heroes who valiantly try to protect us, all of us

Definitely worth reading, from MuzzleWatch (which is a project of the Jewish Voice for Peace) at the Durban Conference
Gay Muslim filmaker Parvez Sharma is my hero.

And these pithy paragraphs from the latest entry on the distrust the writer has for the reporting of the first Durban conference. She says:

I don’t doubt there was anti-Semitic literature and language at Durban I. But was it 90% of the conference, or .09%? I have no way to know. I do know, however, that yesterday’s Sharansky, Voight, Dershowitz session, supposedly on anti-Semitism, was a tour de force of insulting and demeaning anti-Muslim/Arab stereotyping and callousness, infused with Islamophobia, and that not one media account will ever call it what it is. [Author's emphasis].

There’s simply no question that there are plenty of Arab and Muslim diplomats in particular who are more than happy to use their air time to go after Israel and ignore their own miserable human rights records. This is not news. And I’m sure that if you took enough time, you could find someone who supports Hamas, someone else who hates Jews, and someone else who hates women.

But where is the power? [my emphasis]. That, in some ways, is the only question that matters. And in the end, Israel continues to act with diplomatic impunity, thanks in large part to the US which protects it. That’s why a strong UN is a threat.[my emphasis]

The United Nations is not a corporate entity. It is a place where every country has some voice, though some-like the United States and other Security Council members- have much much stronger voices than others. At a conference like this, the representatives of those countries, no matter how vile, stupid or cruel, get to speak. As Ijm Dike told me, “After Achmedinejad spoke, any leader of state could have gotten up and taken him to task, and then re-asserted the focus on the conference. I don’t understand why nobody did that.”

Too late now.

By the way, American Dershowitz above has labelled anti-apartheid campaigner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as a racist and a bigot for his prior comments that Palestinians live in conditions similar to, if not worse than, South African apartheid, and for his urgings that they be treated equally and fairly, and for his urgings to change the conditions they live under. I wonder what Dershowitz's comments are classified as, if Achmedinejad and Tutu have the racism mantle between them, and Israel and (its proxy supporters) is the only country with a voice?