A major United Nations conference, The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, is scheduled to begin in Durban, South Africa on August 31 and run until September 7. It is expected to attract 10,000 participants. Delegations will come from more than 180 countries.
Billed as the most important international gathering on racism ever, the conference will target the most important issues of all: attacking Jews and demanding reparations from Western nations for slavery.
The organizers of the conference have singled out Israel as the focus of evil in the modern world. Their primary agenda is to equate Zionism with racism. The draft for the Durban declaration calls the Israeli control of areas populated by Palestinians “a crime against humanity.” The secondary agenda, meanwhile, is to extract Western cash as compensation for slavery, the slave trade, colonialism, and, of course, “economic and political exclusion."
And then there is reality.
U.S. President Bush has had the courage to threaten a U.S. boycott of the conference if it does not drop its two agendas. In other words, it looks like the U.S. won’t be attending.
Most developing countries, which form a voting majority at the U.N., are far more interested in pursing anti-Semitism, and extorting money from the West for ancient history, than in actually doing something about the racism and slavery that exist in the world today.
This explains why the “anti-racist” conference will spend zero time denouncing the chattel slavery that exists till this day in Sudan and Mauritania. It also explains why the delegates will articulate no “thank you” to the Western world for the fact that, as David Horowitz points out in his ad against reparations, “in the thousand years of its existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians – Englishmen and Americans – created one. If not for the anti-slavery attitudes and military power of white Englishmen and Americans, the slave trade would not have been brought to an end.”
Thus, the delegates at the Durban conference will do what Leftists do best: ignore the fact that Western civilization created the notions of equality and liberty by which they now judge and hate it.
The “anti-racist” conference also will not entail a discussion of the reality that, as Hugh Thomas has documented in The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870, African and Arab traders were the ones who kidnapped and delivered Africans to white-run slave ships. There will be no examination of the racial discrimination that exists under India's caste system, nor of the virulent anti-Semitism that prevails throughout the Arab Middle East. Intense scrutiny will not be brought to the realities of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda, where tribal hatred between the Hutu and Tutsi has led to mass genocide, involving the murder of millions of people, in the last decade. Nor will “racism” be found in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe conducts a war against white farmers because they happen to be white.
This selective indignation about “racism” is, of course, the result of the obvious deep-rooted racism and self-hatred of the “anti-racists” themselves. In these individuals’ eyes, white people have to be held up to higher moral accountability. That’s because, in the eyes of the racist Left, the civilizational and moral superiority of whites is a given.
This pernicious belief system is represented well by a hate-monger like African-American author Bell Hooks, who argues that black people cannot be racist.
This is a clear-cut example of how racism is spawned by self-hatred. Hooks, an African-American woman, clearly sees herself as being inferior to white people. Indeed, if Black people cannot be racist, then they obviously lack the capacity to participate in, and feel, the depth and breadth of all human experience and emotion – good or evil.
The bottom line is that the Black people who are killed by other Blacks are just as equal as the Black people who die at the hands of whites. They are also equal to the white people who die at the hands of Black tyrants like Mugabe.
We can never submit to the ugly Leftist lie that the humanity of Blacks only exists when they are killed or persecuted by whites, and that it disappears the moment fellow Blacks become their oppressors.
George W. Bush should be championed for his ultimatum in regards to this “anti-racist” conference. It’s consoling to have an American President who recognizes hatred when he sees it.