The United Nations Special Rapporteur on “contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”, Dr. Doudou Diène, has been invited by the U.S. government for a three week visit this month and next to the cities of Washington, New York, Chicago, Omaha, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, and San Juan in Puerto Rico. The stated purpose is for Diène to gather first-hand information on racism in America. He is scheduled to hold meetings with governmental representatives, both at national and local levels, and with members of the legislative and judiciary branches as well as with non-governmental organizations, community members, representatives of political parties, academics and other organizations and individuals working in the field of racism and discrimination.

The invitation should be rescinded immediately. This unwelcome visitor is hardly an objective reporter or impartial judge of racial conditions anywhere.

Diène is from Senegal, a predominantly Muslim country which is a member of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the largest voting bloc at the United Nations. He has consistently sided with that bloc against Western and other democracies such as Japan. His cultural and religious biases have led to his obsession with Islamophobia, which he has called “the most serious form of religious defamation.”

For example, Diène has repeatedly criticized the Danish government for placing freedom of expression above “combating religious intolerance and incitement to religious hatred” on the grounds that it was not quick enough to condemn a private newspaper’s publication in 2006 of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He has criticized “groups that have instrumentalized the freedom of expression” – a direct assault on the First Amendment guarantees embodied in our most basic instrument of liberty, the U.S. Constitution. Yet Diène failed to condemn a blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon brought to his attention by the Wiesenthal Center that appeared a year earlier in the ArabNews (billed as Saudi Arabia’s first English-language daily newspaper). The cartoon depicted rats wearing skullcaps bearing the Star of David, scurrying backwards and forwards through holes in the wall of an edifice bearing the poster "Palestine House."

Diène was also silent about government-issued schoolbooks in Egypt and Saudi Arabia that promote hatred against Jews and Christians, which UN Watch had asked him to condemn without success. These books, according to UN Watch, refer to Jews and Christians as “cursed,” as “infidels,” as “unbelievers,” and as “enemies of Islam.” They teach schoolchildren that “the Jews are a people of betrayal and treachery” and that “a malicious Crusader-Jewish alliance [is] striving to eliminate Islam from all the continents.”

Diène’s double standard reeks of hypocrisy. He believes that democratic processes in the West are leading to anti-Muslim rhetoric and to immigration-limiting political parties coming to power, shutting off the possibility of his model of a multicultural society. The only catch is that Diène’s definition of a multicultural society applies only to the Western host countries which must continue to subsidize Muslim immigrants with generous welfare payments and at the same time adjust their own enlightened norms of individual freedoms to archaic Muslim sensibilities. Islamic leaders in the West meanwhile remain free to discourage integration of Muslims into Western culture for which they continue to express unbridled contempt. Diène is playing right into the Islamic Jihadists’ long term strategy of destroying Western civilization from within so that, in the Muslim Brotherhood’s words, “it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

Diène talks about how Western-style racism against Muslims is the major factor causing the so-called clash of civilizations between the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic cultures. Where is his condemnation of Islamic fanatics practicing a faith that demands conquest and subjugation of the adherents of all other beliefs, whether they are Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Bahá'ís, or atheists? Virtually all of the worst acts of terrorism in the world today are committed, financed, and led by such fanatics who claim to be acting in the name of Allah. Saudi Arabia, the self-proclaimed guardian of the Islamic faith, is the fountainhead of religious intolerance and of the strict segregation of Muslims from non-Muslims. It is a land where it is a crime punishable by death for non-Muslims to even set foot in certain “holy” areas.

The United States is far from perfect, to be sure, but Dr. Diène has nothing useful to say to us about how we can improve racial conditions in this country. Rather, Diène has much to learn from our example of steady progression toward achieving the ideals of individual dignity, freedom of conscience, and equal rights for all Americans irrespective of their religious beliefs, race, nationality or gender. He would make much better use of his time concentrating on real human suffering caused by real instances of “racism, xenophobia and intolerance” such as the rampant Arab racism against blacks in Sudan that has led to genocide and slavery.

In short, there is much work for Diène to do in helping to reduce racism in the world if he is serious in his intentions and not just trying to score propaganda points. He should end his wasteful foray to the United States immediately and get started on tackling the spreading cancer of Islamic racism and religious intolerance.