Durban: A milestone in the new antisemitism

"The Durban Conference in South Africa in September 2001 was not just an event; it was a turning point. It was the modern-day Wannsee that planned the contemporary destruction of the Jewish people.

I was there for the Italian newspaper, La Stampa. The stench of something rotten was already emanating from the preparations for the great gathering ‘against racism’ convened by the United Nations, with the participation of an enormous number of NGOs—some 3,000—all of them with knives between their teeth, determined to demonstrate that, under the banner of human rights, the real enemy was Israel...

At Durban, the death sentence against Israel went hand in hand, for the first time, with the preemptive legitimization of terrorism, now carried out by ‘freedom fighters’ rather than the terrorists of Munich or Fiumicino.

At a demonstration along the battered streets on the outskirts of Durban, just days before Sept. 11, the crowd marched behind portraits of its mastermind, Osama bin Laden. Along the dusty road, young NGO activists called—as their documents did—on ‘all of civil society,’ from the Maya to the Tibetans, everyone oppressed by racism, to embrace the struggle against Israel and transform it into the fundamental human-rights struggle...

The conference was organized by a United Nations that had by then been captured by the great Third World and Islamic blocs that had reliably provided the Soviet Union with a majority. ‘Zionism is racism,’ the 1975 resolution, was an addendum to the death sentence against Judaism following Hitler’s attempt to eliminate it from the planet.

Israel was the new target of antisemitism, invariably linked to anti-Americanism and viewed as the spearhead of the colonial and imperialist West...

Durban is a milestone in the antisemitic catastrophe that once again torments the world today, and the United Nations is its prophet."