Joining a host of other countries that have decided to bocott the event due to alleged fears that the conference's planning documents are offensive to Israel, the US announced that it too will not attend the UN's upcoming conference on racism -- capitulating to Israel's outrageous demands. The conference is slated to "review" the 2001 Durban "World Conference Against Racism." I presume everyone's in a tizzy over part of that conference's "Programme of Action", in which they declare Palestine's right to self-determination:

63. We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion;

The US also joined Israel in a walkout of this 2001 conference. This is the problem with the US' perverse relationship with Israel: it stands beside it even in Israel's most blatantly Zionist moments. It seems that any statement advocating self-determination for Palestine can be construed under this rubric as anti-Semitic, which demonstrates how deeply problematic this kind of rhetoric is for politics. It can only work under a theocratic Byzantine view of the state in which a threat to national sovereignty is concurrently a threat to religion. But it doesn't just stop there, it uses the highly politicized vocabulary of "anti-Semitic" to cushion the impact of critics, and to manipulate through rhetoric their attacks into bigotry. This isn't just heinously fucked up, but it also erodes the power of future uses of "anti-Semitic" to actually refer to prejudice against Jewish people.

Saying that Palestine deserves self-determination is not and cannot on its face be rendered anti-Semitic, and arguing that it is is zealous religious-nationalism. Israel is wrong on this, and using religion as a rationale for their occupation of Palestine is disgusting and must end. It's no different than Christians embarking to "recapture" Jerusalem under the banner of the Crusades. It's political occupation of a people justified by religion, and it cannot be tolerated.