The Durban Ii Farce: Memo To Susan Rice

I know you must be aware of the Durban II...Well, what shall I call it?  First of all, it is an extravaganza, like all the conferences sponsored by the hand-to-mouth United Nations, even the relatively benign ones like "the year of the child" or "the year of the woman."  It is true that these ideological jamborees allow people to meet who might not be able to meet otherwise.  But I wonder if anyone has ever done a cost-benefit analysis of what good has come out of any of these.  By all accounts, you are a tough-minded and simpatico person.  You don't want intellectual and moral fraud to be the characteristic that intelligent people associate with the U.N.  Of that I am certain.

To be sure, that's what nearly everybody who thinks seriously and honestly about it feels with regard to the United Nations Human Rights Council with 45 member-states.  And this is not just with reference to Israel, although about 90% of the Council's activities and resolutions actually deal with the Jewish state, essentially false accusations whipped up into legalese by the Muslim states and the new wave of post-Castro Castroite dictatorships.  

Here is a long-delayed matter in the international arena: just how much power are we prepared to vest in countries many of which are not really nation-states but arbitrary territorial jurisdictions where tribes, sects, races, clans and language groups wage bloody struggles against each other to control, by hook and by crook, every one else.  The very basis of the United Nations will have to be examined so that its legacies are not made up merely of resolutions without commanding the respect of sentient men and women.

I just noticed in my first sentence that I had typed not Durban II but Darfur II.  It is an understandable slip, and a devastating one.  The United Nations Security Council has considered the Darfur enormity many times, and each time come to conclusions that everyone knew would not work.  That was actually the aim of some members of the Security Council: give some procedural hope for relief of the black Muslims of Sudan...but no actual relied.  And surely no relief that would stop the killing.  This, after all, would require western military intervention.  Alas, this is a test of the West.

So let me come to Durban which is surely on your agenda and that of President Obama.  Durban II is not the place to engage anybody.  It is rigged, a set-up.  If we even so much as send an observer we shall be telegraphing the tyrants and bigots and Muslim fascists that we can be had and that we can be had as far as insulting the deepest values of our Constitution and also the deepest values of the society we have, in some real way, just become.

Here is a report from another Geneva N.G.O., another type of N.G.O., United Nations Watch.  And from its scrupulously honest rapporteur, Anne Bayefsky: