Twenty-five years ago, the UN held an event that previewed today’s Israel-obsessed Jew hatred. From August 31 to September 8, 2001, the global body ran a massive “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance” in Durban, South Africa.
Officially aimed at celebrating the apartheid regime’s end and charting a path to a better world, the summit was hijacked into a platform for anti-Western, anti-Zionist, and antisemitic demonization – creating the foundation for the rampant hate directed nowadays at the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor and member of the US delegation to Durban, summed it up best: “Having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand, this was the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”
This UN conference, convened by Human Rights Commissioner (and former president of Ireland) Mary Robinson, included cartoons of hook-nosed Jews with “pots of money surrounding their victims” on handouts distributed by the Arab Lawyers Union.
Copies of the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were prominently displayed. Marchers wearing T-shirts with Nazi swastikas and blue stars threatened and intimidated Jewish participants. This travesty took place while Israelis were being slaughtered in Palestinian bombings (erroneously labeled “the Second Intifada”), including the Sbarro pizzeria attack in central Jerusalem (August 9, 2001 – 16 murdered and over 130 wounded) and in Haifa (August 12, 2001 – dozens wounded). The victims were entirely invisible in Durban.
Months before the opening, the takeover of this “anti-racism” conference was carefully planned by UN officials, Iran, the 55-member Organization for Islamic Cooperation, and anti-Western NGOs (non-governmental organizations) such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International.
In a series of preparatory meetings, including one in Tehran, these players orchestrated the hijacking of the ostensible “anti-racism” conference – the events in Durban were carefully rehearsed. (Prior to the Tehran meeting, UN officials, including Robinson, assured members of accredited Jewish NGOs that Iran had agreed to provide visas to allow their participation – one of many fictions during this process).
The main venue for attacking Israel was the conference’s NGO Forum, where 1500 organizations came together in the city’s central football stadium to hurl accusations of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide at Israel. This forum revived the UN’s infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution – adopted in 1975 after a campaign by the USSR and the Arab League and repealed in 1991 as the Soviet Union crumbled.
The NGO industry that claimed to promote universal human rights then picked up the antisemitic and anti-Zionist agendas, which were on full display at Durban’s NGO Forum. The leaders (especially Human Rights Watch) deplatformed delegates from Jewish organizations such as the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. The objective, as clearly stated in the Declaration and Plan of Action (DPOA), was to target Israel uniquely, including launching boycotts and sanctions to prevent it from defending itself.
Following Durban, the same NGOs used the DPOA template for continuous campaigns demonizing Israel with the same chorus of false accusations and claims. In March 2002, the NGOs and the UN were primary sources of the blatant lie accusing the IDF of a massacre in Jenin, as Israel responded to the Palestinian mass bombings. Amnesty International, HRW and other groups launched bogus “research reports” and pseudo-legal analyses. Many were copied by mainstream media platforms, parroted in UN documents, and quoted by politicians and academics.
This cycle was repeated and expanded over the next two decades, including in the Second Lebanon War (2006) and the notorious Goldstone Report on the first Gaza war (Operation Cast Lead) – which Richard Goldstone himself acknowledged was filled with false claims.
This process culminated in the full-scale explosion of anti-Israel hate launched immediately after the first reports were posted on the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023 – again led by the NGOs.
Durban and its successive displays of destructive, unaccountable NGO manipulation should have set off alarms for Western democracies and triggered the creation of serious oversight mechanisms. Instead, the NGO “halo effect” continued to project long-outdated images of altruistic, trusted, and impartial experts. For many years, these organizations’ mounting corruption and moral failures – including extensive antisemitism that a few whistleblowers have lately begun to report – were also systematically ignored.
The need for NGO transparency
Recently, however, lawmakers and elected officials in the US and elsewhere have recognized that the unchecked power and absence of funding transparency among radical NGOs are antithetical to democracy. Reports from USAID’s Inspector General on the terror links of grantees and investigations by the UK’s Charity Commission are important first steps. After October 7, it is clear that many ostensibly humanitarian NGOs are political actors with malevolent agendas. Going further, NGOs with annual budgets in the tens of millions and more should be required to publish details of foreign government donations, much like universities.
Beyond these initial steps, democracies need to review and curtail the special privileges granted to a small number of NGOs and their donors in the 1950s and 1960s, when they were in fact voluntary and altruistic. Today’s reality is characterized by the “sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews” featured at Durban 25 short years ago.
The writer is founder and president of the NGO Monitor research institute and professor emeritus of political studies at Bar-Ilan University.