So said President Bush in a speech last May 29. At the end of the speech he said: “I call on President Bashir to stop his obstruction, and to allow the peacekeepers in, and to end the campaign of violence that continues to target innocent men, women and children. And I promise this to the people of Darfur: The United States will not avert our eyes from a crisis that challenges the conscience of the world.”

Just last November 1, in a message to Congress on the “Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Sudan,” he wrote: “Because the actions and policies of the Government of Sudan continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, the national emergency [originally declared by President Clinton in 1997] must continue in effect beyond November 3, 2007.”

It was strange, then, to find in attendance at the Annapolis conference on Tuesday one John Ukec, ambassador to the U.S. from Sudan. In other words, among the invitees of a purported peace conference was a representative of a regime that the convener of the gathering himself, George Bush, had openly accused of genocide.

Sudan’s presence, though, wasn’t totally inappropriate to the morally upside-down world of the conference, which pitted a lone democracy, Israel, against the dictatorial-anarchic Palestinian Authority backed by a supporting cast of nine other Arab dictatorships of which Sudan was only the most egregious, along with the Arab League and the 56-member Organization of the Islamic Conference only a handful of whose countries could loosely qualify as democracies.

Moral inversion was well manifested in the Israeli-Palestinian “joint statement”—pursued like a sacred elixir for months by Secretary of State Rice and finally read out by Bush at the start of the conference—in which the sides “express our determination to . . . confront terrorism and incitement, whether committed by Palestinians or Israelis.”

With those words Israel—a democracy struggling against sixty years of violent aggression that does not engage in terrorism or incitement any more than Finland or Iceland—trashed its achievements, its identity, its Jewish heritage, and equated itself with one of the most terroristic and incitement-ridden societies of all time.

All the key players agreed that turning that society into a state—within a year—was the supreme goal. As Bush put it: “The [final peace] settlement will establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people just as Israel is the homeland for the Jewish people. . . .” As Prime Minister Olmert put it: “When negotiations are concluded, I believe we will be able to fulfill the vision set out by President Bush: two states for two peoples; a terror-free state for the Palestinians and a Jewish democratic state, free of terror threats….”

It was President Abbas, the object of so much Western courtship, who was able to get past the airy generalities and be much more specific about his “vision,” proclaiming “the right of my people to see a new dawn, with no occupation, no settlement, no separation wall, no prisons with thousands of prisoners, no assassinations, no siege, and no roadblocks around villages and cities.”

And again: “a halt to all settlement activities including natural growth . . . removing settlement outposts, roadblocks, and releasing prisoners. . . .”

In other words: not a single Jew living or being born in Judea and Samaria, not a single Israeli antiterror measure, not a single terrorist in an Israeli prison instead of roaming free, and—“We want east Jerusalem to be our capital”—the world’s most sacred Jewish and Christian sites being handed over to Muslim rule.

And to all this Bush and Olmert and the many other representatives of democracies present, sunk so deep in moral equivalency regarding the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” that they can no longer use words accurately, think straight, or make the most axiomatic distinctions, could only say amen. Meanwhile violent anti-Annapolis riots broke out not only in Gaza but also in Ramallah, Hebron, Nablus, Qalqilya, and Tulkarm in the putatively Abbas-ruled West Bank, with security forces firing into the crowds and killing at least one rioter and wounding dozens more.

To contrast this with the few entirely peaceful anti-Annapolis demonstrations in Israel; to note that this is the Palestinian Authority whose quick conversion into a democracy President Bush has made an obsessive theme—any such observation would have been seen as an unacceptable insult to the assembled jihadists, dictators, and genocidists. The best hope for the Annapolis conference is that it was a passing, ugly spectacle of democracy dragging itself through the mud of Middle Eastern barbarism.