Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: A conference of racists

Thursday, Sept. 6, 2001 | 9:16 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

RECENT DISCUSSIONS ABOUT the United Nations conference on racism has included the desire of Arab nations wanting to again label Zionism as being racist. Of course, they were able to get this charge approved by the U.N. in 1975 and it wasn't removed until 1991. A wiser United States wouldn't play their game this year and Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to attend the U.N.-sponsored conference in Durban, South Africa. Later he withdrew even a lower-level U.S. delegation in attendance.

I have often wondered why several Arab nations haven't been branded as being guilty of racism. Time and time again I have had Israelis tell me about leaving all of their homes and businesses behind when escaping from Arab countries. More than 800,000 Jews went to Israel as refugees from countries like Egypt, Iraq and Syria.

Ten years ago, when helping the Kurds in northern Iraq hold an election, I made note that even a small Christian political party was on the ballot. This made me wonder why I couldn't find one Jew in that area of Iraq. The answer was, they were either in Israel or some other country to which they had fled. Ramat Gan, a large city next to Tel Aviv, has a mayor and more than half of its population made up of Iraqi Jews.

Large numbers of my Israeli friends and associates speak both Arabic and Hebrew. Some of their parents, who had roots going back 2,000 years in other nations, still speak better Arabic than Hebrew. They were expelled from their homeland and left with nothing more than a suitcase and their children. When arriving in Israel they went to work and turned the desert into productive farms and small towns with good schools. They built their homes and a nation.

Joseph Farah, who writes a column called "From Arab America," expressed his own view of racism in the Middle East when telling readers:

"If you want to understand what real racism is, the question needs to be turned around 180 degrees. What do Israel's enemies want? Over and over again, we hear, from their own mouths, that they want to destroy the Jewish state and replace it with an Arab state. 'Palestine -- from the sea to the river' is the favorite expression of this movement. In other words, there is no room for a Jewish state in the Middle East no matter what the borders are, no matter what concessions Jerusalem is willing to consider, no matter what rights Arabs are granted within Israel.

"Isn't that racist? In other words, the conflict in the Middle East between Jews and Arabs -- at least from the Arab point of view -- is not about what kind of government should represent the people who live there. It is about what kind of people should live there. That has never been Israel's perspective. The Arabs who live in Israel today enjoy more human and civil rights than their neighbors do in any Arab Country."

My experience in the Middle East gives me good reason to support Farah's view. If the U.N. wants a conference to discuss racism it can start with several Middle East countries and extend the discussions all the way south to Zimbabwe where President Robert Mugabe rules.

The Wall Street Journal reports, "Thousands of militants loyal to Mugabe have illegally and often violently occupied more than 1,700 white-owned farms since March 2000, spurred by a government campaign to seize 4,600 white farms and redistribute the land to poor blacks. The government, which says it is trying to remove the last vestiges of white colonialism from the country, has ignored rulings by the judiciary to end the occupations. It has supported attacks against judges, critical journalists and opposition politicians who are threatening Mr. Mugabe's hold on power for the first time in 21 years." Oh yeah, there are more than enough places for the U.N. to find brazen racism. The Jews settling in Israel doesn't happen to be one of them.