(With apologies to James Burnham)

Only a few hundred miles from the African people's paradise of Zimbabwe, where the head of state, Dr. Robert Mugabe, has just announced that all white farmers must get out or be killed, there sits the lovely metropolis of Durban in the equally paradisiacal land of the new South Africa. In the coming days, Durban will be the location of yet another United Nations gabfest on the world's most urgent problems—this time on the unpleasant subject of "Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance." It tells you all you need to know about the conference that the threat of ethnic cleansing and genocide against white people in Zimbabwe will barely register on the conference's agenda.

The only reason anyone has paid any attention at all to the Durban meeting is the question of whether the United States would attend it, and of course Secretary of State Colin Powell says he won't and only a low-level munchkin will go in his place.

The only reason the United States offers for its lack of attendance has to do with the threat of various Arab states to sponsor a resolution suggesting that the state of Israel is "racist." "We will not have a representative there," declared President Bush last week, "so long as they pick on Israel." Whether the conference "picks on" other states, including the one Mr. Bush purports to lead, because of their own supposed involvement in "Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance" apparently is pretty much irrelevant. So, for that matter, is the very real and very murderous "Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance" in neighboring Zimbabwe that both the United States and the Durban conference are ignoring.

Originally, the United States and various other Western states took a dim view of the Durban conference because it was expected to push for a resolution demanding "reparations" for Western countries' involvement in slavery, imperialism and other wickednesses that only the West has ever been involved in. Yet, as the conference approached and Zionist organizations in this country and throughout the world began to yelp, "picking on Israel" seemed to displace every other concern. By the time the conference actually opened, virtually no one bothered to mention the subject of slavery, etc.

Indeed, one reason no one bothered to mention it is that the conference, under U.S. leadership, has worked out language that virtually does apologize for slavery. The language expresses "deep regret and profound remorse" for the institution of slavery and the slave trade on the part of the United States and Western nations, and that apparently is satisfactory to the Africans. It ought to be, since it also apparently makes no mention whatsoever of the paramount role that Africans themselves played in the mass kidnapping and trafficking of their own people to Western slave traders. So, for that matter, did the Arabs, not to mention no small number of Jewish slave traders, but no one seems to be interested in demanding apologies or reparations from either Arabs or Israelis for slavery.

While the business of avoiding and not mentioning such hot topics of "Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance," past and present, as non-Western involvement in slavery and the Zimbabwean project for white genocide seem to be the main entree on the Durban conference's plate, those atrocities of racial hate that will be discussed and undoubtedly condemned by all and sundry will include such crimes as the reluctance of some Western (European, U.S. and other white-majority) nations to allow Third World immigrants to enter their territories as they please.

And then there will be acres of jaw-muscle exercised about such flaming issues of social justice as white cops who pull over black drivers without good reason in South Dakota and how many non-whites are on Death Row in Texas. You can probably make a safe bet that no one will spend too much time or energy discussing why blacks commit so much more violent crime in the United States (much of it against whites) or the degree to which non-whites in white majority countries are developing explicitly racial forms of group identity that exclude and stigmatize whites.

What happens and what will not happen at the Durban conference in the coming week is therefore not especially surprising; the whole extravaganza will offer little more than what are by now routine denunciations of the white West for most of its historic achievements and equally routine exonerations of the non-white West as the perpetual victim of whites. It is entirely right that the United States stay as far away from Durban as it can get; what is pathetic is that the Bush administration is staying away for only a small part of the right reason.

COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

August 30, 2001