Editorial: Racism talks lure extremists

Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2001 | 9:43 a.m.

The United States government did the right thing Monday when it ordered home its delegation from a United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa. The conference has been tarnished by hateful language heaped on Israel. Palestinians and their supporters want to equate Zionism with racism, incorporating such offensive language into the meeting's draft declaration and other documents.

Pulling out of the conference wasn't something that the United States took lightly. "I have taken this decision with regret because of the importance of the international fight against racism and the contribution that this conference could have made to it," Secretary of State Colin Powell said. A Palestinian official said that the United States was using Israel as an excuse to not deal with other tough issues, including attempts to obtain slavery reparations. But it would have been unconscionable for the United States to attend such a meeting that had nothing but hate for Israel, a nation that has been trying to live peaceably all the while under terrorist attacks.

There is no getting around it: The environment at the meeting in Durban is ugly and has included the distribution of scurrilous anti-Semitic literature by pro-Palestinian supporters. And as Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Andrew Maykuth noted in a Tuesday dispatch from Durban, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe also has jumped on the anti-Israel bandwagon. "Jews in South Africa, working in cahoots with their colleagues here, want our textile and clothing factories ... to close down," Mugabe said. Mugabe's comments are despicable enough on their own, but he and the delegates to the racism conference have reached new heights of hypocrisy: Zimbabwe has led a violent drive to evict whites from their farms, something that the U.N. conference hasn't seen to fit to criticize.

The conference's extremist delegates threaten to turn this into something that resembles a racist skinhead gathering instead of a conference to address the evils of racism. The United States shouldn't give its blessing to a meeting that engages in the very practice that it suggests it wants to wipe out: racism.