An ominous warning about Islamism’s growing – Latest News
The coming week shall be heavy with 9/11 commemorations, which for a lot of New Yorkers nonetheless appears like yesterday. But this week, I’ll even be remembering one other occasion that additionally appears like yesterday: 1000’s chanting “Free, Free, Palestine!,” “Jew, Jew, Jew!,” and “Israel commits genocide!” No, I don’t imply Columbia University in 2024. I imply the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001.
This now-infamous UN occasion, 25 years in the past this week, was ideologically hijacked by a group of autocratic nations known as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which commandeered the proceedings to focus completely on Israel — thereby averting the world’s eyes from their own crimes. The Hitler-themed posters that blanketed the UN convention in Durban have been funded by the household of Osama bin Laden.
OIC protests on the 2001 UN Durban convention. AFP through Getty Images
The clown show started in early 2001, when Iran, internet hosting the Asia area’s pre-planning convention in Tehran, barred Israeli officers and Jewish teams from attending. At their blissfully Jew-free convention, delegates from authoritarian states drafted a UN declaration naming just one nation — Israel — as a racist human-rights violator. The OIC included regimes whose concepts of tolerance ranged from legalizing baby rape to gassing civilians with chemical weapons. These states have been delighted to signal on. Later in Geneva, the OIC proposed language for the primary UN declaration about Israel committing “genocide.” (The 2001 death toll from the Israeli-Palestinian battle was just below a third of that yr’s murder price in Baltimore.)
The objective 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 noticed that the OIC regimes’ plan was exactly to destroy the which means 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.”
That is strictly what occurred, besides a lot worse.
Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Anadolu through Getty Images
In Durban, 20,000 protesters swarmed the convention venues, chanting “Free, free Palestine!” and carrying a banner studying “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 textual content “What if I had won? There would be NO Israel.”
The wall-to-wall Jew-hate silenced dissent, actually. At one level, Jewish teams organized an emergency press convention to publicize the hatred. There, one delegate recalled, a “phalanx of Iranian women in black” rushed the rostrum to forestall them from talking. By then, convention security suggested Jewish delegates to not stroll the few blocks to Durban’s Jewish group middle; it was too harmful.
When the NGO convention discussion board voted on its official Declaration and Action Plan, Jewish teams tried so as to add language about antisemitic violence. With treasured few exceptions, 3,600 NGOs all voted to delete it. After that, surrounded by jeering crowds, the Jewish delegates walked out — shortly, with bodyguards.
In the seventy-page Declaration voted and accredited by these 3,600 NGOs, just one nation on earth was named. Israel was the world’s solely “racist nation,” a “colonial apartheid state” guilty of “genocide.” In a victory for regimes worldwide truly partaking in racist, colonial, apartheid, genocidal rule — and a defeat for thousands and thousands struggling underneath their reign — no different nations have been even talked about. Al Qaeda, equally unworthy of point out, waited within 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 mentioned as he introduced the walkout, however “I am convinced that will not be possible.”
US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell testifies earlier than the House Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, October 24, 2001. Getty Images
It wasn’t. Words like “racism,” “antisemitism” and “genocide” have been rendered meaningless, which was the objective. These phrases have been now shiny issues dictators wore on their lapels, distracting everybody from the populations they tortured back home. The world’s premier human-rights organizations, whose braveness as soon as introduced 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 phrases and which means when the convention triumphantly ended — 4 days earlier than Sept. 11, 2001.
I nonetheless can’t imagine all of them fell for it. Twenty-five years later, too many nonetheless do.
Dara Horn is the writer of “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living” (Avid Reader Press) from which this essay is customized.
