our money on measures to attack us and other democracies. The perpetrators of terrorism, genocide, mass rape, and unspeakable brutality will be allowed to transform their evil into a false image of good while casting the defenders of freedom as today’s principal racists. 

Strip away its phony veneer and this is what Durban II is all about. Nevertheless, we will be picking up a major share of its costs unless we mobilize immediately to persuade Congress to cut off our funding for anything related to this travesty.