You might want to mark the date of the upcoming international hate fest: the so-called Durban 2 conference, scheduled for April 20th in Geneva. April 20th, as some people know, was Hitler's birthday, a national holiday in Nazi Germany, and a high-alert day for West German police forces after the war. The symbolism is apt.
According to this rather technical article, the Obama Administration has broken with the Bush Administration's admirable stand of having nothing to do with the event. The Obama people are participating in the preparations, and aren't even trying very hard to head off the damage.
I'm not an international diplomacy wonk, so I can't vouch for the details of the description, but it sounds pretty bad to me. Not that the conference will be all that important, mind you: the antisemites will celebrate, the others will avert their eyes, and the world will continue as before.
Yaacov, you only need to be "an international diplomacy wonk" to understand all the details. You don't need to be one to understand what's happening. In the international arena, America has too, too often sided with 'what's good for America' instead of siding with 'what America is or represents'.
ReplyDeleteThat the main representative of America...the one who is most visible and encountered in the world...is the American businessman says a lot and maybe all. How many tyrannical governments has and does America support or do business with? G.W. Bush's "read my lips" says so much.
America has never been so pushed as today to take a stand on anti-Semitism, yet never as today has there been so much to push America openly into the anti-Semitic world view. Not only is America no longer independent of the world, it finally recognizes that it is tremendously dependent upon it. The pressure is on, and which way America will turn is completely open. Worse, too typically America is one thing domestically and quite another internationally.
as to chosing the April 20-date ...
ReplyDeleteI was borne in 1942 to a normal "meine Eltern waren keine Nazis" family and to this day I have the automatic reaction when I hear April 20th:
Oh! Führer's Geburtstag -
no matter how much I try to get rid of it, it is there just like the opening tunes of a popular song bring more to the mind
rgds, Silke