Germany agrees to boycott Durban III
Germany will boycott the controversial Durban III United Nations Conference Against Racism, planned for later this month in New York.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle announced the decision Sept. 2, saying the event risked becoming a repeat of the Israel-bashing, anti-Semitic fiasco that marked the first two conferences, held in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, and in Geneva in 2009.
The announcement was met with applause by Jewish leaders, who considered Germany’s decision key.
Dieter Graumann, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, applauded the government’s decision and urged France and Britain to follow suit. The conference is nothing but an “organized show-trial against Israel,” he told the Passauer Neue Presse.
The American Jewish Committee, which frequently meets with representatives of the German government, also praised Germany’s decision to withdraw from the event, meant to mark the tenth anniversary of the U.N. World Conference on Racism, which turned into an anti-Israel hate-fest. AJC Executive Director David Harris said he hoped other countries would follow suit:
“What a telling statement that many of the world’s leading democracies have chosen to shun the upcoming Durban conclave — with more to come in the next few weeks, we hope,” he said in a statement issued after the German announcement.
At the first two conferences anti-Israel groups were widely considered to have hijacked the proceedings, so that international human rights issues appeared to become secondary to Israel-bashing. Critics of the conference have noted that human rights abuses reported in Arab countries have been pooh-poohed by conference
organizers.
This year, Canada was the first country to announce it would not attend. Other countries shunning the event are: the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, Austria, the Czech Republic, Israel and Italy. About 40 delegates dropped out of the 2009 conference following what was widely described as a hate speech by Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“We oppose the attempts by dictators and despots to use the Durban process to hijack this noble cause,” Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based U.N. Watch organization, recently said in a statement. The Durban process “was marked by ugly displays of intolerance and anti-Semitism, and that is not something that should
be commemorated,” he added.
JTA
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