UN race conference biased against West

By W. James Antle III
web posted August 13, 2001

The upcoming United Nations' Conference Against Racism,
Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance
would be better described as the UN Conference of Hypocrisy,
Demagoguery, Wealth Redistribution and Related Nonsense.
Scheduled to take place in Durban, South Africa beginning
August 31, it is already clear that it is going to be hijacked by
radicals who loathe capitalism and the West and have agendas
far removed from the conference's stated purpose.

Rather than concentrate on human rights abuses, racial injustices
and impediments to wealth creation and economic progress
happening today, there will be much focus on wrongs committed
hundreds of years ago. This is because many convention
delegates adhere to an ideological viewpoint that the Western
world, rather than having achieved a degree of material progress
and individual liberty that should be emulated elsewhere, is
instead an agent of unrelenting oppression of women and
minorities. Never mind that bashing the West rather than learning
lessons from Western civilization will yield no tangible benefit to
anyone this conference is ostensibly supposed to help.

The focus is thus likely to be on calls for wealthy Western
nations to pay the Third World (and presumably their own
minority populations) reparations for slavery and colonialism.
There will be hearty denunciations of corporations, international
trade and that favorite bogeyman of the world's perpetually
aggrieved community, globalization. The United States will likely
be particularly singled out as a pernicious force for oppression
and imperialism on the world scene. For good measure, when
attacking the US and Western Europe grows stale, the delegates
will take up their cudgels against Israel and attempt once again to
equate Zionism with racism.

To President Bush's credit, he has stated that the US will
participate in this $21 million boondoggle only to the extent that it
is not a UN-sponsored rally for reparations and anti-Zionism. If
the assortment of thugs and dictators who always represent a
disproportionate share of those present at UN gatherings to
denounce the human rights records of everyone else persists in
this ranting, US delegates will boycott meetings. Predictably, this
will be cited as evidence that the US in general and the Bush
administration in particular is indifferent to racism at best and
inescapably racist at worst.

Balance is one thing that will be missing from the UN conference
on racism. While there is likely to be much airing of the historical
wrongs committed by the US and Western Europe, non-
Western participation in the international slave trade will almost
certainly be ignored. Preliminary reports show an almost
exclusive focus is planned on the transatlantic slave trade, which
glosses over the roles of non-Westerners in slavery. Of course,
to allow anything else to enter the discussion would complicate
the case for reparations, wouldn't it?

There is also the hypocrisy of Sudan and Mauritania, where
slavery still is practiced, lecturing the United States, which
abolished slavery in 1865, on this subject. Similarly, Great
Britain became a leading force in the international movement for
abolition after William Wilberforce's bill to end the English slave
trade was adopted by Parliament in 1807. A month after
Wilberforce's death in 1833, Parliament passed a bill that
emancipated all the slaves in the British Empire and banned
slavery. The historical fact that Western nations enslaved
Africans should not be ignored, but neither should the unique
leadership role the West played in the abolition of slavery
throughout the world.

It is of course not fashionable to credit Western civilization with
anything other than a legacy of oppression, which is presumed to
be the source of its wealth rather than a climate of relative liberty.
Israel is the only nation in the Middle East with foundations in
Western institutions, so naturally its existence must be questioned
as well. Yet those who wish to label Zionism as racism are oddly
silent on the subject of anti-Semitism, with some Arab delegates
reportedly opposing the inclusion of anti-Semitism among the
intolerance this conference is meeting to condemn. It goes
without saying that some of the most virulently anti-Israel forces
condone anti-Semitism and rely on media reports and school
textbooks that defame Jews and either deny or downplay the
Holocaust. Arnold Beichman, Hoover Institution senior fellow
and able debunker of globalist America-bashers, notes that some
of this material "would make Joseph Goebbels proud."

Also typical of UN "solutions" to social and economic problems,
the creation of new wealth will not feature prominently as an
agenda item. Instead, the world's wealth will be treated as a finite
quantity to be redistributed from the greedy colonialists and
imperialists of the West to the Third World poor. Nowhere in
this talk about reparations, foreign aid, debt forgiveness and
other statist schemes is there any recognition of the need for real
wealth to be created in the Third World by the residents of those
countries themselves. Where the free market has been tried,
including in Africa, it has produced greater material benefits and
personal freedom. This dependency on global largess will not
ultimately benefit anyone other than socialist ideologues seeking
power.

Little more can be expected of an international body that already
demonstrated earlier this year that it believes Libya, Sudan,
Cuba and Communist China are more dedicated to the
advancement of human rights than the United States. There will
be much rhetoric critical of the West's human rights record.

George Mason University economics professor Walter Williams
puts this notion into perspective wonderfully. Williams recently
asked in his syndicated column: "Think about it. If you are a
feminist, where would you prefer to live: Iran, Saudi Arabia,
China or a country in Africa? If you are a criminal, where would
you prefer to be tried and imprisoned: Turkey, Mexico, China or
Russia? If you are a minority, where would you prefer to live:
Burundi, Albania, Malaysia or Liberia? If you were an unborn
spirit condemned to live a life of poverty, but permitted to
choose a country for that life, what country would you choose:
Chad, Romania, North Korea or Kenya?"

Obviously, when the question is framed in this manner, the
superiority of Western human rights protections stands in stark
contrast to what is enjoyed by much of the rest of the world. Yet
it is precisely those countries that are the targets of these
international conferences, while many dictatorships not only are
free of criticism but join in the condemnations. It quickly
becomes clear that genuine concern about human rights and
racism take a back seat when an agenda is being served.

The victims of racism would not suffer in the slightest if the United 
States refused to participate in this charade. Let the politically correct 
hordes and international bureaucrats talk themselves blue without us.

W. James Antle III is a senior writer for Enter Stage Right and
can be reached at wjantle@enterstageright.com.

Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com