During the United Nations Conference on Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Tehran, Iran, on Feb. 19-21, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson said, “No region, no country, no community can fairly claim to be free from racism.”
She could not have been more right, because at the behest of the Iranian hosts of the conference at which she spoke those words, Jews were banned from attending.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights organization and registered non-governmental organization at the United Nations, was publicly warned by an Iranian official that “Jewish organizations would not be welcome.”
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told me in a telephone interview this week that the Iranian authorities approved a visa for the center’s international liaison Shimon Samuels at the last minute, “but in practice there [was] no chance for him to arrive” in time for the conference.
Cooper posits the Iranian government finally gave Samuels the go-ahead in order to say, “See, we treated them equally.”
But don’t just blame the Iranians. Robinson was alerted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center weeks before the conference began that the center’s applications for entry visas to Iran had been rebuffed. Robinson and the United Nations decided to go ahead with the anti-racism conference anyway.
Robinson, said Cooper, hasn’t “lost any sleep over her behavior.”
The conference, attended by representatives from 46 Asian countries and around 100 NGOs, was aimed at “identifying what needs to be done to fight racism,” according to Robinson.
For conference attendees confused about how to identify racism, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi was happy to help. He cited Zionism as a “vivid example of racism and racial superiority in the contemporary world.” To fight this scourge, Kharazi called for “concerted international action aiming at confronting crimes perpetrated by Zionists.”
Keep in mind this is from the foreign minister of a country on the U.S. State Department’s list of countries sponsoring terrorism; a place where ten Jews are languishing in prison on trumped up charges of spying for Israel. Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, tens of thousands of Jews, Bahais and other minorities have been tortured, jailed and sometimes executed, and millions have fled to other countries.
For Jews and Israelis, the recent conference comes as no surprise. Over the decades, the United Nations has churned out resolution after resolution condemning Israel, hitting the bottom of the barrel in 1975 with the infamous “Zionism equals racism” resolution (rescinded in 1991).
Explaining why there have been so many anti-Israel U.N. resolutions, Abba Eban, a former Israeli foreign minister, said, “If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.” Simply put, Israel’s enemies have a built-in majority at the United Nations, many of whom take the stances they do in the interests of lucrative oil deals and weapons sales.
Yet this latest row over another anti-Semitic episode at the United Nations can be used to our advantage. By passing one-sided resolutions over the decades, the Arabs and their supporters aim to weaken the state of Israel diplomatically. They also mean to rob Israel and the Jewish people of any moral authority and legitimacy.
So long as we remind ourselves of the absurdity of the United Nations convening an anti-racism conference in Iran while banning Jews from attending, we can put the next round of anti-Israel U.N. resolutions in their proper context.
A big part of winning any battle or cause is believing in the righteousness of one’s own cause. This latest U.N. travesty reminds us which party suffers from a moral deficit. More important, it reminds us that Israel’s cause is just, even when the entire world seems to stand in opposition to Israeli and Jewish concerns.
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