From the Canadian Press
Minister Jason Kenney says Canada will not attend a UN conference on racism next September because the event will be a “charade” and a “hatefest.”The conference, dubbed “Durban III,” is intended to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2001 meeting in South Africa aimed at defeating racism.
Canada and several other countries walked out of that meeting after Iran and several other countries began ganging up on Israel.
Canada was the first country to withdraw from Durban II last year in Geneva.
Kenney says the UN General Assembly has chosen to “repeat and even augment the mistakes of the past” by holding a commemorative meeting in New York next year.
He says the government has lost faith in the process and Canada “will not lend our good name to this Durban hatefest.”
Kenney says Canada is clearly committed to the fight against racism, but he says the Durban process “commemorates an agenda that actually promotes racism rather than combats it.”
Despite legitimate issues I’ve had with the Conservative Party of Canada’s direction on fiscal issues and domestic policy, one area where Stephen Harper’s administration has never wavered is on pragmatic foreign policy and support for Israel. The latest decision by the government to refuse to acknowledge a special United Nations panel on d**k-all (“ending racism”) and, as such, refuse to take part in it, really shows the fact that they haven’t sold out.
The point is never to blindly defend a particular country, but rather to acknowledge when a country is being unfairly treated as Israel constantly is. The only thing the United Nations has ever done right in the Middle East is giving Israel back to the Jews like it belonged. Since then, the U.N. has been an anti-Semitic global orgy.
Prime Minister, please do more stuff like this.
