Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson?

You'll find the words "Truly Global" under the school seal of Thunderbird, The Garvin School of International Management. Those words, and the seal, appear on an invitation to join the chairmen of Thunderbird in honoring Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner, at a reception and dinner at the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa Ballroom on April 10. The reputations of the school itself and of the chairmen - among them Lattie and Elva Coor and the Herbergers - are sterling. Unfortunately, the reputation of the honored guest is somewhat less than that.

Last year, when Robinson was scheduled to speak at Emory University's commencement, more than 1,000 students and staff members signed an online petition accusing Robinson of being anti-Semitic and fostering hostility toward Israel.

Anti-Semitic or not, Robinson presided over the disastrous 2001 World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, at which Zionism was repeatedly equated with racism. In the end, Israel and the United States walked out of the conference in protest, after which Robinson criticized the "American media" for distorting the tone of the conference.

Looking back, Congressman Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) wrote: "To many of us present at the events in Durban, it is clear that much of the responsibility for the debacle rests on the shoulders of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, who, in her role as secretary-general of the conference, failed to provide the leadership needed to keep the conference on track." Of the emergency meeting in Geneva, held a month before the actual conference in an attempt to avert the disaster to come, Lantos wrote, "Mrs. Robinson's intervention with the assembled delegates later in the same day left our delegation deeply shocked and saddened. In her remarks, she advocated precisely the opposite course to the one Secretary Powell and I had urged her to take. Namely, she refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East. Instead, she discussed, 'the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand, and ... the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.'"

Such language is not new. But neither is it acceptable. And the question becomes: If Thunderbird is truly global, in its perspective and its aims, why has it chosen to honor Mary Robinson?

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