Mary Robinson: “You Just Don’t Understand!”
Tevi Troy, who finished a two-term career working for George W. Bush as his deputy health secretary, has a sharp post up at NRO's The Corner about Mary Robinson's continued capacity for self-delusion.
Robinson's insistence on "Durban wuz allright" even after the controversy stirred by her Medal of Freedom, casts not just her judgment in unflattering light, but the White House's as well. It's not just the vetting, it's that whoever made this recommendation must have had an idea of her incredible obtuseness.
Anyway, here's Tevi:
In response to a series of questions about her role in the 2001 Durban “anti-racism” conference -- a conference boycotted by the U.S. and Israel because it helped give rise to vile anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric -- she continually fell back on the same series of talking points designed to make it appear as if her critics don’t understand what went on there. Robinson said that “there’s a wonderful story about Durban waiting to be told” and that she is waiting for an “objective” and “proper evaluation” of what happened at Durban by “someone who knows how the U.N. works.” I am not sure what she is getting at, as I would think that the less people looked into Durban, the better off she would be. As for the comment about finding “someone who knows how the U.N. works” to tell the story of Durban, that sounds to me like code for someone who shares the U.N. perspective on things, a perspective that is far more critical of liberal democracies than of autocratic nations. In short, it is the very perspective that ensured Durban would spin out of control.
Tevi is referring to this CBS interview.
His evisceration is nice and tidy, but let me add that she frets that the flurry after Sept. 11 attacks kept the "truth" about Durban from emerging. What a narcissist.
In the same interview, Charles Lane, a Washington Post analyst, makes the point that what makes the award so offensive is her, for lack of a better term, undistinguishedness. Another awardee, Desmond Tutu has not been merely obtuse, he has crossed the line to anti-Israelism, and veered close to anti-Semitism. But he also was a real hero in the struggle against Apartheid. Notice how mostly he escaped censure. Robinson was a bureaucrat, and not a particularly effective one at that, considering Durban's debacle. What did she risk?
Finally, let me tweak Tevi a little: He ends his post with a partisan flourish, which is fine --
[Lane says] “I don’t see what’s so special about Mary Robinson," Perhaps Lane doesn’t, but the president does, and he has now diminished this nation’s highest civilian honor by sharing it with her.
-- but I don't know if I'd pick this fight in Medal of Freedom territory. Tevi's old boss didn't even bother to bury his most controversial awardees among a dozen worthies: On Dec. 14 2004, he named only three awardees: L. Paul Bremer, General Tommy Franks, George Tenet.
That these three men were profoundly undistinguished in how they pursued the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and their aftermaths is no longer even a matter of partisan controversy.
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Waskow,
You posted the same drivel at another article about the incurable anti-Semite Robinson. Are you fixated on your delusion that there are no anti-Semites in the world, but rather individuals spewing bigoted lies and hate who deny that the Jewish State of Israel has the right to exist. If there were no Israel, where would you go to spread your over-educated nonsense? Of course, with the genocidal Palis!
Robinson personally turned the 2002 Durban Conference into an anti-Semitic hatefest. The Durban Conference was a pathetic joke because it was set up and conducted as an anti-Semitic/ Israel hatefest. No more, no less!
From the sublime to the ridiculous:
A past Medal of Freedom/Congressional Gold Medal recipient was the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson zt"l, who played a major role in reviving Judaism from the ashes of the Holocaust, and in whose honor and on whose birthday Presidents of both parties have declared “Education Day.” for many years. How ridiculous were some of the subsequent awards by comparison.
There are those who think the choice of Robinson was a deliberate attempt to tweak pro-Israel Americans. President Obama should have used the famous advice, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”
Hi Arthur-
She kept out “Zionism is Racism,” it’s true. But no one here is claiming she did not.
The final document singles out the Palestinian issue and not any other issue —in a world that, at the time was dealing with oppressions in Chechnya, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan etc. etc. etc. that dwarfed Palestine. And many of these were racially tinged.
So she kept out an odious calumny, not by standing up to those perpetuating it, but by wheeling and dealing with them, and coming up with a disingenuous compromise—citing Palestine alone among all other examples of suffering peoples. This does not strike me as particularly brave or commendable. She might have, like the United States did, made a hard decision and walked away, as I would have expected her to had the Serbs been present and had successfully persuaded China and Russia to back a request that the expulsion from Krajina make the final document to the exclusion of all other atrocities—or whatever other example you might pick. That singling out compromised the whole document, but so did her willingness to deal with racists compromise the whole affair.
There have been many undistinguished Medal of Freedom over the years—as I note in the same post. (I’d suspect, however, that Kemp’s inclusion had something to do with the political risks he took in confronting his party on race.) Jewish groups have every right to criticize the selections that exercise them without attaching a list of others deemed undeserving.
And Arthur, you have every right to question my motive as a journalist. I think it’s in bad taste, though. I like your newsletters, I agree with some of your insights, disagree with others—but no disagreement has ever driven me to question your credentials as a rabbi.
There is a word for extremely liberal Jews, even those who become --undoubtedly-- Reform Rabbis..JINOs. Jews In Name Only . Leftist ideology trumps religion and Israel with them. Obviously.
So Steve, who died and gave you the right to define who’s a Jew? I certainly don’t let trash like you have the right to call me a non-Jew, self-hating Jew, or any other slur that you right-wing bastards think that you have the right to spew. The ideologic trash that you and your ilk spout just goes to prove how dangerous and maniacal Israel is. Your rants, and similar ones, do more to preach for the destruction of Israel than anything folks on my ideological side of the spectrum could ever do. You all need to wind up like that fat slob in a coma.
Mary is the one who doesn’t understand and like many Irish are so anti-Israel and Jews that they can’t see through their hate. But then I recall they were oblivious to Hitler, too.
Despite it having scarcely made the news reports anywhere else, this is about the 15th-20th article on JTA about it!
To take just one of the more ridiculous posts:-
REZASANTORINI:-
I lived in Ireland, and of course they are anti-Israel, given their history with the British, but they are most certainly not anti-semitic...I, and other Jews I know in Ireland would all agree that I experienced less anti-semitism there than even the US.
In other words “their hate” as you call it is democratic political opposition rather than knee-jerk anti-semitism, which you can hardly disagree with.
Equally Ireland as a country was not “oblivious to Hitler”...they were poor, and unable to enter the war, given the vulnerability of their geographical position. However, a huge number of the population still fought along with the British army, as anybody with a knowledge of WWII Allied forces would know.
Sheesh - in two lines you managed to get so much wrong. The Irish are far from anti-semitic, while your unsupportable bigotry is clear!
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Arthur Waskoiw
08/18/09 04:27 PM
Kampeas somehow avoids mentioning that Robinson in her CBS interview specifically says that she fought against the “Zionism is racism” resolution at Durban and that it was removed before the end of the conference. That doesn;t seem to me in the least obtuse. It seems to me rather that Kampeas is being opaque —-- by accident? Deliberately? How could he have possibly left that out?
Her attacker on CBS thinks the Durban conference was a joke even if it had not included an attack on Zionism. Why would a serious attempt to address the world problem of racism be a joke?? Except of course for someone who doesn’t think racism itself is important. The worst things he could think to say about her is that she kept a useless conference from being worse, and that she was not as great a figure in world history as Mandela. . Is that why Kampeas has expressed so much animus against her? And against Obama for naming her? Did Jack Kemp compare in history to Mandelka? Why wasn’t there criticism of Obama for naming Kemp?
Something is rotten in the journalistic cheese here.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow
The Shalom Center
http://www.shalomctr.org