Prominent South African lawyer and political activist Dumisa Ntsebeza launched a stinging attack on Israel on the first working day of the United Nations Conference on Combatting Racism, held this week in Sydney.
Ntsebeza, national publicity officer of the Black Lawyers Association, claimed: “We in South Africa find various analogies between the conduct of Israel and the South African government,” including “attacks on neighboring countries” and “massive removals of whole communities” to “make way for exclusively Jewish settlers.”
He alleged that “world concern with anti-Semitism” has shifted attention away from Israel’s record on human rights.
Ali Kazak, a Palestine Liberation Organization observer to the conference, said he supported the comments of “Brother Ntsebeza,” adding he found it “quite amazing how we can fight racism without challenging and facing Zionism.”
The PLO speaker said “guilt feelings toward Nazis’ victims” has meant that the West “tries to avoid facing the racism of Israelis.”
Israeli delegate Judith Karp attacked critics of Israel for their failure to make positive suggestions, given that “racism is in the backyard of each of us.”
She urged all states to work together to fight racism and not spend the conference sessions “pointing at specific countries.”
Karp went on to say that the conference must not ignore the linkage between racism and terrorism, both of which targeted individuals for their perceived relationship with identifiable groups.
The session also saw the Jordanian representative launch an impassioned attack on the role of the mass media in the United States in “using freedom of expression” to “negatively stereotype Arabs and Palestinians.”
Australian academic Stephen Castles, keynote speaker at the session on “Current Themes and Major Issues Regarding Racism and Racial Discrimination: National and International Perspectives,” responded, “It is difficult to take sides, but any social scientific study must accept that Israel is imposing racial policies on the minority — there is no other way of looking at it.”
The World Jewish Congress, as a non-government organization, raised concerns at the conference about the relentless persistence of racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism.
The conference was charged with drafting resolutions on racism to go before the U.N. Human Rights Conference, scheduled for June in Vienna.
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