Durban IV Conference: Racism masquerading as Anti-Racism
Max Pollack
On September 22nd, the United Nations hosted the 4th Durban Conference on Anti-Racism in New York. The Durban Conference, or formally the United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), has a very lofty and progressive goal yet the Conference is used to do the one thing it's specifically against -- promote racism. The first Durban Conference took place in 2001 in the city of Durban, South Africa. The second conference happened in 2009 in Geneva. The third was two years later also in New York. All these conferences have been widely critized as antisemitic.
Antisemitism at the international level is an immense problem but the Durban Conference brought it to a boiling point. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has a popular working definition of antisemitism that includes eleven examples of how antisemitism manifests itself. The rhetoric of the Durban Conferences, most infamously a speech given by then-Iranian President Ahmadinejad during the 2009 conference, violates at least six of these examples. Outside the first Durban Conference, protestors carried inflammatory and racist signs comparing Jews to the Nazi regime and many more hate fueled signs. Attendants to other past conferencesdistributed copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other antisemitic texts and cartoons. The streets of Durban IV were more peaceful. Some protests and pamphlet distribution but not the vitriolic hate speech of conferences past. Part of that must be the subdued nature of most protests due to COVID-19, but it might be a sign that people are taking antisemitism more seriously.
There was only one head of state that attended the second Durban Conference in 2009, Iranian President Ahmadinejad. In his speech he used antisemitism to attack Israel including saying that Jews used the holocaust as a pretext for the creation of Israel. His team gave out a copy of his speech for the event which called the Holocaust “ambiguous and dubious”. His racism and holocaust denial. In 2009, there were 10 countries that boycotted the event. This past week a total of 38 countries openly boycotted the event because of the unapologetic Jew hatred that the whole Durban ‘anti-racism’ framework demonstrates. The nations that boycotted the event were Albania, Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Moldova, Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, United States, and Uruguay. The Israeli Foreign Ministry is the primary force behind the boycott. Yair Lapid, the Israeli Alternate Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, spent the past few weeks convincing countries to boycott the event. His use of diplomacy shows a large departure from the foreign relations of the Likud government that recently went out of power.
The United Nations has some issues as a body when it comes to different forms of racism but continuing to promote what started as a forum to scapegoat the Jews – and hasn’t improved much since—only hurts their mission and international anti-racism efforts. The Durban Conference needs to have systemic changes otherwise it will continue to be racism masquerading as anti-racism.