Word: racism
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...There is nothing quite as unacceptable today as racism, and if individuals wriggle and squirm when confronting their own racist demons, today's nation-states are even more averse - not least because an honest reckoning with the past carries some uncomfortable political and legal implications in the present...
...Still, it's not something that any country can easily walk away from - not even a Bush administration that has made a habit of being the party pooper in international forums. There's a political cost, too, in being seen to duck a discussion of racism. Instead, the U.S. and some of its European allies are looking to make the menu more palatable. They want to expunge the two most controversial items: discussions of reparations for slavery and colonialism, and of Zionism as racism. Washington has warned that if those topics are still on the agenda come conference time...
...easy to come up with myriad reasons why compensation is a can of worms, and would distract the conference from the urgent tasks of remedying and combating racism and allied evils in the 21st century. At the same time, it's also easy to understand the ire of those in the developing world pushing for such a discussion. People robbed, murdered or forced into slavery by the Nazis have been paid compensation by a generation of Germans who had nothing to do with those crimes; why, many Africans and their supporters ask, should the descendants of slavery in the Americas...
...Zionism is racism" is different. It's something of a red herring, coming as it does a decade after the repeal of the U.N. resolution condemning the Jewish nationalist ideology that drove the creation of modern Israel. The issue has been revived for the racism conference in order to build diplomatic support for the plight of the Palestinians, and even a number of human rights groups fiercely critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians under occupation have warned that it's an inappropriate discussion that could derail the conference's objectives. Of course, that doesn't get Israel...
...Washington and the Europeans are certainly correct in insisting that the conference properly address its global mandate, rather than fixating on the issues of racism in Israeli-Palestinian relations at the expense of other issues. After all, the conference could just as easily spend a whole week discussing ethnic violence in Indonesia or the Balkans or Burundi or England, slavery in the Sudan or the rights of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. And too much focus on the Middle East might even help some governments keep their own skeletons out of the limelight...