Add The New York Post on Google The coming week will be heavy with 9/11 commemorations, which for many New Yorkers still feels like yesterday. But this week, I’ll also be remembering another event that also feels like yesterday: thousands chanting “Free, Free, Palestine!,” “Jew, Jew, Jew!,” and “Israel commits genocide!” No, I don’t mean Columbia University in 2024. I mean the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001.
This now-infamous UN event, 25 years ago this week, was ideologically hijacked by a group of autocratic nations called the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which commandeered the proceedings to focus exclusively on Israel — thereby averting the world’s eyes from their own crimes. The Hitler-themed posters that blanketed the UN conference in Durban were funded by the family of Osama bin Laden.
The clown show began in early 2001, when Iran, hosting the Asia region’s pre-planning conference in Tehran, barred Israeli officials and Jewish groups from attending. At their blissfully Jew-free conference, delegates from authoritarian states drafted a UN declaration naming only one country — Israel — as a racist human-rights violator. The OIC included regimes whose ideas of tolerance ranged from legalizing child rape to gassing civilians with chemical weapons. These states were delighted to sign on. Later in Geneva, the OIC proposed language for the main UN declaration about Israel committing “genocide.” (The 2001 death toll from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was just under a third of that year’s homicide rate in Baltimore.)
The goal was clear to American delegate Tom Lantos, a congressman and Holocaust survivor. “If the OIC delegates could turn Israel into the new apartheid South Africa — the world’s sole racist regime — the broad agenda of the WCAR [World Conference against Racism] could be overthrown,” he later wrote.
Lantos saw that the OIC regimes’ plan was precisely to destroy the meaning of human rights. To UN human-rights commissioner Mary Robinson, Lantos argued that “allowing these same forces to appropriate terms like ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘genocide,’ and ’crimes against humanity’ to describe Israel’s behavior would forever debase their meaning.”
In Durban, 20,000 protesters swarmed the conference venues, chanting “Free, free Palestine!” and carrying a banner reading “Hitler was Right.” Inside, delegates distributed copies of the century-old antisemitic screed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and cartoons of bloody-fanged Jews. Ubiquitous posters featured Hitler’s face over the text “What if I had won? There would be NO Israel.”
The wall-to-wall Jew-hate silenced dissent, literally. At one point, Jewish groups organized an emergency press conference to publicize the hatred. There, one delegate recalled, a “phalanx of Iranian women in black” rushed the podium to prevent them from speaking. By then, conference security advised Jewish delegates not to walk the few blocks to Durban’s Jewish community center; it was too dangerous.
When the NGO conference forum voted on its official Declaration and Action Plan, Jewish groups attempted to add language about antisemitic violence. With precious few exceptions, 3,600 NGOs all voted to delete it. After that, surrounded by jeering crowds, the Jewish delegates walked out — quickly, with bodyguards.
In the seventy-page Declaration voted and approved by those 3,600 NGOs, only one country on earth was named. Israel was the world’s only “racist nation,” a “colonial apartheid state” guilty of “genocide.” In a victory for regimes worldwide actually engaging in racist, colonial, apartheid, genocidal rule — and a defeat for millions suffering under their reign — no other countries were even mentioned. Al Qaeda, equally unworthy of mention, waited in the wings.
To its credit, the American delegation walked out of this clown show. “I have taken this decision with regret, because of the importance of the international fight against racism and the contribution the conference could have made to it,” US Secretary of State Colin Powell said as he announced the walkout, but “I am convinced that will not be possible.”
It wasn’t. Words like “racism,” “antisemitism” and “genocide” were rendered meaningless, which was the goal. These words were now shiny things dictators wore on their lapels, distracting everyone from the populations they tortured back home. The world’s premier human-rights organizations, whose courage once brought down the world’s worst tyrants, had now all bowed down to tyrants, and flushed their credibility down the toilet.
This left the UN and human-rights advocates worldwide emptied of words and meaning when the conference triumphantly ended — four days before Sept. 11, 2001.
I still can’t believe they all fell for it. Twenty-five years later, too many still do.
Dara Horn is the author of “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living” (Avid Reader Press) from which this essay is adapted.
