Michael Jordan of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has an interesting piece today about the hesitance of the UN High Commissioner’s Office to actually name the groups behind the campaign to marginalize the Durban Review Conference. Jordan writes:

It’s no secret who was behind the effort to discredit the 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva.

For nearly a year before the anti-racism confab, Jewish and pro-Israel groups lobbied hard to get Western countries to boycott the gathering, which they said was certain to treat Israel unfairly, just as the first Durban conference had done in 2001.

But why, when pressed, do UN officials give such vague answers?

This time, however, the Jews actually did conspire, albeit openly, to sabotage the conference.

…But for the most part, Durban II’s organizers and participants did not want to point the finger at the Jews for the anti-Durban effort for fear of being labeled anti-Semites.

“I can’t tell you exactly who the lobby is,” Pillay said in a March 12 interview with Australia’s ABC.net. “I can just pick out that it seems to be one source putting out this wrong information and labeling this review conference as ‘hate fest.’ ”

In an earlier piece, Jordan reports a story that illustrates exactly the impossible dynamic faced by the UN office, and how, like a powerless female character in a film who threatens to yell ‘rape’ if someone gets too close, some Jewish groups are only too happy to cry ‘anti-Semite’ if you get too close. In some ways, its the nuclear option for powerless people. (Worse, as I have amply documented, these Jewish/Israel lobby groups sponsored a range of sessions demonizing and attacking the UN, Arabs, Muslims, Iran and Palestinians, all with Orwellian titles about fighting bigotry and anti-Semitism.)

The head of an official NGO alliance at the UN told me groups have an agreement not to protest inside of the United Nations, and that if they do, it is standard practice to revoke the group’s accreditation. When the UN tried to do just that to the European Union of Jewish Students, which disrupted the conference at various moments, the chair boasted that one threat to send out a press statement made all the difference:

Another student group, the European Union of Jewish Students, had learned April 21 that its accreditation was pulled after some members had yelled insults at Ahmadinejad from the gallery.

But the EUJS, which also has formal, permanent accreditation to the United Nations, protested that the entire group shouldn’t be punished for the actions of a few. EUJS Chairman Jonas Karpantschof said he told U.N. officials he would issue a news release if the accreditation weren’t reinstated, and it soon was.

“It would have looked really bad,” he said, “for the U.N. to take away badges from Jewish students on Yom Hashoah at an anti-racism conference.”

Jordan himself feeds the dynamic in the same article, called “Malcolm X’s daughter: ‘Zionist agitators’ bothered at Durban II. The article comes complete with an angry looking photo of Malaak Shabazz, who complained about ““Zionist agitators” at one event who were ” juvenile, nasty and aggressive.” In fact, friends from Canada’s Independent Jewish Voices were in the room when the students were acting in threatening ways and stuck a camera right in Shabazz’s face.  One can only assume that as Malcolm X’s daughter, an “angry black Muslim woman”, she was right out of central casting for a depiction of the scary, anti-Semitic, mean Durban Review delegates.

I went to an Israel rally where the audience was exhorted to yell, “I am a Zionist” half a dozen times. But Shabazz, who was literally right when she called these young students “Zionist agitators”, is now part of the massive anti-Jewish hate-fest because she used the phrase.

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