The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, will shun a UN conference on racism over concerns about "offensive" anti-Israel language in the programme, a State Department official said yesterday.
However, a decision about sending a lower-level delegation to participate in or observe the meeting, which opens on Friday in Durban, South Africa, has not yet been made, he said.
"It's increasingly clear that the Secretary won't go," the official said. "He has determined that there is too much offensive language about Israel for us to believe that his going could fix it. We're still considering exactly how the United States will be represented, if it will be at all."
The official said a US boycott of the meeting, threatened last week by President Bush, remained. "We will have no representative there so long as they pick on Israel, as long as they continue to say Zionism is racism," Mr Bush told a news conference last Friday, calling the Jewish state "our friend and strong ally".
The State Department official echoed Mr Bush's words. "If all this is going to do is isolate Israel, than we won't go at all," he said.
However, Mr Powell is still considering sending the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, Ms Paula Dobriansky, or Washington's top human rights diplomat, Mr Lorne Craner, to the conference, the official said.
Another way to express US displeasure would be to send an observer delegation of diplomats from various US embassies in Africa, he said.
Mr Powell had indicated that he would like to attend the conference but only if it were "forward-looking" and did not include anti-Israel language.