On the Right - Mare's-Nest in Durban.(United Nations World Conference on Racism)(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 4

The tangle in Durban reflects the centripetalization of problems and sorrows and dilemmas in faraway places when the U.N. comes to town.

The problem of U.S. involvement.

-In 1973, I was a delegate to the United Nations and wrote a book about my experiences there, remarking that the General Assembly had developed into the most concentrated font of anti-Semitism in the world.

-In 1975, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. defied the vote equating Zionism with racism by large histrionic gestures, but the vote carried, and wasn't diluted until years later; now it's up for reissuance.

-In 1977, philosopher/strategist James Burnham, writing in National Review, proposed that President Carter instruct his delegate to the United Nations to suspend voting on any motion by the General Assembly. The American representative, Burnham counseled, should continue to argue in the Assembly, to cajole, to wage diplomacy, to exhort. Just don't vote. Why? Because if you do vote, you become a constituent part of the plebiscitary mechanism. If the vote, Zionism equals racism, is passed 99 to 1, the lone dissenter has vested a greater authority in the vote than if it passed 99 to 0, the dissenter declining to participate in the vote. The administration's decision not to send the secretary of state to Durban was an attempt precisely to diminish the parliamentary leverage of the impending negative vote. The ensuing decision, to withdraw even our second-level representatives, reaffirmed that withdrawal from the scene, but only after clumsy footwork.

-The Israelis may not be vulnerable to the charge of racism, but are certainly vulnerable to the charge of apartheid. The aggressive maintenance of their settlements in the West Bank, which are the cause of suppurating collisions with the Palestinian world, such as it is, day after day, cannot be defended. They are arrant ventures in a ...