by Felix Quigley
April 20, 2009]
The United Nations is now running an antisemitic conference in Geneva and a group of courageous Jewish students has protested from within the conference itself. The following is the Guardian report which deals with some of the issues involved in this courageous and unprecedented protest which has taken the whole UN Establishment by total surprize.
[Begin Guardian report here]
from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/20/un-conference-boycott-ahmadinejad
Dozens of diplomats, including Britain’s UN ambassador in Geneva, walked out of a speech by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this afternoon when the Iranian president accused Israel of being “a totally racist” regime.
The address at a UN conference on racism in Geneva was disrupted by protesters who heckled Ahmadinejad after he branded Israel a “cruel and oppressive racist regime”. He said the state of Israel was created “on the pretext of Jewish suffering” from the second world war.
Peter Gooderham, the UK ambassador to the UN in Geneva, walked out along with representatives from France, Spain and several other European countries. One shook his fist at the Iranian president as he left. The delegates said they planned to return to the session as soon as Ahmadinejad had finished speaking.
(Let there be no confusion here. Brown and the British Labourists are in favour of this antisemitic UN Conference, it is just that they want to save some face by walking out on Obama. This is typical British Labourist antisemitism. The correct thing to do was to stay totally clear of this conference. Ahmadinejad is not the only antisemite here. What happens when groups such as Human Rights Watch begin to speak and to operate their brand of antisemitism)
European countries had been split over whether to attend amid fears Ahmadinejad and other delegates could ignite a new row over the Holocaust or Israel’s right to exist.
Germany, Poland and the Netherlands were joining a boycott led by the US and Israel. France and Britain attended but promised to walk out of the conference if offensive language was used at the podium.
The protesters leapt to their feet and shouted “racist” in French at Ahmadinejad when he made his remarks about the state of Israel.
Some wore clown wigs and one, who was positioned among the delegates, managed to run to within 10 yards of the Iranian president before throwing a soft red object, hitting the podium and interrupting his speech. The protester was ushered out by security.
The protesters said they represented the Union of Jewish Students in France. “We did it because it’s all a farce,” Joelle Jakubowicz said. “You can’t fight racism if you are racist yourself.”
France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, speaking before Ahmadinejad’s speech, said “we will not tolerate any blunder or provocation” from Ahmadinejad, who has referred to the Holocaust as a myth and called for Israel to be “wiped off the pages of history”.
If Ahmadinejad “proffers any racist or antisemitic accusations we will leave the hall immediately”, Kouchner said.
(The position of Kouchner is to be welcomed but of course if he really was in support of Jews against antisemitism he would not be present in the conference at all)
The Iranian president, the only head of state at the conference, is due to give a press conference today, which coincides with the start of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Foreign Office said in a statement, also released before the speech: “The United Kingdom has argued strongly for the concluding document to contain adequate language on Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism. We will find unacceptable any attempt to use the Durban process to trivialise or deny the Holocaust, or to renegotiate agreements on the fight against antisemitism.”
(This is rank hypocricy from the British antisemites. They should not be present at all)
A flurry of late-night telephone calls between European foreign ministries failed to salvage what British officials hoped would be a common European position, amid growing unease about what Ahmadinejad would say and fears that a draft text from the UN anti-racism conference would single out Israel and call for bans on the freedom to express criticism of religion.
(It is obvious what has happened. The British want the antisemitism to go ahead but somehow they want to sanatize Ahmadinejad. Wrong option! Cannot be done! The whole UN conference is a stinking cesspit of antisemitism)
Israel today announced it was recalling its ambassador to Switzerland for consultations. Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said that while Israel would be commemorating 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis, “in Switzerland the guest of honour is a racist and a Holocaust denier who doesn’t conceal his intention to wipe Israel off the face of this Earth”.
The US said on Saturday that it would not be attending today’s UN conference because of what Washington said was “objectionable” language in a draft statement. The Geneva meeting is known as the Durban Review Conference because it is intended to follow up a world conference against racism held in the South African city eight years ago, when the US and Israel walked out in anger at attempts to equate Zionism with racism.
(The position of Obama is the most interesting. Obama is an enemy of Israel and is an antisemite without any shadow of a douubt. The whole orientation of the US Government and ruling elite is to join forces with Islam against the demands of workers who do not wish to be driven into barbaric poverty by the crisis in capitalism. Antisemitism is the tool of the US elite in this period. What applies to Britain applies even more to these US bigots. Obama fears the American people will see that he is pro Islam and pro Muslim, may even be a Muslim himself, and above all hates Israel. That is the only reason the US is not at the conference since they have been there from the beginning of the preparations for the conference)
One person not boycotting the conference was the film star Jon Voight, a staunch supporter of Israel who said he had come to confront Ahmadinejad’s position on the Holocaust. Voight told the Guardian: “The fox is in charge of the hen house here. This is supposed to be about human rights, but hidden under that banner is antisemitism. Someone has to respond to it.”
(Voight is a stupid idiot. Pay no attention to what this stupido says or thinks. He is an insult to the courageous Jewish students seen here. Voight you are a complete fool!)
The draft statement for this week’s conference does not single out Israel but formally upholds the 2001 declaration, which does. The UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said she was “shocked and deeply disappointed” by the US boycott. On the Guardian’s Comment is Free website today, Pillay concedes that the 2001 meeting has been “tainted by the antisemitic behaviour of some NGOs on the sidelines”, but she argues that the best way to tackle such issues is to participate in this week’s meeting.
(Wrong Pillay. And you will be forever marked as an enemy of Israel for organizing this conference and giving the likes of Ahmadinejad a platform to spew out his racist Nazi filth)
That position was echoed today by Human Rights Watch. Juliette de Rivero, the group’s Geneva advocacy director, said: “The sad truth is that countries professing to want to avoid a reprise of the contentious 2001 racism conference are now the ones triggering the collapse of a global consensus on the fight against racism.”
(Human Rights Watch, aka the US nazi CIA front organization, must be thoroughly exposed)
British officials say the current draft text is acceptable if “adequate language” is included on the Holocaust and antisemitism, but they are also anxious to retain European solidarity.
(British officials are antisemites)
Ahmadinejad’s speech and press conference will be carefully scrutinised for his tone towards the US after Barack Obama’s recent overtures to Tehran.
(This and the following paragraph is total bullshit. The fact is that the US Government is the friend of the Iranian Fascist Mullahs. They certainly were close friends int he war to destroy Yugoslavia. The US and the British are stirring up antisemitism in the world in order to hold on to the reins of power)
The Iranian president has ruled out compromise on Iran’s nuclear programme, but has occasionally raised hopes of a thaw in US-Iranian relations, as he did yesterday when he insisted that an Iranian-American journalist, sentenced by an Iranian court to eight years in prison on espionage charges, should be guaranteed the full right to defend herself in her appeal. The Iranian government today urged Obama not to comment on the case.
(This is interesting. I think the Iranian Fascists are in crisis because they now are beginning to realize that Israel has the power, expertise and under Netanyahu the discipline and determination to pulverize their evil Nuclear programme. If you doubt it is evil then listen to Ahmadinejad. The man is obsessed with Jews and with Israel, which he calls usually Zionists, same thing actually. So he is beginning like the cowardly rat he is to snuggle up OPENLY to the US Imperialists, to Obama in particular. The great fear now of Ahmadinejad is that he is beginning to sense that this time Israel will break from the US Nazis of Obama and Bush and will fight alone to defend themselves)
So to conclude. What these Jewish students have done is just wonderful, better than a million words.
The US and British political elite who have worked together leading and preparing this conference are exposed as the friends of Ahmadinejad.
There is now not only a growing antisemitic movement but also a growing struggle against antisemitism.
Things are only beginning to move. What lies behind much of this is the total bankruptcy of the capitalist economic system and the needs of US and British Imperialism to move to new forms of rule where they will work alongside the Nazi Islamist Fascists to create dictatorships. Somewhere in there, in their scheme of things, rests their promotion of antisemitism.
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