'SUCH LANGUAGE IS UNACCEPTABLE AT A GLOBAL CONFERENCE AGAINST RACISM'
Hedy Fry, the Canadian secretary of state for multiculturalism and the status of women was responding to the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's refusal to refrain from criticising Israel, currently waging a war against the Palestinian people.
The United States' policy of ambushing conference delegates with the charge of anti-Semitism succeeded. Disguising themselves as the Jewish victims of prejudice - lifelong catholic Mary Robinson even protested that she was a Jew - Western leaders have succeeded in robbing their critics of the moral high ground, or at least in obscuring it from sight.
While British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks stormed out, protestors outside the conference tried to get their 'people's manifesto' in. Already destabilised by the United States' high profile brinkmanship in the run- up, the Durban conference has demonstrated that the issue of race provokes more heat than light. Race today is an issue so highly-charged, but equally ill-defined that a government minister can play the part of the outraged victim, while lecturing a nation under violent occupation that its protests are "totally unacceptable to Canada".
For the developed nations of the West, race has been a potentially explosive issue. As if to underline the problem, the Australian navy repelled hundreds of Afghan refugees forcing them to float miles offshore; Sympathising with the Australians, the British Government arrested 43 immigrants walking through the Channel Tunnel (whose owners, Eurotunnel have already spent three million sterling on security measures, as if it was their job to prevent people crossing the channel).
Forty-four years ago, third world nations challenged white supremacy directly at the Asian and African People's Conference in Bandung. But since then the unity of the oppressed nations has diminished, while the Western elite's learning curve over challenges to its power has steadily climbed. Western leaders know now that the best way to trump the challenge of anti-racism is to turn the charge against their critics. Though early accusations of 'inverse racism' against anti-colonial revolts sounded forced, the art of championing victims of racism against third world nations has been refined.
When European colonialists made a straightforward argument of white supremacy, the argument was at least clear. But today charges of discrimination, ethnic cleansing and even of holocausts are regularly laid against third world states - the better to obscure the West's own continuing record of domination.
Tragically, the West's critics were hopelessly wrong-footed by the manoeuvre of hiding American military domination behind the persecuted Jew. The Palestinians' attempts to insist that Israel's policy discriminates on racial grounds can be portrayed as little more than ethnic posturing because the struggle against US domination of the Arab World has ebbed, leaving the Palestinians to fight alone. Arab leaders endorse the Palestinian struggle while getting on with making their peace with the US.
-- James Heartfield