Durban III - Canada's Initiative

"Canada will not participate in this charade any longer. We will not lend our country's good name to what has widely been characterized - indeed across party lines here - as a hatefest." Statement by Canada's Minister of Immigration, Jason Kenney

Canada has no illusions left in a United Nations-led process whose purpose was stated as the need to combat racism, but which ultimately degenerated into a tainted process that led to the condemnation of a democratic liberal state, whose founders, steeped in a history of persecution led them to the conclusion that only such a state established for the distinct purpose of providing a safe haven for Jews would save them from potential annihilation.

Zionist-centred Israel is now a country whose existence relates to a Jewish homeland. Any Jew, living anywhere in the world, is free to 'return' to their historical roots in the Middle East, to become a citizen of Israel. Yet Israel is also a country dedicated to human rights, extending those freedoms and protections to all its citizens equally. A quarter of whom are not of Jewish origin, comprised of Arabs, Kurds, Christians and Muslims.

Despite which its enemies, and they continue to be legion, have no problems equating its establishment as a homeland for world Jewry with discriminatory apartheid. And since, from its very creation as a distinct, sovereign and singular state, it has met with violent resistance to its presence by all of its neighbours, it has never been able to relax its vigilance, to safeguard its existence.

While the many wars that Israel's Arab neighbours waged against it unsuccessfully proved the country could and would defend itself, the enmity its presence in the Middle East has engendered has never been lifted. The large and influential Arab and Muslim political bloc within the United Nations, supported by countries chiefly in Africa and Latin America has ensured that Israel has never been anything but an uneasy fit in the UN.

A reflection of which is the hugely disproportionate number of censuring votes against Israel that have emanated from the United Nations.

A process and procedure that culminated in the UN's formation of its Jew-venomous Human Rights Commission, and in its series of anti-racism conferences which focused singly upon Israel as representing a genocidal, human-rights-abusing state, accused as such by those very countries of the world whose records on human rights were horribly blemished.

"We obviously continue to believe in the United Nations as an important multilateral forum. But we are able to make basic distinctions between good and bad." Jason Kenney

Canada will remain involved in those aspects of the United Nation's activities that have a sound purpose for the common global good. Such as the World Food Program, UNICEF, and offering safe haven to the countless ethnic, displaced migrants of the world, living in UN refugee camps. Many of them refugees from the very Arab, African and Muslim countries that sit in implacable censure of Israel.

But Canada, once again leading the way, has announced its resolve to have nothing whatever to do with a reprise of the original World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, ten years ago. A conference spear-headed by the most malignant human-rights-abusing countries of the world whose agenda was simply to isolate one country alone.

In which process that one country - Israel - was held up for display as the one country whose existence and place on the world stage, and policies and politics and social structure exemplified racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, neatly fitting into the raison d'etre of the conference, giving it meaning, and a reason for jubilant exultation that it had exposed Israel to the censure that the censuring countries themselves deserved.

That Canada's official decision to withdraw its presence from the atrocious proceedings posing as a legitimate venue in support of human rights goes across party lines in support of Israel and denial of the hate-fest that the conference represents, demonstrates aptly the moral fibre of the current government, reflecting admirably on Canadian-held values.