Durban II set to be another Israel hate-fest...

And the NDP actually want Canada to attend the event...

Earlier this month, a UN committee stacked with dictatorships (Libya, Iran, Cuba, etc.) produced a provisional blueprint for the Spring, 2009 "Durban Review Conference," an international confab organized to promote the "Programme of Action" that came out of the original, disastrous 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.

Since Durban I has become a byword for anti-Semitism and anti-Western extremism, the forthcoming Durban II confab is widely expected to be a farce (Canada and Israel have already announced they won't be attending). And so relatively few pundits seem to have bothered wading through the UN's characteristically turgid pre-conference planning documentation.

But faced with a slow news day, I decided to take a crack.

Four hours later, I don't recommend the exercise. The five-part "Draft Outcome Document" contains 88 pages and 646 provisions. Most of it consists of boilerplate repetition of the same small handful of themes (encapsulated well in this UN Watch report): (1) Racism is everywhere, (2) The fault for this lies with the West, because of its "genocidal" legacy of slavery and colonization, (3) "Islamophobia" and discrimination against "people of African descent" are especially prevalent and pernicious, and (4) Israel is a blight upon nations (Paragraphs 114-117 of Section 1, for instance, are dedicated exclusively to bashing the Jewish state. No other country comes in for singling out in the whole document). In many cases, whole paragraphs are repeated several times over (such as a lengthy Jimmy Carteresque screed about Israel promoting "a new kind of apartheid").