The U.N.'s Anti-Antiracism Conference

Geneva shows that the best hope for restoring human rights is to deny these corrupt events the veneer of legitimacy.

GERALD M. STEINBERG

From today's Wall Street Journal Europe

GENEVA -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's tirade Monday to the United Nations' "antiracism" conference should not have surprised anyone. The Iranian president denounced Israel, or the "Zionist entity" as he calls it, which, according to his version of history, was created by Europe and the U.S. on the "pretext of Jewish suffering" in World War II. He spoke of a world-wide Zionist conspiracy, referring to Israelis as "those racist perpetrators of genocide."

AP

European delegates walk out on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday in Geneva.

Many people walked out, including those European diplomats whose governments had ignored the warning signs and chosen to participate in this conference. They were cheered by Jewish NGO members and students who had come to ensure that this conference would not take the anti-Semitic path of the 2001 Durban catastrophe.

In a packed unofficial session on anti-Semitism the next day, Holocaust survivor and memorializer Elie Wiesel demanded an apology from the U.N. for even inviting Mr. Ahmadinejad, who has long been infamous for his Holocaust denial and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz spoke of the Iran-Hamas link and attacks against Israel in the Arab world and by the left in the West. And ex-gulag resident Natan Sharansky condemned the Orwellian spectacle of an antiracism conference run by some of the world's worst human-rights violators, an absurdity that reminded him of Soviet show trials.

Consider that Libya and Iran were the leading organizers of this conference and thus responsible for drafting declarations that single out Israel among the nations for condemnation -- the modern form of anti-Semitism.

After Mr. Ahmadinejad's address, the conference got down to business: The Syrian, Qatari and Palestinian representatives spoke of Israel's "racism," though the status of minorities and women in their own jurisdictions was off-limits, of course. Other Arab speakers focused on what they consider to be the worst form of racism: insults to Islam and the prophet Muhammad. Muslim countries have long been pushing for international laws to criminalize such "insults." Draft declarations of the Geneva conference called for limits to freedom of speech with respect to religion, i.e. Islam. Little wonder then that 10 democratic countries -- first Canada, followed by Israel, the United States, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic -- chose to stay away from this farce.

The Geneva conference has so far not seen the type of anti-Semitic excesses as witnessed in Durban, where Jews were physically attacked and Hitler's "Mein Kampf" was handed out.

But the radical agendas of many powerful NGOs is at display at numerous "side events." A London-based group called "Islamic Human Rights Commission" brought three Hasidic Jews to hold signs proclaiming "Zionism is racism." The organization "North-South 21," which is closely linked to the Libyan regime, organized a session on "Occupation and Discrimination," featuring Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general and now left-wing activist who accuses Israel of "genocide." Radical pro-Palestinian groups such as Badil and Ittajah held an "Israel Review Conference," which discussed how to press war-crime charges against Israelis in Western courts and cut off Western arms sales to the Jewish state. Unlike in 2001, the more prominent NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International did not take part at these sessions, even though they are playing a central role in international campaigns to delegitimize Israel.

Once again, the obsessive focus on the Jewish state meant that the real problems of racism and genocide were largely ignored at this U.N. conference. Only outside the official U.N. antiracism conference, at well-attended "counterconferences" organized by NGOs such as U.N. Watch, did the real victims of racism and mass murder get the attention they deserved.

Only at those counterconferences could one witness moving presentations by victims of Iranian oppression, survivors of the Rwandan genocide and the continuing slaughter in Darfur. And on Monday night, when Jews marked Holocaust Memorial Day, a large gathering stood quietly honoring the victims while the language of human rights was being abused in the U.N. building.

Human Rights Watch, which played an active role in the 2001 fiasco, had tried hard to pressure the Obama administration to abandon core moral principles and participate in the review conference. President Obama rejected this advice, and in a tacit rebuke to the NGO lobby explained that the foundations of the Durban process are fundamentally incompatible with universal human-rights norms. A new structure is necessary if these values are to be given serious attention.

At the same time, though, President Obama has sought to placate the NGO lobby by agreeing to rejoin the failed U.N. Human Rights Council. The main lesson from this week's events is that the best hope for restoring human rights is to deny such corrupt organizations the veneer of legitimacy.

Mr. Steinberg is executive director of NGO Monitor and chair of the Political Science Department at Bar Ilan University.

Palin Press Conference April 10 Part 1

Impressed Me Not

Impressed Me Not by Walter Shapiro On Obama's first White House press conference.

Through most of his inaugural primetime press conference, Barack Obama seemed like he was channeling a particularly loquacious combination of Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and the ghost of Hubert Humphrey. The president's response to the first question from the Associated Press about the risks of sounding too apocalyptic about the economy ran (or, to be more accurate, crawled) for nearly 1,200 words--and ended with Obama saying "Okay" with an implicit question mark as if he were requesting permission to keep on talking. A national poll from the Pew Research Center released Monday afternoon found that 92 percent of Americans described Obama as a "good communicator." There is a suspicion that those astronomic numbers had dipped by the time that Obama exited from the East Room of the White House at 9 p.m. on the dot. In Obama's defense, the press conference was the first extended glimpse that many Americans had of their new president since the Inaugural Address. No one can deny the complexity of the economic challenges facing the nation--and President Obama is uniquely equipped to play Explainer in Chief. But Obama radiated the sense of a leader who has digested too many economic briefings and memorized too many talking points in preparation for his primetime rendezvous with the public. He clearly came out in an over-caffeinated mood ready to do battle with his Republican congressional foes, whom he had already vanquished-and, as a result, he over-reacted to last week's Fox News commentary instead of focusing on the exact shape of the stimulus. What shone through the entire press conference is how irked the president is with laissez-faire conservatives who believe, even now, "that the government has no business interfering in the marketplace" and that "FDR was wrong to intervene back in the New Deal." (Presumably Amity Shlaes, the Roosevelt-ripping author, should not plan on any immediate Oval Office invitations). It is inevitable that the Obama press conference will be reviewed as political theater, since it was light on ... well ... that amorphous thing called news. The president's strongest answer was in response to the evening's fluffiest question, about Alex Rodriguez's confession that he had taken steroids. After an honest baseball fan's lament ("it tarnishes an entire era"), Obama jumped to a larger point that transcends sports--the lesson in A-Rod's downfall for the young: "There are no shortcuts; that when you try to take shortcuts you may end up tarnishing your whole career." Obama also took advantage of the presidential prerogative to duck when he was asked a tricky question about ending the ban on media coverage of the flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base. "We are in the process of reviewing those policies in conversations with the Defense Department," Obama said without revealing his hand. "So I don't want to give you an answer now, before I've evaluated that review and understand all the implications involved." Obama's maiden presidential press conference (complete with a question from Helen Thomas) was orchestrated to revolve around what the president called "the most profound economic emergency since the New Deal." The president clearly wanted to mobilize his supporters who have been languidly following the congressional maneuvering over the stimulus package. But there was little in Obama's remarks that spoke to issues that the congressional conference committee will soon be squabbling over. Having won on the Senate cloture vote, Obama might have risked a few tart remarks about, for instance, the addition to the legislation of $70 billion in middle-class subsidies to ward off the dread Alternative Minimum Tax. But Monday night, Obama, with his lengthy soliloquies, seemed content to simplify the choice as between those who support the stimulus and do-nothing Republicans. The new president may have made a far more powerful case if, in his first primetime appearance, he was behind the desk in the Oval Office, giving the kind of speech at which he excels. What Obama was decidedly not Monday night was Kennedy-esque. When JFK unveiled the live presidential primetime press conference 48 years ago, he answered 37 questions in the space of 40 minutes; Obama only half-responded to 13 questions in the space of an hour. Admittedly, Kennedy, who had survived a narrow election, was trying to demonstrate with his competence that he was a worthy successor to Dwight Eisenhower. Obama--who romped home in November and certainly does not lie awake worrying about invidious comparisons with George W. Bush--was trying to sell a set of economic talking points. As a result, the reporters and their questions were little more than potted palms as President Obama declaimed from the East Room. When a president is as popular as Obama, the atmospherics of his first primetime performance are apt to be forgotten in a week or two. And blessed with the good will of almost all Americans to the left of Sean Hannity (and that is a wide swath of political territory), Obama has the luxury of experimenting with different formats to reach the voters. My guess is the primetime press conference is a gambit that may not be repeated for quite a while. But the next time that Obama tries it, he might consider taking his stage cues from that White House master of brevity known as Silent Cal Coolidge.