Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Inadvertent flackery: Promoting Ahmadinejad
The New York Times, in editorializing against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's crazy and vile assault on Israel at the United Nations conference on racism, argues, typically, that the solution is to increase the size of the audience for the hatefest.
The fear all along has been that the United Nations conference on racism would be manipulated into yet another forum for demonizing Israel. All too predictably, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who has called the Holocaust a myth and has advocated Israel’s destruction — did just that....
We commend France and other European nations for walking out in protest....
[Bunch of qualified moralizing about Israel to establish lefty bona fides, as if that were necessary.]
The last United Nations conference on racism — in 2001 — deteriorated into an Israel-bashing spectacle. Israel was the only country singled out in the final conference communiqué. Many participants, including the Russians, worked hard to try to ensure that this year’s meeting would be different. While there have been improvements in the communiqué, as now written, it would affirm the conclusions of the last one, implicitly still singling out Israel.
The United Nations conference can never have credibility, or value, if it is used to attack one country — Israel — especially when so many other countries have truly abysmal human rights records, including China, Sudan and Iran.
After weighing the issue, President Obama decided not to send an American delegation to the conference. Perhaps it would have been better if his administration had been present to fight for an improved communiqué until the end. Ceding the podium to Mr. Ahmadinejad and his ilk is not the most effective strategy — for defending Israel or for promoting human rights. (emphasis added)
Why not cede the podium, and the entire forum, to the dirtbags? If the only countries to show up to this circus were clown regimes, then it would become like any other gathering of African or Arab thugs, nobody would care what was said, and there would be very little media coverage of it. The real, respectable countries that showed up and then walked out amplified Ahmadinejad's message and lent it credibility all over the world. The Europeans once again made the Iranian president look like an anti-colonialist leader of the oppressed, which in turn increases his reputation among the self-styled victims in the world. Why not ignore the spectacle completely? How many media organizations would even show up without the possibility of the serious countries storming out in outrage?
One gets the sense that only objection to boycotting the Durban freakshow is that it would implicitly validate a policy of the Bush administration that transnationals reflexively condemned when it was fashionable to do.
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Apr 21, 09:48:00 AM:
Wasn't there recently expressed on these pages a hope the Times would find a way to save itself? It's dying. Sadder than sad, but when it's over the next newspaper to rise up will not make these mistakes. We need a press, indenpendent of the Democrat party, to moniter our government and expose miscreants. There's an opportunity out there for someone to sell a lot of newspapers with screaming headlines. Maybe an English paper like the Globe and Mail or the Telegraph will branch out into New York!
