Next week, Geneva, Switzerland, will host the U.N's Durban II Anti-Racist Conference. It begins on April 20th, ironically the birthdate of Adolf Hitler.
Students of history see an eerie parallel between the anti-Semitism that stalked the world during Hitler's era and the kind of anti-Semitism rising in the world today.
This conference is a case in point. One of the honored speakers will be Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the destruction of Israel.
Furthermore, Russia will help draft the text of the resolution presented to the conference, while Libya is the chair and Iran the vice chair of the event.
Tomas Sandell, director of the European Coalition for Israel, wrote the following op-ed on the situation. I think you might appreciate his perspective.
Two cities - two tales. How will history judge Geneva 2009?
It is less than three quarter of an hour by car from the city of Geneva and its much smaller sister city Evian-les-Bains on the French side of Lake Geneva. What Evian lacks in size and political importance it makes up in history and style. This rather sleepy, but healthy, resort town at the foot of the Alps can boast with one the grandest fin-de-siècle resort hotels of its kind as well as with the bottled water which bears its name. But Evian has a less friendly side which has left its mark in history. Simply google "Evian" and you come up with a resort, a water and a conference which by some historians has been called "Hitler's green light for genocide". Last year marked the 70th anniversary of the Evian conference on the future of the Jewish refugees but it was effectively forgotten as the host country France at the time chaired the European Union. As President Sarkozy hosted the conference which was to launch a new era of cooperation around the Mediterranean Sea the last thing that Elyssé wanted to be reminded about was Evian 1938. You cannot blame them. Evian goes down in history as one of the darkest chapters of modern European history when appeasement was the mode of the day and anyone who did not believe in "peace in our time" was simply disregarded as a warmonger.
It is not only the proximity between the two cities which is striking but also the zeitgeist of Evian 1938 and this year's United Nations Conference against Racism. Whereas the original UN conference against Racism in Durban in 2001 spiraled out of control with its obsession with the "Judenfrage" there are no guarantees that this year will not be a repeat. Western governments have been paying lip service to their commitment to withdraw from anything that would resemble the hate fest in 2001 but words will be cheap when the commitment of the Western nations to stand true to our universal values is to be tested shortly.
Back to Evian in 1938. As Hitler had annexed Austria and hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees were seeking a safe haven outside of the Nazi controlled areas the free world knew that something had to be done. It was the US president Franklin Roosevelt who finally called together the conference with the objective to seek a solution to the Jewish refugee problem. 32 nations were invited to participate. It soon became clear that the conference was not going to solve anything after one country after another explained that they all agreed that this was a major humanitarian problem which needed to be solved but that their respective country could not do anything about it. Others were less diplomatically skilled.
"Our country is simply not big enough to receive any Jewish refugees", said the Canadian representative. When asked how many refugees Canada could receive the answer was; "none is too many."
"Australia has no racial problem and we are not desirous of importing one", is a quote which today is on display in the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The list of obscenities does not stop there. A proposal to rescue the refugees by simply letting ten countries receive 25 000 Jews each was flatly rejected. While these tragic decisions were made, which would ultimately have consequences for millions of Jews, some historians note that pleasure cruises on Lake of Geneva were very popular among the delegates as were tennis and golf in the fresh mountain air.
Perhaps it is again the allure of cosmopolitan Geneva and the same mountain climate which makes it so difficult for Western diplomats to simply say no to the UN conference which singles out only one country, namely Israel, as the racist state of the world and calls its policies "apartheid". What makes this conclusion even more surreal is the fact that the working group, which has been drafting the text, consists of human rights champions such as Libya, Iran and Cuba. The language in the draft resolution has been unacceptable for many still the decision to withdraw seems difficult to make. At the moment only a few governments besides Israel has decided to boycott the conference, namely Canada and Italy. The new US administration has said that it will not participate if the resolution text is not radically changed.
One thing is clear. The UN conference in Geneva, which takes place from 20-24 April, will not be a friendly place for any of us who sympathize with the Jewish cause. But things could be worse. In 1938 the world was said to be divided up in two categories, those nations which Jews could not enter and those which wanted to expel them. The promised Jewish homeland was not even considered as an option for resettlement since it was believed to create more tension in then British mandate of Palestine. A few years later there would be six million Jews less to accommodate but then, finally, the urgency of creating a Jewish homeland was realized by the world community. But the prize to pay was far too high.
It is of course the irony of time that a conference dedicating itself to fighting racism, the very disease which lead to Hitler's Holocaust, is currently paving the way for a legitimizing of Jew hatred and Israel bashing around the world. This comes at a time when anti-Semitic violence in Europe has hit its highest level since the Second World War. If we would only be better students of history we would blow the trumpet in time. Some are doing it but for most parts they are ignored.
But why curse the darkness if you can simply light a candle? On the second day of the UN Conference, Tuesday 21 April, which also happens to be Holocaust Remembrance Day, a small commemoration event will be held in the small synagogue in the city which hosted the conference in 1938 which would turn out to have such a detrimental ramification for World Jewry and the world at large. Also then the fate of the world was in the hands of a few good people in the free and democratic nations, those who could say no to tyranny and totalitarianism while there was still time. They failed.
Let us hope that the world will have learned its lesson this time. When a people group and their nation state are singled out as the only racist perpetrator in the world we are awfully near to Evian 1938.
To learn more about the European Coalition for Israel, visit their Web site at www.ec4i.org