[Guardian-UK] Benjamin Pogrund - How did the organizers of the UN conference on racism manage to allow Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be the keynote speaker on the opening day? UN officialdom provided him with a platform to be a one-man wrecking crew. Some say the countries that boycotted and walked out should have stayed to listen to Ahmadinejad and engaged him in debate. But would it have been possible to sit down to a polite conversation with Adolf Hitler and persuade him that he was wrong to believe that Jews, Gypsies and Russians were sub-humans deserving only of mass death? Would there have been any point in trying to engage Ahmadinejad in debate, to tell him his views are lunatic and evil? During the Ahmadinejad diatribe, many in the conference hall, from Africa, Asia and Latin America, applauded and cheered his attack on Israel as a "racist state" and on the West. Who wants to be involved with people who behave like this? The writer was deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg, South Africa.
2009-04-27 06:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive