James Zogby assesses the official US delegation to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) “Conference on Anti-Semitism and Other Forms of Intolerance” convened last week in Cordoba, Spain:
“For the most part, the participants appeared to have been selected for reasons having more to do with domestic political patronage and ideological purity than with the purposes of the conference itself. Most were political conservatives, including the group’s lone Catholic clergyman. One of the delegation’s Jewish representatives has been known to argue vigorously against Israel becoming a ‘nation of all its citizens’ or a ‘democracy’ since that would ‘dilute’ the state. Another appeared to have been selected mainly because he switched his support from Gore in 2000 to Bush in 2004. And the delegation’s only Muslim representative was an individual who has recently aligned himself with the far-right against all of the US’s Muslim organizations arguing that he alone stands against terrorism, which, presumably, he believes, the others support.”