Differences Must Be Tolerated

Germany’s refusal to participate in the United Nations conference on anti-racism is wrong. There’s more to the conference than meets the eye.

The reasons Germany is using to justify its boycott of the anti-racism conference in Geneva are quickly enumerated and at least somewhat illuminating. Of course there’s a danger that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad will use the forum to repeat his nonsensical “Holocaust myth” idea. And representatives of some Islamic states undoubtedly will demand again that criticism of religions should be made illegal. Nevertheless, it’s wrong to boycott the conference as the U.S., Germany and other Western nations are doing.

The exhausting struggle required to produce a closing statement shows that disagreements between conferees is worth it: “The Holocaust can never be forgotten” is part of that now and will be presumably endorsed by Iran. The African states have abandoned the idea of compensation for slavery. Islamic nations have abandoned their demands that anyone slandering Islam must be punished.

Israel isn’t mentioned by name and, thereby, many of the “red lines” drawn by Western nations have been cleared up. If Germany uses that excuse to withdraw its participation at the last minute, that constitutes an affront to those nations whose citizens are subject to more global discrimination and racism than are the citizens of industrialized Western nations: those nations that attach more importance to an anti-racism conference than do Western nations, namely those of Africa and other developing regions.

More importantly, there will be strong suspicion that Germany made it easy on itself, because boycotting the conference means the German government will avoid that perilous cliff of having to listen to the Iranian President’s speech. How one gets around that has already been shown by the French delegation, which will walk out of the gathering if Ahmedinejad starts one of his hateful tirades.

It’s also unfair to conflate the parallel conference of non-governmental organizations (NGO) with that of the UN conference: In Durban, the NGO conference branded Zionism as racist, but the official UN conference did not. Continuing discussions of such points must be permitted.