Civilization first

From a Yahoo! News story: “GENEVA – The United Nations opens its first global racism conference in eight years on Monday with the U.S. and at least five other countries boycotting the event out of concern that Islamic countries will demand that it denounce Israel and ban criticism of Islam. The administration of President Barack Obama, America's first black head of state, announced Saturday that it would boycott "with regret" the weeklong meeting in Geneva, which already is experiencing much of the bickering and political infighting that marred the 2001 conference in Durban, South Africa. The Netherlands declared its boycott Sunday, while Australia, Canada, Israel and Italy already have said they would not attend. "I would love to be involved in a useful conference that addressed continuing issues of racism and discrimination around the globe," Obama said in Trinidad on Sunday after attending the Summit of the Americas. But he said the language of the U.N.'s draft declaration risked a reprise of Durban, during which "folks expressed antagonism toward Israel in ways that were often times completely hypocritical and counterproductive. We expressed in the run-up to this conference our concerns that if you adopted all of the language from 2001, that's not something we can sign up for," Obama said.” Almost everyone knows by now that there’s nothing more that U.N. diplomats love than a good long conference in a nice civilized city somewhere. The whole exercise is dumb, meaningless, and hypocritical.