Degree of Dishonour at McGill [Mary Robinson honorary Phd]

As the United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson presided over the 2001 World Conference against Racism that was hijacked by anti-Zionists who demonized Israel, bullied Jewish delegates and distributed crude anti-Semitic images.

When McGill University announced it will grant an honourary doctorate to Mary Robinson, a "human rights leader," my first instinct was to be silent. I have no wish to politicize commencement… But in a world of ever-coarsening anti-Semitism and despicable rationalizations for suicide bombings, in a city which just endured the burning of a Jewish children's school library, at a university in which vandals scratched "Heil Hitler" into the bathroom of the Bronfman Building and defaced the exterior of the Hillel Jewish Student Centre, honouring Mary Robinson sends a terrible message.

As the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, Robinson presided over the infamous World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001. In her closing remarks, Robinson declared "we…succeeded," a shocking statement considering that anti-Zionists hijacked the conference, demonizing Israel, bullying Jewish participants, and distributing crude anti-Semitic images of hooked-nose Jews.

In fighting modern anti-Semitism, the moral neutrality of the politically correct—which often masks moral sloppiness or even outright bias—is a particularly insidious problem. We need Winston Churchills, and Mary Robinson is a Neville Chamberlain. We need to hunt down hatred, yet McGill will lionize a lamb in the face of ugly verbal assaults that have come to epitomize the new anti-Semitism.

I hate talking about anti-Semitism. Despite the stereotype that Jews are hypersensitive, my generation was raised to consider Jew-hatred an outdated, European disease. Born into North America's post-Auschwitz meritocracy, we believed that anti-Semitism had been cured along with whooping cough and polio… Growing up in the 1970s, we believed our identities were malleable… We believed Marlo Thomas that we were Free to Be You and Me. We learned that if we jumped through the right hoops, we could go as far as anyone else in society. We felt protected by our American or Canadian passports.

Climbing the ladder of achievement, we internalized varying amounts of good liberal guilt about our good fortune. Our relationship to oppression was as fellow crusaders fighting for justice, not potential victims. We were empathetic not paranoid, guarding against injuring others rather than worrying about protecting ourselves. We had zero-tolerance for racism, sexism, homophobia and any kind of religious intolerance… Many of us pooh-poohed older relatives and Jewish leaders who seemed obsessed with anti-Semitism. They were stuck on yesterday's news—and history's burdens—rather than liberated by the miracle of North America.

Yasser Arafat's war of terrorism and propaganda against the Oslo Peace Process changed the equation—especially when the world applauded him and his tactics. Soft, spoiled, naive and terrible soothsayers, we never imagined that we would be living in a society where a children's elementary school library would be firebombed, and the crime could trigger debate about its underlying rationale…

But how to assess those noble reactions against the slurs directed at Liberal MP Jacques Saada for the sole "crime" of being Jewish? How should one perceive the attempt to "contextualize" this attack on Canadian children and democratic values by condemning Israel? What does one say about the decision by editors of La Presse to "balance" the expressions of indignation in the Letters to the Editor section with "different sentiment[s]," one dismissing the burning of "a little library" and the second sneering: "If our friends in the Jewish community were…not so almost unanimously supportive of the hateful and intransigent policies of Israel, we would obviously be more scandalized by these unfortunate acts."

Moreover, how do we understand the intellectual dishonesty festering at Concordia University, where a Swastika scribbled on an Israeli flag is justified by the lie that the hated Nazi symbol functioned as a neutral Hindu emblem? What do we make of the insanity at my home institution whereby an idealistic student in my History of Presidential Campaigning conference was publicly libeled as a racist because—unlike Mary Robinson and the hypocritical, myopic UN human-rights establishment—she dared to raise the moral issue of deploying children as suicide bombers?

Again and again, I note the noxious nexus, the way criticisms of Israel and anti-Zionism camouflage the new anti-Semitism, at Durban and in Montreal, how little hurts grow into big traumas. There is a link, and the firebombers made it, between the violence against Jews in Israel, Istanbul, Montreal and Mombasa, the ugly Jew-baiting rhetoric festering in so many mosques and madrassas, and the genteel but unfair, obsessive and disproportionate expressions of exasperation or indifference toward Jews and the Jewish state in so many seminar rooms and parlours.

When Jews note the obvious connection these days between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, they are accused of being thin-skinned, intolerant, even McCarthyite; yet when anti-Semites justify attacks against Jews by pointing to Israeli actions as the United Talmud Torah vandals did, there are supposedly reputable people around who deem the connection reasonable, contextualized and thus, implicitly justified.

Jews deserve equal treatment not special treatment. If vandals firebombed an Italian church, would La Presse publish letters minimizing the "little fire" or suggesting any community behaviours that justified the crime? Are there any geniuses at Concordia University ready to rationalize cross burnings on African-Americans' lawns given the cross's many positive meanings? Would Mary Robinson have declared her anti-racism conference a success had it degenerated into Muslim-bashing?

Jews should not be burdened with proving that anti-Zionists are merely critics of Israel and not anti-Semites. Given the thousands of incidents targeting Jews in the last few years, harsh critics of Israel and of Zionism must work harder to dissociate themselves from the noxious nexus, from the rivers of ugly rhetoric feeding and blurring together hatred of the Jew, Jewish nationalism and the Jewish state. And leaders like Mary Robinson—and my McGill colleagues who distribute honourary doctorates—should be extra vigilant to weed out this hatred, rather than standing silently by and watching it grow.

Anti-Semitic acts, be they "minor" or "major," rhetorical or physical, violate the fundamental covenant we all share as citizens of a democracy. Democracy is more than one person, one vote; it begins with values of equality, mutuality and civility, rooted in our common humanity. "Zero-tolerance" means we all must combat all forms of bigotry, be it in bathroom stalls or on editorial pages, in the halls of the UN or in the context of difficult political strife.

Last week, McGill principal Heather Munroe-Blum sent a letter to the McGill community condemning the incidents of vandalism—and linking them to the torching of United Talmud Torah's library. Note the contrast between the McGill honouree's moral tone-deafness amid the blood libels of Durban and the McGill principal's honourable refusal to ignore bathroom graffiti—understanding the ''broken windows'' theory of policing, that little incidents of incivility fester. Perhaps, rather than granting an honourary doctorate, Heather Munroe-Blum should sit Mary Robinson down for some lessons on exhibiting moral courage and fostering a true, consistent, aggressive commitment to human rights for all.

(Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University, is a member of CIJR’s Academic Council)

Mary Robinson, War Criminal?
An appropriate career move.
National Review, 5/20/02

By Michael Rubin

n September 12, 1997, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Mary Robinson as the United Nation's High Commissioner for Human Rights. On paper, Robinson is as eminently qualified as any other U.N. political appointee. For seven years, she served as president of Ireland. The website of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights trumpets Robinson's "outstanding legal qualifications" and her long record in human rights. Chief among Robinson's accomplishments are her attendance and participation in many United Nations conferences and her travel. The official website crows, "Ms. Robinson was the first head of State to visit Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide there… While in Rwanda, she met representatives of, and was briefed by, agencies on the ground, as well as by the United Nations Human Rights Monitors. She was also the first Head of State to visit the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia…."

What the United Nations trumpets as qualifications look like little more than empty grandstanding to anyone caught outside the U.N.'s labyrinthine bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the International Criminal Tribunal might be an appropriate place for Robinson to return, albeit for a slightly longer visit.

The trouble starts with Robinson's tenure as president of Ireland. During the last four years of Robinson's tenure, the European Union donated large sums of money to the Palestinian Authority. Ireland even held the presidency of the European Union for the second half of 1996. During this time, Arafat siphoned large amounts of European aid money away to pay for terror. Robinson can plead ignorance, but documents seized during the recent Israeli incursion into the West Bank revealed that the Palestinian Authority spent approximately $9 million of European Union aid money each month on the salaries of those organizing terror attacks against civilians. While European officials like Robinson looked the other way, the Palestinian Authority regularly converted millions of dollars of aid money into shekels at rates about 20 percent below normal, allowing the Palestinian chairman to divert millions of dollars worth of aid into his personal slush fund.

Remember the young boys, students, and old women killed in the rash of Palestinian bus bombings back in 1996? It's hard to believe that European politicians are so incompetent than to notice that Palestinian violence grew in proportion to their aid money. European funds enabled Arafat to purchase $50 million worth of sophisticated Iranian weaponry for use against civilians. While the world knows the story of the Karine-A's interception last January, few remember that the ship represented only one of many Palestinian weapons schemes (Remember the Calypso? The Santorini? The smuggling tunnels from Egypt into Gaza?) European leaders may claim ignorance, but Robinson should be the first to admit that indirect responsibility is no mitigation for war crimes. The sad fact is that aid given by Robinson helped build the organizations that now kill children at pizzerias, teenagers at discos, and pensioners at Passover seders, not to mention numerous American citizens along the way.

Robinson's tenure at the United Nations has been little better than her record as Ireland's president. She was the driving force behind the Orwellian "World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance." At the conference, Robinson presided over little more than an intellectual pogrom against Jews and Israel. She remained largely silent as the preliminary Asian Regional Conference in Tehran (to which Israel was excluded) inserted blatantly racist statements into the conference agenda. She failed to speak out when, on the grounds of the U.N. conference itself, the Arab Lawyers Union distributed pamphlets depicting hook-nosed Jews as Nazis spearing Palestinian children. In the same tent where nongovernmental organizations depicted Israel as a "racist, apartheid state," were distributed fliers entitled, "What if Hitler had won?" The answer: "There would be no Israel, and no Palestinian bloodshed." While Robinson takes no responsibility for enabling the greatest single display of anti-Semitism in 50 years, she failed to lift a finger when the South African government denied visas to European anti-slavery activists critical of human rights in Islamic nations like the Sudan, where over two million people have perished in a war since the regime in Khartoum declared a jihad against non-Muslims in 1983. Either black Sudanese are less worthy of concern to the human-rights commission, or it would be inexcusably politically incorrect to actually protest human-rights violations conducted in the name of Islam.

Robinson's post-Durban record is little better. On April 15, Robinson's commission voted on a decision that condoned suicide bombings as a legitimate means to establish Palestinian statehood (six European Union members voted in favor including, not surprisingly, France and Belgium). The vote came after Robinson initiated a drive to become a fact finder to investigate the now-famous massacre in Jenin (also known as "the massacre that never happened"). Curiously, in the months preceding Israel's incursion into the U.N. refugee camp in Jenin, suicide bombers launched from the camp wearing explosives likely bought with European money killed more than 100 Israeli civilians. However, for Robinson, a massacre is the deaths of seven Palestinian civilians in a war zone (47 Palestinian militants and 23 Israel soldiers also died). The deaths of more than 100 Jewish civilians by suicide bombers is worthy of little more than deafening silence interrupted by an occasional pithy statement of moral equivalence. The world still waits for Robinson to use her bully pulpit to call for an investigation of the terrorist murder of Jews (but then again, such an inquiry might lead uncomfortably close to UNRWA and European Union officials ).

Of course it's farcical to believe that Robinson will ever be brought before the International Criminal Tribunal, or that she even should be. With her double standards, amazing ability to look the other way, and her record at the Human Rights Commission, Robinson has done more than any other international official to demonstrate that international courts, commissions, and agencies are more about politics than ethics, human rights, or morality, and therefore should never the legitimacy of U.S. endorsement.

The charge of indirect responsibility for crimes against humanity is a reasonable charge so long as it is levied against those whom the chattering classes in Europe wish to condemn. Otherwise, dozens of Dutch peacekeepers would be in prison now for handing countless Muslim men and boys to Serb gunmen in a so-called U.N. safe haven. U.N. peacekeepers might be defending their actions in The Hague for working feverishly to avoid taking any action in Rwanda as all hell broke loose. UNIFIL observers might need to explain under oath why they helped cover up Hezbullah's kidnapping of Israeli soldiers from across a border the secretary general himself certified. Speaking of the secretary general, he might wish to explain, at least as a witness, why he saw fit to meet with and legitimize Hezbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah just two months after Nasrallah declared, "Jews invented the legend of the Nazi atrocities." UNICEF director Carol Bellamy might want to explain why slaves (oops.. "abductees" in U.N. and E.U. parlance: We mustn't antagonize the Sudanese government) liberated by UNICEF in Sudan never returned home, but ended up dead at government check points a day after UNICEF representatives crowed triumphant and foreign journalists departed. Then again, with UNICEF workers in West Africa trading emergency food and medical assistance for child sex, why question a few dead Sudanese so long as the photo-op was successful?

The European Union and the United Nations are sick with self-righteousness, moral equivalence, and appeasement, but Mary Robinson is just one symptom. Worthy international causes have been hijacked for narrow political agendas.

Accountability has become a dirty word. And looking the other way, especially regarding terrorism, has become a form of art. But then again, why reform if bashing Israel and sponsoring forums to promote anti-Semitism can reinforce your credentials in the eyes of your peers?

— Michael Rubin is a visiting fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations.

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