Not much to add to these two useful articles. First, from Are the Palestinians getting a hearing at the UN racism conference? on Reuters Global News blog:
Although the U.N.’s racism conference in Geneva has been dominated by Middle East politics, Palestinian rights groups say Palestinians have effectively been silenced. On the one hand tough rules by the conference organisers prevented Palestinian NGOs from holding “side events”, they say. On the other hand Monday’s controversial speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, slamming Israel as a “totally racist government” founded “on the pretext of Jewish suffering”, has distracted attention from the issues that actually affect Palestinians.
“One thing that we have noticed in this conference is that there has been a concerted effort to silence the voices of the Palestinian presence and raising the Palestinian issue,” said Wisam Ahmad of Al-Haq, a Ramallah-based advocacy group.
Ahmad says that Ahmadinejad’s speech became the symbol of the conference, as intended by “those that wanted this conference to fail”.
“We as Palestinians want to be heard and it is unfortunate that the press attributes the statements of the president of Iran to all of the Palestinian people,” he said.
Ingrid Jaradat, director of the Badil Resource Center in Bethlehem, agrees.
“We all knew he was going to come, we all knew that the European governments were going to wait until they just hear the key word and then they will all stand up and leave the hall and then the press comes in, they all would write about what he said or did not say and everybody would forget what is really written in the documents and what the conference is really about,” she said.
“From my point of view I do not think that this was helpful for the Palestinian people in general and not for our organisation.”
And a great commentary from Seumas Milne in the Guardian pointing out the hypocrisy of the Western boycotting states in his article, “What credibility is there in Geneva’s all-white boycott?“:
What do the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy and Israel have in common? They are all either European or European-settler states. And they all decided to boycott this week’s UN conference against racism in Geneva – even before Monday’s incendiary speech by the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which triggered a further white-flight walkout by representatives of another 23 European states.
In international forums, it’s almost unprecedented to have such an undiluted racial divide of whites-versus-the-rest. And for that to happen in a global meeting called to combat racial hatred doesn’t exactly augur well for future international understanding at a time when the worst economic crisis since the war is ramping up racism and xenophobia across the world. . .
[If Avigdor] Lieberman had turned up to speak at the Geneva anti-racism
conference, who believes that western delegates and ambassadors would
have staged a walkout? Of course, there’s a perfectly reasonable
argument to be had about the nature of Israel’s racism and whether it
should be compared to apartheid, for example. But for western
governments to hold up their hands in horror when Israel is described
as a racist state has no global credibility whatever.Israel’s
supporters often complain that, whatever its faults, it is singled out
for attack while the crimes of other states and conflicts are ignored.
To the extent that that’s true in forums such as the UN, it’s partly
because Israel is seen as the unfinished business of European
colonialism, along with the Middle East conflict’s other special mix of
multiple toxins. The Geneva boycotters, fresh from standing behind
Israel’s carnage in Gaza, are in denial about their own racism – and
their continuing role in the tragedy of the Middle East.
