Last week the European Parliament got into the lynching act itself by hosting in Brussels the UN’s “International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” With speaker after speaker calling for boycotting Israel, the event, said Shimon Samuel of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris, “was only about Israel as war criminal and devil.”

In the same week Europe lent its auspices, in Geneva, to the UN’s first preparatory meeting for the 2009 Durban “World Conference against Racism.” That event is planned as a follow-up to the first Durban conference in 2001, which U.S. congressman and Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos called “the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I had seen since the Nazi period.”

Last week’s Geneva meeting was relatively tame only because it was preparatory and not the anticipated “Durban II” itself. Conducted by a twenty-country committee that was chaired by Libya, included Iran, and elected Cuba as its vice-chair, the “tameness” was only that of sharks circling their prey before they strike.

The Egyptian speaker condemned Israel for its “continued occupation of Palestine and violations arising therefrom.” The Pakistani representative said the conference should “move the spotlight on the continued plight of the Palestinian people.”

Iran joined Egypt and Pakistan in addressing what some saw as a broader problem of “the defamation of Islam and discrimination against Muslims” along with the “intellectual and ideological validation of Islamophobia.” The conference did not discuss whether the behavior of any Muslim regimes or organizations has been in any way remiss or contributed to fears and resentments among others.

The less-inhibited Brussels event featured speakers like Paul Badji, Senegalese head of the UN’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP), who said his committee “joined the European Parliament in calling on the Israeli government to immediately stop the military operations against the Palestinian people,” and British MP Clare Short, who condemned the EU for “allowing” Israel to build “an apartheid wall” and said “The boycott worked for South Africa, it is time do it again.”

The organizers were, however, considerate enough to invite certain Jewish and Israeli speakers for “balance”—including members of the notoriously anti-Israeli Neturei Karta sect, and left-wing Haaretz columnist Danny Rubinstein whose description at the conference of Israel as an “apartheid state” led the British Zionist Federation to cancel his participation in a meeting.

A week before the conference, Israel’s EU envoy Ran Curiel asked EU Parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering to block it—to no avail.

The European People’s Party, a conservative bloc in the Parliament, opposed the event, and on Friday seven Parliament members published a letter in the International Herald Tribune that said:

. . . CEIRPP has a proven record of anti-Israel bias, spreading propaganda that presents only the Palestinian narrative, including the delegitimization of Israel—a UN member state. . . . Surely, the European Parliament is not just a convention center. As Members of the European Parliament, we are shocked that this biased event would take place within our institutional premises.

But these were honorable exceptions. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon sent welcoming remarks, and Wolfgang Grieger, secretary of CEIRPP, noted proudly that the conference's 400 participants included “representatives of 140 civil society organizations, members of the European and national parliaments, 53 government observers, as well as 16 intergovernmental organizations, including UN agencies. The Committee is very pleased with this big turnout.”