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Twenty-five years after the infamous 2001 Durban Conference, the UN Human Rights Council held a session to celebrate the anniversary. UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer was the only one to challenge the whitewashing of history. Click for video
Highlights:
President of the U.N. Human Rights Council:
We will now begin the high level panel discussion on the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Durban Declaration…
Deputy U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights:
The Durban Declaration and Program of Action is a global blueprint for racial justice…
Belarus:
The Durban Declaration and Program of Action were a milestone.
Angola:
It’s a milestone.
Human Rights Watch:
It’s a moment to celebrate…
Hillel Neuer (UN Watch):
Mr. President, the measure of an event lies not in its aspirations, but in its legacy. Twenty-five years ago, in Durban, the UN convened a World Conference Against Racism. But this mission was betrayed.
It was turned into a conference for racism. In the streets, thousands of radical activists marched against Israel and Jews, some carrying signs praising Adolf Hitler. Jewish students were threatened. The Arab Lawyers Union handed out cartoons of hook-nosed Jews. Copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the notorious antisemitic forgery, were openly sold.
At the NGO Forum, Israel was declared a “racist apartheid state,” and accused of “genocide.” In the Durban outcome document, the Jewish state alone was singled out as a perpetrator of racism. Holocaust survivor and Congressman Tom Lantos called it “the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews” he had witnessed since the Nazi era.
Durban was a turning point. Antisemitism was repackaged in the language of human rights. Ancient libels were given new terms: “apartheid,” “racism,” “genocide.” Once embedded in UN discourse, that vocabulary spread to civil society, media, and campuses. The singling out of the world’s only Jewish state—as uniquely evil—became normalized.
Today, we live with the consequences. Jews are attacked in the streets of major cities, targeted in synagogues, harassed on campuses. And when a mandate-holder of this Council publicly amplifies rhetoric describing the Jewish state as “the incarnation of evil” — and is backed by Iran and South Africa — we must ask: Has the lesson of Durban truly been learned?
