BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

Durban II mixes the same old Israel-bashing with new attacks on free speech. One of Colin Powell's best moves as Secretary of State was to pull out of the 2001 United Nations Durban confab against racism once it became an anti-Semitic rant. One of the best moves the new U.S. administration and Europe could make is to stay away from the follow-up meeting altogether. "Durban II," planned for April in Geneva, promises to be an encore of the same old Israel-bashing. The draft declaration says Israel's policy toward the Palestinians amounts to no less than "a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity, a form of genocide and a serious threat to international peace and security." We'll spare you the rest of the diatribe. Israel will be the conference's main object of obsession, but it's not the only target. The draft declaration also goes after the West's freedom of speech and antiterror laws under the guise of protecting religion -- read: Isl...

Israel calls it as it TRULY IS!!! HOORAY! Israel says will boycott U.N. forum on racism Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Wednesday that Israel had made a final decision not to participate in a U.N. forum on racism and urged other countries to boycott what she termed an "anti-Israel tribunal." The United Nations said it regretted the decision. The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, to be held in Geneva in April, is a follow-up to a 2001 summit in Durban, South Africa on the same issues. Israel and the United States walked out of the first conference in protest over draft texts branding Israel as a racist and apartheid state -- language that was later dropped. In a speech to visiting U.S. Jewish leaders, Livni said she announced last February that Israel would not participate in the 2009 meeting unless it was clear it would not be used "as a platform for further anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic" activity. She s...

Gillerman's being polite. Carter being a bigot is a drop of the harm he's done to Israel. Israel's ambassador to the United Nations on Thursday called former President Jimmy Carter "a bigot" for meeting with the leader of the militant Hamas movement in Syria. Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, "went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands after shaking the hand of Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas," Ambassador Dan Gillerman told a luncheon briefing for reporters. The diplomat was questioned about problems facing his country during a wide-ranging discussion with reporters lasting more than an hour. The briefing was sponsored by The Israel Project, a Washington-based, media-oriented advocacy group. The ambassador's harsh words for Carter came days after the ex-president met with Mashaal for seven hours in Damascus to negotiate a cease-fire with Gaza's Hamas rulers. Carter then called Mashaal on Monday to try to get him to...

WHAT ELSE SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM THE USELESS U.N.? (this speaks for itself) U.N. Team Still Looking for Iraq's Arsenal Though Work Is Seen as Irrelevant, Security Council Can't Agree to End It By Colum Lynch -- Washington Post Staff Writer More than four years after the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations is spending millions of dollars in Iraqi oil money to continue the hunt for Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Every weekday, at a secure commercial office building on Manhattan's East Side, a team of 20 U.N. experts on chemical and biological weapons pores over satellite images of former Iraqi weapons sites. They scour the international news media for stories on Hussein's deadly arsenal. They consult foreign intelligence agencies on the status of Iraqi weapons. And they maintain a cadre of about 300 weapons experts from 50 countries and prepare them for inspections in Iraq -- inspections they will almost certainly never conduct, in search of weap...

PLEASE GET OUT OF MY CITY! ... and find somewhere else to be impotent, antisemitic, lame, rude and blind! Check out what these self-involved narcissistic "diplomats" actually DO spend their time on. THEMSELVES!! UN Seeks Immunity From NYC Lawsuit. New York, NY - First, it was parking tickets. Now, the dispute between New York City and United Nations diplomats centers on whether foreign countries should pay taxes on the high-rise apartments where they house their diplomatic workers. The Supreme Court was to hear arguments Tuesday from lawyers representing India and Mongolia, which are fighting New York's effort to collect property taxes from nations that operate diplomatic offices and house their employees in the same buildings. The two countries -- and the State Department -- want the court to declare that foreign missions have immunity from such a lawsuit. Under U.S. treaties, embassies and other diplomatic buildings are generally tax-exempt, but the city claim...