Ambassador Jeff Bartos: U.N. must abandon anti-American, anti-Western legacy of Durban Conference

"Over the course of the past half-century, virulent anti-Western ideology has become a permanent feature of our international institutions. One of the key inflection points in this transformation took place at a United Nations conference 25 years ago: the U.N.’s World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.

The conference’s stated purpose was to confront alleged racism and bigotry. Today, the United Nations touts the Durban Declaration — the ideological framework adopted at the conference — as ‘the U.N.’s blueprint to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance globally.’ In reality, it represented the instantiation of a set of radical ideas about race, history and Western civilization as the formal dogmas of our most powerful global institutions.

Since then, the anniversary of the Durban Declaration has frequently served as an opportunity for radical bureaucrats to reaffirm and double down on their anti-Western hatred. Nearly every five years since the conference, including next week, the U.N. commemorates and revels in the falsehoods and civilizational self-hatred that the conference has propagated across the international system. The United States will not have any part in celebrating this poisonous legacy. In fact, we are urging countries to join us in rejecting this propaganda and taking a meaningful step forward in repairing the rot within the U.N...

Because of the Durban conference, extremist ideologues who had long festered at the fringes of the international system were pulled under one tent, handed credentials and microphones and given the imprimatur of the United Nations.

The result was radically anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Christian, antisemitic and dedicated to the destruction of the very civilization that gave birth to the United Nations itself.

The Durban conference itself was a testament to the radicalism of this project...Yasser Arafat delivered a speech denouncing Israel as a racist colonial oppressor, while the conference’s NGO Forum called for Israel’s ‘complete and total isolation’ through sanctions and embargoes, laying the groundwork for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement years before BDS became fashionable on Western campuses. Protestors outside circulated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and chanted that Hitler should have finished the job.

The United States walked out.

Since then, the radicalism codified in Durban has metastasized and spread...The United Nations lost something too: credibility. Every time it returns to Durban, it poisons its own brand — and helps fuel the same conflicts it should be fighting to end.

President Trump has made clear: America will not apologize for being America — or perpetuate a system that teaches others to hate us for our success.

The world has had 25 years to see where the Durban conference’s ideology leads. We must reject its poison of grievance politics and anti-Western hatred. It’s time to burn and bury the Durban conference’s legacy of Third-Worldism and hostility toward Western civilization. Under President Trump and Secretary Rubio, the United States will continue to speak out against this evil ideological project in the U.N. system or wherever it appears around the world.

Instead, we welcome allies, partners and friends: Join the United States in embracing pride in our past and confidence in our future — and rejecting the politics of shame, self-hatred and decline."