The U.N. Conference: The Elders of Durban - Brief Article

National Review, Oct 1, 2001

The United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance-to give it the full Ciceronian drumroll-was a strangely peg-legged affair. The delegates strode into Durban, South Africa, intending to address the world- historical consequences of the African slave trade, but the whalebone thumper, clanking like mad old Ahab on the quarterdeck, was the attack on Israel as a "racist, apartheid state."

Yet the two seemingly ill-matched limbs actually go well together. The Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades were great evils. But they ended more than a century ago, thanks largely to the British fleet. The United States fought the Civil War, Brazil emancipated peacefully, and Zanzibar was made into a protectorate, ending slavery itself in its last civilized redoubts. The only places it flourishes now are in African holes such as Mauritania and Sudan, or in the kitchens and boudoirs of Arabia, staffed by wretched Filipinas. To pursue claims of damages at this date would be as wrongheaded as it is futile. The only purpose of ginning up a ruckus over slavery at Durban is to shake down money from guilty white donors-Euros who might give to Africa; Americans who might give to their black fellow citizens. In this connection, it is devoutly to be wished that Jesse Jackson return home from Durban, urging the Democratic party to take up reparations as an issue. That would nicely hoist every Democratic candidate on the Mau Mau's petard.

If black pols and African despots troll for handouts, why should not Palestinians wheedle for advantage? The more Israel is depicted as a pariah state, the better can its enemies wrap warfare and revolution in the cloak of legitimacy. Following the main body of the ideological army like skirmishers was the conference of NGOs-non-governmental organizations-where the grossest Nazi and 19th-century canards were trotted out, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The U.N.- ese boilerplate of Zionist racism and the aged fantasies about spider- like Jews serve the same function: stripping Israel of humanity, in hopes of priming it for the kill.

Durban's Jew baiting was certainly reason enough to walk out, and the certainty that it would occur was reason enough not to go. It is a shame that the racial lies and agendas, mild only by comparison, would not have struck anyone at the State Department as out of bounds.