Yoshie wrote: I doubt that Israel will get much sympathies (outside the USA) for being "picked on." No one likes the teacher's pet, you see. :-> As Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times, "If absolutely everything had gone well at the heroically named conference -- which is still under way in Durban, on the east coast of South Africa -- all that could have emerged would be a paper telling us that racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance are bad. In its essence, the paper's theme would be, 'Now, now, you stop that'" (6 September 2001)! Conferences of this kind are by nature farcical. The only difference this time is that the USA and Israel were made to walk out in a huff, unable to play the roles of anti-racist leaders of the free world, which made the conference a far more politically provocative spectacle than otherwise. (((((((( CB: The real joke is the arch-racist U.S. posing as world human rights and democratic leader. That's real Orwelliain doublespeak. Uncle Sam is in the Ku Klux Klan. Comedy is superior to tragedy, but in the main racism remains an enormous tragedy in the world. This conference deals more in tragedy than in comedy and farce. The anti-racism conference is dead serious, despite US efforts to dismiss it and just dis it. I think Israel is sort of featured as racistly oppressing nation now for the obvious reason of the current , ongoing genocidal assaults on the Palestinians. Such a conference is for talk and is not of the nature to "solve" all of the world's problems of racism. If it can make a significant protest impact on the ongoing, hot racism in Palestine, this would be the mode of conferences of this type. Sometimes we would walk a picket line on a particular local struggle at an NLG conference, the demo being on a small issue compared to the whole conference's scope. Conferences are not practical but theoretical. The Israeli attacks on Palestine are current, ongoing, in the news everyday, horrendous. It is hot racism/national oppression. Other current racist oppressions are not as spectacular in terms of the world news media. Israel is acting like a leading world outlaw at this historical juncture. This is something of the other side of the coin of the U.S. ,imperialism, ( and NATO) singling out Iraq or Yugoslavia to bomb. At least the WCAR protestors are only dropping word , not real, bombs on Israel. It is an expression of pointed anti-imperialism, naming names. In the past , the South African apartheid regime was singled out by name by the UN ,along with Israel. All democrats are obligated to listen to the majority of nations' voices, upon risk of making farcical their own declarations of "democratic passion" on so many other world issues. The U.S. leaving the conference is only one country. And even if France leaves, there are still more nations at the conference than out. Within South Africa, the conference's presence there has seemingly emboldened the militant left to strike against neo-liberalization and privatization scourges. The question of the 20th Century ,and now into the 21st, is the question of the color bar, and that ain't no joke. The Colored nations are always ahead of the white nations on issues of the color bar, and the white nations always react as if they must lead anti-racist movement. However, the white nations are the criminals in the tragedy of racism.
