The U.N. Conference: The Elders of Durban.(Brief Article)

The United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance-to give it the full Ciceronian drumroll-was a strangely peg-legged affair. The delegates strode into Durban, South Africa, intending to address the world- historical consequences of the African slave trade, but the whalebone thumper, clanking like mad old Ahab on the quarterdeck, was the attack on Israel as a "racist, apartheid state."

Yet the two seemingly ill-matched limbs actually go well together. The Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades were great evils. But they ended more than a century ago, thanks largely to the British fleet. The United States fought the Civil War, Brazil emancipated peacefully, and Zanzibar was made into a protectorate, ending slavery itself in its last civilized redoubts. The only places it flourishes now are in African holes such as Mauritania and Sudan, or in the kitchens and boudoirs of Arabia, staffed by wretched Filipinas. To pursue claims of damages at this date would be as wrongheaded as it is futile. The only purpose of ginning up a ruckus over slavery at Durban is to shake down money from guilty white donors-Euros who might give to Africa; Americans who might ...