Jennifer Rubin has the details on Mary Robinson, the former Irish PM who went on to serve as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and who will soon be awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor — the Freedom Medal — by President Obama. Robinson presided over the Durban conference that passed the famous Zionism=Racism resolution and which was, as a result, boycotted by both the United States and Israel, among others. Robinson defended the Durban statement at the time, saying, “In the end, the text that came out of South Africa was remarkably good including on the issues of the Middle East.” Time magazine came to a different conclusion, as did just about every right-thinking person in the Western world. “The conference was a disgrace. It was a disgrace in conception–in the very idea that a few days of talk could lead to any useful action directed against a scourge that diminishes the lives of millions–and it was a disgrace in execution,” wrote Michael Elliott in a piece that singled out Robinson for her naiveté. After Robinson was retired from her post at the UN, she joined Rashid Khalidi on the faculty at Columbia, where she lamented,
But things have changed. It was, after all, our current president who once declared that “No one is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” And now that he is the president, he has brought the full force of that office to bear on the cruel regime that inflicts such suffering, leading the editors at the Washington Post to note today that among the “striking results of the Obama administration’s first six months is that only one country has worse relations with the United States than it did in January: Israel.” But I guess the opinion of the Columbia faculty club is all that really matters.
