WHY's own Peter Mann reports
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel quoted the menacing ending of Albert Camus' great novel The Plague in his keynote speech at the U.N. Conference on Monday, June 21, dealing with "Confronting Anti-Semitism: Education for Tolerance and Understanding." The plague had gone, Camus noted, but only for a time: it was waiting to return, to attack once more the happy city. This image resonated throughout the day as panels of writers, scholars and experts discussed the roots of anti-Semitism, and ways to reach mutual respect and understanding.
The image was particularly jolting, since the conference was called by the United Nations, founded after World War II under the terrible shadow of the Holocaust in which six million Jews perished as victims of anti-semitic hatred. The United Nations was created to ensure that such horrors would never happen again, yet U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged in his opening remarks that anti-Semitism had reentered the U.N., that many kinds of racism were condemned at U.N. meetings but rarely anti-Semitism, and he committed the U.N. to a program of confronting and combating anti-Semitism.
While recognizing the U.N. initiative and the Secretary-General's leadership, many speakers criticized U.N. policies, none more so than Anne Bayefsky, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, who described the present relations between the U.N. and Jews as at an "all-time low." In her view, the U.N. had used the language of human rights to demonize Israel, while ignoring human rights crimes in Rwanda, China and the Sudan. Other speakers condemned the practice of using criticism of Israel to justify anti-Semitism. This was a recurring theme of the day: the Middle East struggle between Israel and the Palestinians — and the ongoing Iraq War — had released and reinforced the demons of hatred.
It was a day of deep passions, of outrage and anger, but also of hope. Anti-Semitism has many roots — in religious differences, politics, and media including the Internet. We heard about education programs in world religions to teach mutual respect and the celebration of differences. Proposals were made for the U.N. Secretariat to place anti-Semitism at the center of human rights work, not at the margins as it is now, and to challenge member states which practice anti-Semitism. This conference was the first in a UN series on "Unlearning Intolerance."
A live webcast of the event was available at www.un.org/webcast. On the U.N.’s Cyberschoolbus Web site at www.cyberschoolbus.un.org, there is a general introduction to human rights for schools, including an in-depth focus on ethnic and racial discrimination.
Peter Mann is WHY's international coordinator
