Parts of Ahmadinejad's Geneva speech were censored before being published
Writing in Friday's New York Post, Amir Taheri reports that parts of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's anti-Semitic diatribe at the Durban II conference in Geneva on Monday had to be censored when they were published for the media that was present to avoid violating Switzerland's strict anti-hate speech laws.
Claudia Rosett has a great column in Forbes about what she terms the Durban II debacle (Hat Tip: Instapundit). The whole thing is worth reading, but I'd like to highlight the part where she explains what's wrong with the United Nations:
So, after all the controversy and drama, what was the Durban Review Conference really about?
The debacle this week was, above all, a natural product of the U.N. system. The real basis for fighting racism is neatly summed up in five words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal." But in the U.N. calculus, it is not the equality of individual men or women that matters most. Instead, the U.N. tends to exalt the "equality" of sovereign states--as if there were no difference, say, between North and South Korea; Iran and the U.S.
Claudia Rosett explains why the fiasco of the United Nations "Durban II" conference was inevitable given the way the UN understands the world:
The debacle this week was, above all, a natural product of the U.N. system. The real basis for fighting racism is neatly summed up in five words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal." But in the U.N. calculus, it is not the equality of individual men or women that matters most. Instead, the U.N. tends to exalt the "equality" of sovereign states--as if there were no difference, say, between North and South Korea; Iran and the U.S.
As an aside: The person who almost single-handedly convinced the Useful Idiots that Ahmedinijad never said Israel should be destroyed - my old friend Juan Cole - seems to have managed to get through this whole week with nary any mention of the event. A blogger's prerogative, of course, to talk about what one wishes and be silent on other matters.
The United States paid $814,000 for its share of the hatefest known as "Durban II," according to a report in Thursday's Jerusalem Post.
The gathering, dubbed "Durban II," has cost $5.3 million, including preparatory conferences, spokesman Ramu Damodaran told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
About $1.6m. of that has come from direct donations from individual countries, but the lion's share - $3.7m. - was funded from the regular budget of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Damodaran said.
In his Tuesday night report from Geneva, Roger Simon explains why the Durban II hatefest adopted its final statement on Tuesday even though it technically doesn't end until Friday.
For many years, the United Nations has conducted itself in ways that range from the ridiculous to the surreal. They have been utterly ineffective in all things save one: the legalization of Jew-hatred. That grim project continues to gather force and is now a potentially genocidal one. The current Durban II conference is more of the same diabolical Mad Hatters party. But make no mistake: The UN and the Organization of Islamic States take themselves very seriously. They think there is nothing illogical, biased, perverted, or even “racist” about their condemnation of the Jewish state.
The failure to stop Durban I not only led to Durban II. It played a role in the escalating and never-ending intifada against Israel and in the “hate Israel” mob demonstrations in the Islamic world and in the West, including on American and European campuses that have taken place ever since.
Let me suggest that President Amadinejad means exactly what he says. He does plan to implement another Holocaust against the Jews. We deny this at our own peril. And, Amadinejad does plan to “play,” shame and, if possible, defeat America in terms of Iran’s obtaining and using nuclear power. The arrest of Iranian-American journalist, Roxana Sabari, as an American “spy” is only the first of many steps in response to President Obama’s open hand and conciliatory tone.
Shouldn't the UN be promoting human rights instead of racism as the organization's integrity takes a pounding?
The United Nations enjoys what is known as the "halo effect", whereby, because of its supposed humanitarian focus and promotion of universal values, it is insulated from scrutiny and is regarded as above reproach by the media, which often holds international bodies such as the UN to be a reference and a guiding moral light.
HonestReporting has regularly attempted to redress the balance, focusing on some of the long list of discriminatory actions by the UN against Israel and highlighting shortcomings within the international organization that the media failed to cover.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dropped a reference in the original text of his speech to the Holocaust as being "ambiguous and dubious" in the hope that fewer delegations would walk out of his Monday speech in Geneva. One of the delegations that did not walk out as a result of Ahmadinejad's not denying the Holocaust was the Vatican
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon criticized President Ahmadinejad's speech Monday at the United Nations hatefest in Geneva.
I deplore the use of this platform by the Iranian President to accuse, divide and even incite. This is the opposite of what this Conference seeks to achieve. . . . I reminded the President that the UN General Assembly had adopted the resolutions to revoke the equation of Zionism with racism and to reaffirm the historical facts of the Holocaust respectively.
In response to Monday's welcoming reception for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Geneva, the United Nations has expelled a 'large number' of members of the European Union of Jewish Students, from whose ranks the clowns and gallery hecklers who disrupted Ahmadinejad's speech were drawn. I suppose that since they cannot really expel the country delegations who walked out of the hall, Ban Ki-Moon and his friends are taking it out on the students instead. No matter - most of the 'action' in Geneva is taking place outside the conference hall anyway.
Israel Radio reported on Tuesday morning that an editorial in the London-based pan-Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat slammed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech on Monday to the UN-sponsored hatefest in Geneva.
No, not because it was a racist anti-Semitic diatribe.
The European delegations that remain in attendance at the Durban II hatefest in Geneva, Switzerland walked out on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he attacked Israel.
On Sunday night, I ran a video of a Libyan torture victim speaking to the Durban II preparatory conference and making its Libyan chairwoman squirm. Here is a much longer, clearer and more explicit version of that video. This is great.
Mystery writer Roger Simon (pictured) is in Geneva covering the Durban II hatefest for Pajamas Media. Simon filed a report about his coming close to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is staying in the same hotel as Simon and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. Simon and Dershowitz were standing outside the hotel on Sunday night when Ahmadinejad and his entourage arrived. Here's how Roger described the experience (Hat Tip: Instapundit).
During the night between Sunday and Monday, New Zealand and Germany joined Canada, Israel, Italy, the United States, Australia, Holland and Sweden in announcing that they would boycott the Durban II conference opening on Monday in Geneva. England and the Czech Republic announced that they would attend, but would only send low-level representatives. France is apparently still undecided.
Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, probably the world's most prominent Holocaust denier today, arrived in Geneva and met with Hans-Rudolf Merz, the President of Switzerland, a country that did as little as it could to save Jews during World War II so as to maintain it's 'neutrality.'
Jewish holidays begin at sunset and end at sunset. This evening will see the beginning of Holocaust Commemoration Day in Israel (and in some Jewish communities beyond), called Yom HaShoah in Hebrew. The New York Times has a chilling article about the Nazi killing fields in the Soviet Union. A brief reminder of the dimensions of that horror.
Once every 19 years or so Yom HaShoah falls on April 20th, Hitler's birthday. During the Nazi era this was a very important day, with parades and ceremonies. Someone I know who went to an AUstrian highschool in the 1970s once told me that every year on April 20th many of the students appeared at school in brown shirts. In the 1970s.
Of course, we've got the Durban II United Nations anti-racism conference starting today, too. So far it's being boycotted by Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States and New Zealand, because it's got nothing to do with anti racism, and everything to do with antisemitism and shielding Islam from free speech. Iran's president is scheduled to give a speech there today, and the representatives of the UK, France, Austria, and other upright democracies will be there to celebrate with him, as will the Arab folks who recently feted Sudan's Omar Bashir, the indicted mass murderer and genocidaire.
Still, after years of preparations there appears little evidence to validate these fears. The statement of 2001 that is so contentious now was cheered in Israel at the time, as it recognized the Jewish state's right to security.
Antisemitism has always flourished on lies, nothing new there. Anyway, the conflation of all these events on one day do rather serve to underline the state of the world. There have been worse moments of time, certainly, but the room for improvement keeps on getting bigger. Finally, the Palestinian contribution: a recent sermon by Ziad Abu Alhaj, broadcast on Hamas television on April 3rd, 2009. Here's some background. Notice that while the man doesn't like Israel, his hatred is directed at Jews, all of them always, his source is (his reading of) the Koran, and he's very clearly calling for world-wide genocide.
Before you get agitated about the wrong things, however: the content of his hate speech isn't new. People have been saying things like this with regularity for millennia, and some of their listeners have acted upon it will regularity of their own, even if the attempt to kill all Jews was a Nazi novelty. If there's anything new about that sermon, it's that now there's a large international constituency, a broad deep and important one, that fervently tells us the sermon doesn't mean what it says, it's not serious, or if it is it could easily be defused if only the Jews took note and changed, and what have you. That, perhaps, may be new. And perhaps not.
Following Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's address at the United Nations anti-racism conference in Geneva, during which he called for the eradication of Israel, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released on Monday a statement slamming Ahmadinejad's cynical manipulation of the conference. "I deplore the use of this platform by the Iranian president to accuse, divide and even incite. This is the opposite of what this Conference seeks to achieve. This makes it significantly more difficult to build constructive solutions to the very real problem of racism," the statement read.
Australia threatened on Thursday to withdraw from a UN conference on racism next month unless the wording of a document it considers anti-Semitic is dropped or substantially altered.
Israel and Canada have already withdrawn from the April 20-24 World Conference Against Racism in Geneva amid fears Arab nations will use it to criticize Israel.
The United States has also said it will not attend the conference unless the wording of the final declaration is altered radically. Israel is calling for a boycott of the event. "If we form the view that the text is going to lead to nothing more than an anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic harangue, an anti-Jewish propaganda exercise, Australia will not be in attendance," Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told parliament.
Critics also object to final declaration sections they say could limit freedom of religion or speech.
The United States and Israel walked out of the first UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, to protest against an attempted resolution comparing Zionism to racism.
In the name of fairness: not long ago I posted an article criticizing the Obama administration for participating in the preparations for the Durban 2 hatefest. Yesterday the State Department announced that having tested the waters they'd decided not to plunge in, essentially continuing the policy formulated by the Bush administration of boycotting the conference. A number of European countries are mulling the same - after all, it's the Obama Americans who are boycotting the conference, not the Bush ones.
All in all, the process seems reasonable. The new folks inherited a rather unusual position - America doesn't often boycott things - so they went to check what it was all about. Having learned first hand, they understood the inherited position was correct, and they affirmed it. Can't do better than that, it seems to me.
“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
(Robert A. Heinlein quotes)
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