Abu Wabu

In another move that clearly symbolizes Obama's obvious animosity toward Israel, he is rewarding Mary Robinson with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. In today's NY Daily News editorial, "Mary Robinson gave hate a megaphone", Rabbi Abraham Cooper details the anti-Israel, anti-American debacle that was the 2001 Durbin UN "Human Rights" conference.

A few ugly incidents still cling to my psyche:

* Each nongovernmental organization, or NGO, was invited to set up a booth. In a presentation that would have brought tears of joy to the eyes of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a Cairo-based lawyers group proudly displayed scores of political cartoons depicting Israelis as Nazis or subhumans.

* As a CNN reporter posed a question at our caucus' news conference, 40 Muslim women from Iran burst in and physically tried to stop our event.

* On Friday, Durban's chief of police gently but firmly urged us not to attempt to walk the 21/2 blocks from the conference to the Jewish Community Center. "I cannot guarantee your safety," he told me. Outside, there were 17,000 anti-Zionist protesters, some of whom held up the banner: "Hitler Was Right!"

* The ill-fated "final NGO document" that Robinson was supposed to hand to then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, replete with anti-Israel invective, did have one reference condemning firebombing attacks against synagogues in France. But the reference was deleted when a delegate from the World Council of Churches rose at the closing plenary to ask, "What does an attack on a synagogue have to do with racism?"

We Jews left the big tent that night to the whistles and catcalls of some and the utter silence of too many of the human rights elites. Hate, not hope, had carried the day...

...Just days after we left Durban, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were launched. The Homeland Security Department is struggling to contain international terrorism. Global human rights have yet to recover from Robinson's Durban debacle.

Power Line has more on the Robinson debacle in The Mary Robinson caper; who done it? and Mary Robinson, enemy of freedom.