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| UN: Durban II meeting may not happen |
| 2009-04-03 |
| [Jerusalem Post Front Page] Lobbying from advocacy groups could undermine next month's world racism conference, the UN's top human right official said Thursday. Jewish and Muslim groups have taken offense at draft statements being prepared for the meeting, pushing governments to demand changes before the April 20-24 conference in Geneva. A fresh draft circulated last month drew cautious welcome from most sides, though key countries including the United States have yet to say whether they will attend the meeting. "I have a healthy fear for the way states sometimes operate," UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay told reporters in Geneva. "I am quite wary of the fact that someone or other may attempt to revisit the issues that were dropped in this last document." Dozens of Arab rights groups called Wednesday for specific references to Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be reinserted. The Arab Lawyer Union, the Arab Commission for Human Rights and others accuse Israel of "daily war crimes" against Palestinians. Meanwhile, the World Jewish Congress said it was lobbying European nations to prevent a repeat of a 2001 global racism meeting in Durban, South Africa. The United States and Israel walked out of that meeting because of a campaign by some delegations to single out Israel for criticism. Pillay defended the conference, saying it ended with a balanced statement that was welcomed by then-foreign minister Shimon Peres. Emotions at next month's meeting are likely to run high if activists are permitted to take the floor, Pillay acknowledged. "We do expect tensions, and victims should be allowed to speak loudly," she said. "I would not regard any of that as disrupting the conference." |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 Re: transnationalists Chesterton said it well in The Spice of Life: The man who forgets nationality instantly becomes less human and less European. He seems somehow to have turned into a walking abstraction, a resolution of some committee, a programme of some political movement, and to be by some unmistakable transformation, striking chill like the touch of a fish, less of a living man. The European man is a man through his patriotism and the particular civilization of his people. The cosmopolitan is not a European, still less a good European. He is a traveller in Europe, as if he were a tourist from the moon. In other words, what has happened is this; that for good or evil, European history has produced European nations by a European process; they are the organs of the organic life of our race, at least in recent times; and unless we receive our natural European inheritance through those natural organs, we do not really receive it at all. We receive something else; a priggish and provincial abstraction, invented by a few modern and more or less ignorant men. |
| Posted by: mom 2009-04-03 09:16 |
| #1 A pity. And I'm serious. The more Tranzis allowed to run free---the sooner true humans turn on them. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-04-03 06:10 |