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JEW-DOMINATED 'RIGHTS' GROUPS BALK
Israel accused of genocide
NGO
forum adopts resolution denouncing Israel for genocide DURBAN, South Africa(AFP)—Thousands of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) adopted a resolution Sunday accusing Israel of genocide and crimes against humanity, but several bodies such as Amnesty International refused to back it. A five-day NGO forum in Durban, South Africa, which took place on the sidelines of UN racism talks, called in its closing declaration for a halt to Israeli "racist crimes, including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing . . . and state terrorism against the Palestinian people". About 6,000 groups were registered at the NGO forum. At least 12, including big-league players Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Federation for Human Rights, refused to endorse the declaration. "Israel has committed war crimes and other atrocities against the Palestinian people, but it is simply not accurate to use the term genocide . . . ," said Reed Brody, of Human Rights Watch. The resolutions, to be submitted to the UN World Conference Against Racism meeting here until Friday, have no binding character for the UN meeting but raise fears the conference could be derailed over the issue. Israeli President Moshe Katsav earlier described some of the declarations being made in Durban as "clearly racist and anti-Semitic". The NGOs' text declared Israel "a racist, apartheid state in which Israel's brand of apartheid as a crime against humanity has been characterised by separation and segregation, dispossession, restricted land access . . . " It also condemned Israeli policies for trying to "ensure the continuation of an exclusively Jewish state" and "driving out the indigenous Palestinian population." And it calls for the establishment of a war crimes tribunal and a UN special committee on apartheid. "This is the worst anti-Jewish document since the end of Nazi Germany," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights' organisation based in Los Angeles. "NGOs are the oxygen of civil society; that oxygen has been poisoned, polluted," he said. The United States, although represented in Durban by a mid-level delegation, has warned it may still officially boycott the UN conference if what it considers to be anti-Israeli language stays in documents due to be adopted. US congressman Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and member of the US delegation [and himself a Jew], told South African television he had come to the conference with high hopes but that the team was now facing only two options. "The first—the one I'm hoping for—is that at the last minute the language against Israel will be eliminated, not improved, but eliminated," he said. "But if the extremists succeed in keeping it in, we will have nothing to do with this document... we will not sign it." US delegation spokeswoman Judy Moon said Sunday there was no "significant development" in efforts to renegotiate the offending wording. An international youth summit which met in Durban last week also produced its declaration Sunday, accusing Israel of "ongoing and systematic human rights violations" against Palestinians. |
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