Sooner or later President Obama would have to face the dilemma that every American president since Harry Truman has had to face. That's the Israel dilemma. It came soon for him when a group of hard bitten Israel foes plopped the ritual Zionism is racism plank into a draft resolution of the UN World Conference Against Racism scheduled for Geneva in April. Obama flatly told the conference planners to drop the Israel bash, or the U.S. will stay home. Obama really doesn't want to stay home, nor should he. The anti-Israel rhetoric should and probably will be dropped, as well as the other foolish language in the resolution that claims that Muslims are the prime, really exclusive, target of global racial and religious discrimination.
The 20 nations that felt the need to put the anti-Israel language in the resolution and narrowly define discrimination as Islamphobia can't be challenged in absentia. Obama should make it clear to them that the United States will aggressively put its money, muscle, and political clout behind an all out war against racism, repression, genocide, state sponsored ethnic war and cleansing in every part of the globe. That's all state or group sponsored racial and human rights abuses, including the abuses by some of the ones that are pushing the anti-Israel talk.
An Obama conference boycott will repeat the same blunder that former President Bush made in 2001 when he skipped out of the UN Racism Conference in Durban, South Africa. An objectionable anti-Israel resolution by the same bunch of Israel foes gave Bush the out he was looking for to ditch the conference.
An anguished Secretary of State Colin Powell thought the decision to bail out was a mistake, and that the U.S. should and could do more good by being there and battling against the extremists and along the way prove that it did take the fight against global racism seriously.
Powell understood what his boss and the handful of pig-headed delegates -- bound and determined to use the conference as a bully-pulpit against Israel -- either forgot or don't give a hang about. The conference was supposed to draw up a battle plan to combat racism wherever it reared its ugly head in the world. The bitter truth is that there are few countries with clean racial hands, and that includes the U.S.
In the provisional agenda the UN Racism conference drew up in 1997 it called for nations to identify victims of discrimination, develop prevention, education, and protection measures, and provide long term strategies to bolster national and international efforts to combat discrimination. The obsessive focus on Israel, it's still the only country that's specifically singled out for its alleged repressive policies, keeps getting in the way of making any real headway on that agenda. The disputed resolution equating Zionism with racism passed in 1975 by a deeply divided U.N. was vague and ill-defined and had no force of law.
It did nothing to alleviate Palestinian suffering. Instead, it made Israel dig its heels in deeper and refuse more concessions on Palestinian rights. The U.N., with the consent of Arab nations and the Palestinians, wised up to the blunder and overwhelmingly voted to dump the resolution in 1991. But it still keeps cropping up in one form or another as a distraction. The Geneva conference is the latest example.
By its one track focus on Israel, the big danger is that the conference will again give short shrift to the ethnic warfare that still rages in the Sri Lanka, caste oppression in India, the plight of the Kurds in Turkey and other Mid East countries, skinhead violence in Germany and Britain, the continuing theft of Indian lands in Brazil, Mexico, and Guatemala, and the genocidal ethnic attacks in Congo. The Geneva conference should demand that Canada and Australia do even more to right the historic wrongs against Indians and Aborigines. It should call on the carpet those corrupt African and Asian dictatorial regimes that elevate violence and terror to state policy against dissidents, many of whom are invariably of different ethnic groups.
Obama should use the Geneva conference as a bully pulpit to press European nations, Japan, and Canada to agree to speed up debt relief, vastly increasing funds for AIDS treatment and prevention programs, pouring more aid into development programs, and negotiating more equitable trade pacts with non-white nations. And not simply shelling out billions to individuals is the best way to repair the damage wreaked by slavery and colonialism.
The UN Racism Conference organizers put years of sweat into bringing white and non-white nations together to figure out a way to put teeth into the struggle against global racism. The stakes are too great to let anti-Israel tunnel vision afflicted delegates flush that effort down the drain. The U.S. should be at the conference to make sure that doesn't happen. Obama's dilemma is how to do that.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).