N The Ideological War Within the West

JUNE 2002 E V I E W R EARLY a year before the September 11 attacks, news stories provided a preview of the transnational politics of the future. In October 2000, in preparation for the UN Conference Against Racism, about 50 American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) called on the UN ‘to hold the United States accountable for the intractable and persistent problem of discrimination’. The NGOs included Amnesty International-USA (AI-USA), Human Rights Watch (HRW), the ArabAmerican Institute, National Council of Churches, the NAACP, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and others. Their spokesman stated that their demands ‘had been repeatedly raised with Federal and State officials [in the US] but to little effect. In frustration we now turn to the United Nations’. In other words, the NGOs, unable to enact the policies they favoured through the normal processes of American constitutional democracy—the Congress, state governments, even the federal courts—appealed to authority outside of American democracy and its Constitution. At the UN Conference against Racism, which was held in Durban two weeks before September 11, American NGOs supported ‘reparations’ from Western nations for the historic transatlantic slave trade and developed resolutions that condemned only the West, without mentioning the larger traffic in African slaves sent to Islamic lands. The NGOs even endorsed a resolution denouncing free market capitalism as a ‘fundamentally flawed system’. N The Ideological War Within the West