The groundwork for much of what's going to happen at next year's Durban II conference is quietly being laid out by a UN committee chaired by Libya and includes Iran, Pakistan, and Cuba as vice-chairs. That committee recently released a provisional blueprint.
Incredibly enough, National Post columnist Jonathan Kay sifted through the 88-page document:
But faced with a slow news day, I decided to take a crack.
Four hours later, I don't recommend the exercise. The five-part "Draft Outcome Document" contains 88 pages and 646 provisions. Most of it consists of boilerplate repetition of the same small handful of themes (encapsulated well in this UN Watch report): (1) Racism is everywhere, (2) The fault for this lies with the West, because of its "genocidal" legacy of slavery and colonization, (3) "Islamophobia" and discrimination against "people of African descent" are especially prevalent and pernicious, and (4) Israel is a blight upon nations (Paragraphs 114-117 of Section 1, for instance, are dedicated exclusively to bashing the Jewish state. No other country comes in for singling out in the whole document). In many cases, whole paragraphs are repeated several times over (such as a lengthy Jimmy Carteresque screed about Israel promoting "a new kind of apartheid").
Don't miss Kay's fascinating post-script:
In response to my blog post, I got this interesting message from a UN insider:
The reason the text is contradictory is that the UN facilitators at this stage just pasted in elements of the texts submitted by both the EU as well as the anti-democratic blocs. So at this stage it’s a hodge-podge, all subject to negotiation. Expect that much of the good stuff will be excised, certainly anything that’s a jab at the violators. The references to tribal violence (African), non-Western slave trade (Arab), reference to the ICC (Sudanese genocide) — all of that will be yanked out. Similarly, the far more prevalent offensive material will be softened. Yet given the constellation of bloc power, far more of the poison than the perfume will remain. And in the end, in whatever proportions the combination turns out, it will be no less inedible.
So there you have it: All the surprisingly enlightened stuff will probably end up on the cutting room floor. Let's revisit this prediction in a few months and see if it bears out . . .
Hillel Neuer of UN Watch also reacts to the Durban II draft, calling it "even worse than 2001." That original gathering degenerated into such an ugly affair, HonestReporting found traditionally anti-Israel publications joined in the near-universal condemnation.
Israel and Canada already decided to boycott Durban II. Yesterday, Denmark's foreign minister threatened to do the same.
