To read this article, click here.

[Excerpt:]

"The Geneva conference has so far not seen the type of anti-Semitic excesses as witnessed in Durban, where Jews were physically attacked and Hitler’s "Mein Kampf" was handed out. But the radical agendas of many powerful NGOs is at display at numerous "side events." A London-based group called "Islamic Human Rights Commission" brought three Hasidic Jews to hold signs proclaiming "Zionism is racism." The organization "North-South 21," which is closely linked to the Libyan regime, organized a session on "Occupation and Discrimination," featuring Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general and now left-wing activist who accuses Israel of "genocide." Radical pro-Palestinian groups such as Badil and Ittajah held an "Israel Review Conference," which discussed how to press war-crime charges against Israelis in Western courts and cut off Western arms sales to the Jewish state. Unlike in 2001, the more prominent NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International did not take part at these sessions, even though they are playing a central role in international campaigns to delegitimize Israel. Once again, the obsessive focus on the Jewish state meant that the real problems of racism and genocide were largely ignored at this U.N. conference. Only outside the official U.N. antiracism conference, at well-attended "counterconferences" organized by NGOs such as U.N. Watch, did the real victims of racism and mass murder get the attention they deserved. Only at those counterconferences could one witness moving presentations by victims of Iranian oppression, survivors of the Rwandan genocide and the continuing slaughter in Darfur. And on Monday night, when Jews marked Holocaust Memorial Day, a large gathering stood quietly honoring the victims while the language of human rights was being abused in the U.N. building. Human Rights Watch, which played an active role in the 2001 fiasco, had tried hard to pressure the Obama administration to abandon core moral principles and participate in the review conference. President Obama rejected this advice, and in a tacit rebuke to the NGO lobby explained that the foundations of the Durban process are fundamentally incompatible with universal human-rights norms. A new structure is necessary if these values are to be given serious attention. At the same time, though, President Obama has sought to placate the NGO lobby by agreeing to rejoin the failed U.N. Human Rights Council. The main lesson from this week’s events is that the best hope for restoring human rights is to deny such corrupt organizations the veneer of legitimacy."