The Durban Honor Roll

The "World Conference Against Racism," better known as Durban III, took place in New York last week at the United Nations. It received less publicity than its predecessors, two conferences that achieved infamy less for their assaults on the State of Israel than for their displays of anti-Semitism.

This year thirteen other democracies joined Israel in boycotting the conference, and it is worth listing them: the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain, France, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Bulgaria.

That is an impressive group of countries, although one is entitled to ask why the conference was attended by other democracies--Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Greece, Finland, Norway, and the Latin Americans, for example. In all, one hundred and seventy-nine countries attended, making the boycott by those thirteen democracies worth special notice and applause.