No Shows

Haven’t we heard this one before? Last week, Iran’s controversial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made a speech in which he said nasty, provocative things about Israel, leading to international uproar. Controversy is nothing new for Ahmadinejad, whose previous remarks—including “The American empire in the world is reaching the end” and “Israel is about to crash. This is God’s promise and the wish of all the world’s nations”—are notorious.

This time, though, the Western world took a bait it had set for itself. Ahmadinejad’s assertions that Israel is a “cruel and repressive racist regime” were made at a United Nations conference on racism in Geneva that the United States, along with the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Israel, and Italy, had already decided to boycott over concerns that Ahmadinejad would abuse it in precisely this manner. That political leaders and journalists are now focusing nonstop on the inflammatory remarks indicates that Western countries’ decision not to attend may have had precisely the opposite effect of what they intended, drawing even greater attention to what Ahmadinejad said in their absence.

Certainly, President Obama and his administration are justified in their concerns over anti-Semitism and efforts to single Israel out for its actions. But, if the U.S. boycott was supposed to function as a protest, it was a misguided one. It did not prevent Ahmadinejad from making his speech and sending his message to the world; with those nations who did stay presumably supportive or neutral toward Ahmedinejad, the applause drawn by the Iranian leader seemed all the louder, coming as it did from these remaining delegations. What it did do instead was to allow the controversy surrounding his disparagement of Israel to overshadow efforts to address other pressing topics like slavery, genocide, and xenophobia.

This is not the first time the United States has boycotted a conference. We seem to have a history of ridiculous attempts to exert influence by not being present, as in our refusal to join the League of Nations and our boycott of the 1980 Olympic games in Moscow. And, in 2001, the U.S. and Israel walked out on the first conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, because certain parts of its final resolution explicitly alluded to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as being driven by racism. Though these references were actually removed from later drafts of the Geneva declaration, the U.S. cited concerns over Ahmadinejad as reason enough to stay away from the conference.

But boycotts rarely address root political problem and often actually aggravate a situation by drawing attention to what is being reacted against. Ignoring and avoiding Ahmadinejad will never make him go away or blunt his rhetoric. Instead of boycotting, the U.S. and other Western nations should have attended the conference and expressed their own thoughts on problems of racism and ways of combating them.

The very concept of the UN is predicated on the notion that as many nations as possible will participate and support it. By choosing to be absent from the conference, the U.S. forfeited the opportunity to meaningfully contribute to an international effort to deal with a very serious issue that many countries must address. Instead, the conference was dominated by a man who is clearly the very opposite of tolerance and open-mindedness.


Adrienne Y. Lee ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Matthews Hall.