On one particular matter, however, I may have inadvertently giving the wrong impression. I wrote that it was only last Friday, when the JHRC fruitlessly implored Foreign Secretary David Miliband three times to withdraw from the conference, that they appeared to have realised that the event was indeed a travesty and that there were ‘serious concerns’ that could not be overcome. This has been taken to mean in some quarters that I was saying it was the first time the JHRC had asked the government to withdraw. Actually, I didn’t mean that. I meant precisely what I said -- that only on Friday did the JHRC realise the game was now up. But now I realise that this is not so. They still haven’t realised it. Let’s look first at what the JHRC had actually said about withdrawal before its ‘three phone-call’ agony with Miliband last Friday. Its supporters claim that it had previously urged the government to withdraw. On March 19, the Jewish Chronicle reported that the President of the Board of Deputies and JHRC member Henry Grunwald had told the BofD the previous weekend that he had lobbied the British government to withdraw. But the same story went on: ‘There are ‘red lines’ and we think those lines have been crossed. I wrote to him [Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch Brown] and I am seeking a meeting with him. If they have been crossed, the government should keep the word it has given to us on many occasions and we will keep up the pressure,’ said Mr Grunwald. ‘The arguments are continuing. The Board is actively involved with other Jewish organisations in this country in trying to see if anything can be salvaged from what should be a very important international conference,’ he added. ‘But we are coming to the conclusion that it is beyond redemption.’ ‘Coming to the conclusion’ that it was beyond redemption? ‘If’ the red lines had been crossed the government should withdraw? The requested meeting was, it was also reported, to ask the government to clarify its position. None of that is the same as having lobbied the British government to withdraw. It’s possible, of course, that Grunwald may have done so in his actual letter to Malloch Brown; but that’s not what was reported. Moreover, on March 20, the day after having that meeting with Malloch Brown, Grunwald’s tone had completely changed. The Jewish Chronicle now reported that Grunwald had hailed the newly sanitised draft Declaration for ‘Durban II’ as a vast improvement on anything that has been considered before and that, despite certain problems remaining with the text, it had given him ‘a degree of cautious optimism’ that the Geneva conference would not turn into a repeat of the Durban 2001 anti-Israel hate-fest. All this ambiguity underlines the main point that I was making – that throughout this whole episode, the UK Jewish leaders have failed to understand the true sting of the ‘very important ‘ Geneva ‘Durban II’ conference and have adopted therefore deeply misguided tactics. In particular, they have repeatedly drawn a distinction between the potential undesirability of the UK government being involved in Geneva – which they accepted -- and the extreme desirability of themselves being involved. They failed to grasp the incoherence of their position: after all, if their own participation could improve matters, why did that not apply also to the government? They thought they could help remove the worst aspects of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice from the text and prevent a re-run of the Durban 2001 hate-fest. But what they principally wanted to avoid was the vicious anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred that had poured out of the NGOs at the 2001 Durban meeting. They didn’t seem to grasp that the real problem was the official Declaration produced at that conference which singled out Israel for defamation as part of the UN’s campaign to delegitimise it. Indeed, some months ago I was told by one prominent JHRC member that there had been no problem with that Declaration, only with the NGOs. Thus they doubly and triply miscalculated. For the whole point of this week’s Geneva conference, as its own Declaration makes clear, is to reaffirm the official text of Durban 2001. So any improvements to the text of the Geneva Declaration would therefore be worse than useless because they would merely serve to sanitise the process whose core mission is to reaffirm Durban 2001, thus institutionalising within the UN the libellous delegitimisation of Israel as a racist state. Worse even than that, by taking part they actually helped legitimise the entire process -- and thus made it easier for the British government to take its own appalling decision to attend the conference. True, the British delegation took part in yesterday’s walk-out when Ahmadinejad embarked on his demented anti-Jewish rant. But this mass walk-out was little more than a shallow stunt since, with the exception of the Czech Republic, everyone promptly went back into the conference after Ahmadinejad left. And as Obama (to his credit) finally recognised, that conference remains unconscionable because it reaffirms the racist declaration of Durban 2001. The fact is that even if Ahmadinejad had not turned up the Geneva conference was always going to be a travesty of human rights. With Iran as its vice-chair, Libya as the chair of the ‘Main Committee’ running the conference and Cuba acting as rapporteur, how could this ‘anti-racism’ meeting ever be anything other than a two-finger gesture by some of the world’s leading tyrannies to the cause of freedom and true human rights? It should have been shunned; and if it had been from the outset, the chances are that it would not have taken place at all. Grotesquely, activists such as those protesting at my remarks are now actually congratulating themselves for ‘achieving a lot’ at Geneva, which they seem to think represents some kind of victory. They thus appear unable to see beyond their own enormous egos. Taking the credit for lobbying, arranging interviews, ‘gathering information on hostile NGOs’, monitoring antisemitic incidents around the complex and helping the noisy protests during Ahmadinejad’s speech is simply grandstanding on the back of an obscene event which should never have been allowed to happen. The fact remains that Geneva provided a platform for Ahmadinejad -- on the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday and the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day -- to pose hideously as a champion of human rights while implicitly denying the Holocaust once again and defaming Israel – which he has repeatedly threatened to wipe out -- as a destroyer of those rights. And what was the mass walk-out other than an utterly hypocritical act of gesture politics? After all, it’s not as if anyone can have been surprised at what Ahmadinejad said. Every single person who turned up to hear him had a pretty good idea of what he was going to say. His appearance did not reduce the Geneva conference to a farce: it simply exposed it for the farce that it already was and rubbed the participants’ noses in it. While the JHRC was congratulating itself for helping organise the protests against him, the Arab states sat there and applauded. The prestige and legitimacy thus afforded to Ahmadinejad’s foaming hatred towards Israel and the Jewish people will have been amplified throughout the Arab and Muslim world; and so too will the power and danger of the Iranian revolutionary regime. The BBC reports that the Iranian state media described Ahmadinejad as the superstar of the conference... One pro-government paper said the president had shot the last bullet into the brain of the West. If the free nations had shunned Geneva from the start, this damaging outcome could have been averted. As it is, Ahmadinejad’s remarks are today front page news around the world. The UK and US governments (despite the last-minute American withdrawal, its previous ambiguous attitude prevented other countries from following the lead of Canada and Israel in refusing to have anything to do with ‘Durban II’) along with the other participants in this travesty all helped make this happen -- and have thus helped strengthen the clenched Iranian fist yet further. Nor have the British Jews apparently yet learned their lesson even now. The reason I wrote that on Friday they finally realised the whole thing was a travesty was that I thought they were finally calling it a day. Not so. For as they are now boasting to each other, they are still working behind the scenes to sanitise the Declaration yet further: In parallel with all of the activity around the Ahmadinejad speech work on securing the best possible text in the document has continued quietly in the background. Even now they still fail to grasp that ‘securing the best possible text’ will merely legitimise a process that should have been placed unambiguously beyond the pale. The British government delegation may have walked out of Ahmadinejad’s rant, but it has still not withdrawn from the conference itself which goes on until Thursday. It is thus still underpinning the unconscionable. So are all those others who are still attending a conference they say has descended into ‘a circus’. But if it is indeed now just a ‘circus’, why are they still there? Why is the conference continuing at all? The really terrible thing is that, for all the pious expressions of shock and horror at Ahmadinejad’s speech, many of his odious and even deranged claims are now common currency amongst the western intelligentsia. The oppressive ‘power grab’ of European colonialism; the creation of Israel ‘in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe’; the ‘aggression, brutalities and the bombardment of civilians in Gaza’; the ‘military action against Iraq planned by the Zionists and their allies in the then US administration in complicity with the arms manufacturing countries and the possessors of wealth’; America’s responsibility for the global financial meltdown after it introduced ‘laws and regulations in defiance of all moral values only to protect the interests of the possessors of wealth and power... And today, they are injecting hundreds of billions of dollars of cash from the pockets of their own people and other nations into the failing banks, companies and financial institutions making the situation more and more complicated for their economy and their people’; the identification of Zionism with racism and the need therefore to ‘eradicate’ it; all these monstrous and genocidal myths that featured in Ahmadinejad’s speech are now the commonplaces of western political and intellectual discourse. After all, did not even Jeremy Paxman, the grand inquisitor of BBC TV’s Newsnight, ask on the programme last night in the course of an otherwise vigorous dissection of the UK government’s hypocrisy in walking out: Is Zionism racism? The real sting of the Geneva circus is that the Islamist agenda of delegitimising Israel, Jewish peoplehood and thus Judaism itself is actually being endorsedwithin the west. Which is why so many countries decided to turn up – and which is why Ahmadinejad may actually have done the cause of human rights a back-handed favour, in leaving those who would otherwise have had barely a qualm in endorsing Durban II nowhere now to hide.
An Unconscionable Farce
Word reaches me that my criticisms below of the approach taken by UK Jewish leaders in the Jewish Human Rights Coalition towards the ‘Durban II’ farce in Geneva have produced a state of near-apoplexy among certain JHRC members and their hangers-on, who believe I have failed to recognise the heroic role these leaders have been playing behind the scenes at this meeting and the terrific results they have achieved. They thus underline how grievously they fail to get the point.
Tuesday 21 April 2009
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