Word: racism
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That the U.S. is pulling out of a major international conference comes as no surprise these days. It's the reason offered for Secretary of State Colin Powell's boycott of the U.N. conference on racism that's cause for alarm - concern that Israel and its ideology, Zionism, would be subjected to harsh criticism at the conference. Or as President Bush put it last week, the delegates were going to be "picking on Israel...
...alone in its boycott, save for Israel, of course. A number of European countries actually share Washington's concern that an event designed to tackle racism and intolerance on a global scale is in danger of being dominated by the Mideast conflict, and they plan to resist efforts to give disproportionate attention to Israel and Zionism. Not that they will exempt Israel from legitimate criticism, but instead will insist that the focus remains global, and that there's an acknowledgement that culpability for racism is widely shared among the nations of both the industrialized and the developing world. Few governments...
...gesture is purely symbolic, and not nearly as important to Israel as the billions of dollars in U.S. financial support and weaponry it receives each year. But symbolic gestures do have meaning, and the meaning that most of the Arab world will take from the U.S. boycott of the racism conference is that Washington's interests are indistinguishable from Israel's. Right now, that's a rather dangerous message to be putting out there...
...Boycotting the racism conference simply reinforces a perception in the Arab world that support for the U.S. is support for Israel. And that's a perception that can threaten U.S. interests on everything from Iraq policy to investigations of Osama Bin Laden's terror operations. The perception of the U.S. as Israel's unconditional ally also raises the inclination among militant groups to target U.S. interests for revenge attacks. After Monday's assassination of PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa by Israeli helicopters, his group vowed to take revenge on U.S. as well as Israeli targets...
...Both racism and sexism are relevant because they may dictate this case. Still, in the days immediately following the rape charge, most news outlets didn't report the race of the accused. Some Western journalists did, but they didn't note that the accuser was almost certainly a kokujo and that the nightclub culture around the Okinawa bases is almost as segregated as the Jim Crow South. When off duty, most military personnel tend to congregate according to race. The clubs that black servicemen frequent are also kokujo haunts. Of course, for a kokujo to say she was there...