by michael j. jordan
jta
geneva | Fears were raised last week that the United Nations human rights conference next year could become the same anti-Israel forum that it was in 1991.
The U.N. officials have already accredited a Palestinian group for the 2009 World Conference Against Racism. The Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign is an umbrella group that uses the controversial security barrier dividing Israel from parts of the West Bank as the hook to promote boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
Canada, the United States and Israel earlier expressed their concern that the 2009 conference will be a repeat of the 2001 forum in Durban, South Africa, which was dominated by pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel nongovernmental organizations.
They have said they will boycott the world’s largest anti-racism forum in 2009, just as they boycotted the just completed two-week “preparatory conference” in this Swiss city.
Felice Gaer, the director of the American Jewish Committee’s Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, said the lack of resistance by the U.N. secretariat and Western nations over the accreditation was “baffling” and “inexplicable,” given that in Durban, the then-U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, rejected any comparison between Israel and apartheid South Africa.
“Misuse of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’” with reference to Israel is a “big part of what discredited Durban,” said Gaer.
Gerald Steinberg, the executive director of Israeli NGO Monitor, said he sees a rerun of 2001 unfolding. “Once such a radical Palestinian group is let in, there’s no longer hope for a civilized discussion of racism and discrimination,” Steinberg said. “Then the only logical decision is to boycott the whole process, to discredit the 2009 conference so it doesn’t carry the legitimacy that the 2001 event had.”
Shimon Samuels, the international liaison for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he approached the NGO groups present last week — some historically hostile toward Israel — to call on “our sister anti-racist organizations to protest with us any hijacking or agitations” at the event.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California