Disgrace in Durban
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
Disgrace in Durban The U.N. conference on racism was worse than just hot air. BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER THERE ARE FEW MUSEUMS as powerful as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, but it contains what...
...Whether the final communique contained that language is irrelevant...
...That he continually said and did otherwise (for instance, creating textbooks whose maps show Palestine with no Israel) was willfully ignored...
...He tried to enlist the entire international community to join in that rejection...
...Conference on Racism in Durban is so important...
...Put back on the State Department terrorism list those who are plainly and openly practicing terrorism—the PLO and the Palestinian Authority...
...What can the United States do...
...For believers in Oslo, the irony is rather extreme...
...Of course, the practical considerations against doing so—Israel's retaliatory deterrent—have not changed...
...Yasser Arafat's speech was particularly important...
...After a suicide bomber murdered 21 youngsters and horribly maimed dozens of others outside a Tel Aviv discotheque, Arafat sent the killer's parents a letter thanking them for their son's "heroic martyrdom operation, . . . the model of manhood and sacrifice for the sake of Allah and the homeland...
...It is what he does on the ground in Israel...
...But there is a second and even more ominous possibility...
...Non-governmental organizations—led by Palestinian and other Arab "human rights" groups and supported by many other NGOs from around the world—issued their own declaration characterizing Israel as "a racist apartheid state" and accusing it of "systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide, and ethnic cleansing, . . . alien domination and subjugation...
...Before the great crime comes the great lie...
...The Palestinian Resistance can obtain such weapons for its battle against the enemy at a minimal cost," writes Issam Al-Ghazi, editor of the Egyptian weekly Al-Maydan, speaking of "biological and chemical weapons— the atomic bomb of the poor...
...The exhibit fills three floors...
...unless the Jews had first been stripped of their very humanity, their extermination would not have been possible...
...Almost weekly there is a mass murder of Jews (and many that are stopped by Israeli preventa-tive measures) that occurs under the protection of the Palestinian Authority, with the encouragement of the official Palestinian media, and to the congratulations of Yasser Arafat...
...Because the prelude is so crucial...
...Many Israelis and Americans made themselves believe that Arafat was sincere when he signed that piece of paper in september 1993 recognizing Israel...
...With all of these promises betrayed—now publicly and openly in Durban—there is no possible excuse for the United States to keep the PLO and the Palestinian Authority off the terrorism list...
...But that misses the point...
...The middle floor covers the Holocaust itself...
...Genocidal societies are not just to be shunned...
...The vicious international campaign to place a genocidal Israel outside the pale of humanity is establishing the psychological basis for genocidal attacks on Israel itself...
...Durban marks the beginning of an Arab campaign of comparable dehumanization...
...BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER THERE ARE FEW MUSEUMS as powerful as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, but it contains what appears to be a structural oddity...
...As one of the Egyptian delegates explained with satisfaction, Zionism as racism is now back on the international agenda and returned to diplomatic discourse at the highest level...
...Likewise, a small bottle of Plague-infected mosquitoes can be used to destroy entire Israeli cities...
...That such a monstrous proposition should even get a hearing anywhere is shocking...
...and uganda, which expelled all its Indian citizens...
...It is too passive a response to a frontal assault on decency...
...But this is just the beginning...
...Their eradication is not merely desirable...
...Arafat is preparing a war of extinction against a friend...
...This has been correctly termed the most anti-Semitic international document produced since the Third Reich...
...But just because the accusation is Orwellian does not diminish its political significance...
...That means cutting off all American aid to, and official recognition of, the Palestinian Authority...
...And that it would be the central focus at a conference supposedly opposed to racism—and the subject of serious textual negotiations involving such otherwise rational international players as Canada, Norway, and the European Union—is, in itself, a scandal...
...But after Durban, it can no longer be ignored or denied...
...But the entire first floor, which can take hours to go through, consists of the prelude, the 1930s and the relentless Nazi campaign to delegitimize the very existence of Jews...
...This is a program with two parts...
...And not just colonial, but intrinsically racist...
...We rightly ostracize and isolate the likes of Syria, Libya, and the Usama bin Laden gang...
...It is time to put him beyond the pale...
...There is already discussion in the Arab press of the legitimacy of using weapons of mass destruction against Israel...
...The charge that Zionism is racism dominated all debate both inside and outside the conference...
...The part in Durban was intended to legitimize the eradication of Israel...
...It should never have shown up in the first place...
...For the time being, the war consists of relentless terrorist attacks, against a background of running gun battles, drive-by shootings, and roadside bombs...
...We Americans have our own forms of pariahhood...
...it is imperative...
...There is one simple straightforward action it can take to shift the focus of debate from the delegitimation of Israel back to where it should be: the delegitima-tion of those conducting this cynical campaign...
...This was a universal conference whose overriding objective was to brand one country and one people as uniquely, transcendently evil...
...Why is the prelude given as much space as the Holocaust itself...
...This is not hot air...
...Moreover, walking out is not enough...
...Armed with an overwhelming international consensus that Israel is colonialist, racist, and genocidal, however, the aggressors would be transformed into liberators...
...they must be destroyed...
...That such a program should draw legitimacy from a conference sponsored by the U.N., paid for by the West, and dedicated to combating racism is grotesque...
...since everyone agrees racism and colonialism are evil and their eradication a positive good, to place Israel in that category—again, uniquely—is to legitimize its destruction...
...Which is why the Bush administration was right to walk out of the conference...
...The ground is being prepared for two major possible escalations...
...The part on the ground—in Israel—is intended to achieve that outcome by means of war...
...You do not show up at a Nuremberg rally...
...What to do...
...Were this to happen, the Arab states might be accused of border-crossing aggression...
...It took almost a decade of relentless anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda to prepare Germany, and indeed the rest of Europe, for the mass murder to follow...
...The whole point was to rekindle the Arab campaign to delegitimize the planet's single Jewish state—and thus prepare the psychological and political ground for its extinction...
...One is the explosion of the conflict into a regional war in which Syria, Iraq, Iran, and possibly Egypt and Saudi Arabia join the fight against Israel, a replay of 1948-49 with the same objective, a judenrein Middle East...
...He portrayed Israel as the last of the colonial nations...
...the last, the rescue and aftermath...
...Which is why the u.N...
...Genocide is the ultimate crime...
...It is not just what Arafat says in Durban...
...Of course, it is absurd that Israel be vilified as racist by the likes of sudan, whose Arab government is conducting a genocidal war against the black Christians in the south...
...One hundred mice with the 'Super Plague' virus . . . could be released in the streets of Tel Aviv...
...How...
...Iran, which hangs Jews for being Jews...
...Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...By invoking the word genocide regarding Israel's treatment of Palestinians, the campaign against Israel goes nuclear...
...The PLO was taken off this list in 1993 when Arafat signed the Oslo accords promising to make peace, renounce violence and terrorism, and accept Israel as a legitimate member of the Middle East community...
...But Durban went far beyond simple nonrecognition...
...It also went far beyond just states defaming Israel and Jews...
...But the moral considerations are changing...
...It is also a demonstration of how far-reaching and effective the Palestinian campaign against Israel has been...
...For two weeks, it became the subject of discussion in every capital from Pretoria to Paris and all the media in between...
...The point of accusing Israel of genocide is to make the destruction of Israel an act of righteous justice, to enlist non-Arabs and non-Muslims in a secular jihad...
...It has been wrongly dismissed by many as mere hot air, the usual Third-World-dictators-in-committee cavorting in their playpen of meaningless demagoguery...
...In Durban, Arafat did not just declare his own rejection of Israel's right to exist...
Vol. 7 • September 2001 • No. 1
