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The very designation "client regimes", and the "client organizations" they have spawned to front for them, helps explain what has happened once again. These are propped-up, artificial, terribly repressive regimes that would not exist were it not for the CIA, NSA, and the Pentagon. Their repeated failures and sell-outs are the price continually paid for this predicament by the great majority of the people of the region stretching from North Africa to the Gulf, including of course the poor Palestinian people. One more time these regimes have failed miserably, making one excuse after another for their pathetic co-optation, then using the very media they have bought and control to propagatic their self-serving distortions and deceits. The diplomats that represent these regimes have once again proved themselves as full of hot air as the arab armies have repeatedly proved themselves incompetent to do anything other than threaten their own people.
The NGOs, the non-governmental organizations, did quite a job at first in the days before the official conference began; and that should not be overlooked. Even so, once the regimes and those they sponsor took over, it was the usual pathos, and in the end shameful defeat.
Communicated by Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Jerusalem September 8, 2001
Israel regrets that a world conference, whose declared purpose was to discuss ways of dealing with a universal phenomenon that causes suffering to millions throughout the world, focused instead on a specific political conflict that has nothing to do with racism.
At the same time, Israel expresses its satisfaction that the draft clauses containing accusations and incitement against Israel and against the Jewish people were removed from the concluding statements of the conference. In doing so, the world rejected the attempts made by extremist Arab states to control the content of the conference and to pervert its ends, by turning it into a platform for denigrating Israel. The draft adopted at Durban in our absence, following our walk-out together with the United States, is not ideal, and we objected to it. However, it is substantially different from the venomous resolutions that the extremist states wished to pass. At the conference, the non-democratic states failed in their attempt to dictate chapter and verse on the subject of human rights to the enlightened world, and were unable to thereby turn the conference into a theater of the absurd.
The well-timed walk-out by the United States and Israel constituted the turning point that encouraged many other states to protest the Arab and Muslim attempts to take over the conference and helped get the conference back on a constructive track. Israel succeeded in its efforts to convince countries from every continent to join together in defeating this intention of putting Israel on trial.
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres stated Saturday night that, for the first time, the automatic majority against Israel was broken. This can be attributed to Israel's striving for peace as well as to its firm stand on the most basic principles. Minister Peres expressed gratitude to the United States for its unequivocal backing of Israel and noted the cooperation of the European Union states and the support of a large bloc of countries in Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, North and Central America and the Pacific.
Deputy Foreign Minister, Rabbi Michael Melchior, stated that the entire world rejected with disdain the spirit of hatred that stood behind the Arab attempt to win international support for hatred of Jews and the delegitimization of Israel.
| Mid-East Realities | www.middleeast.org |
| Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/9/386.htm |