November 2001 Feature

Through a Glass, Darkly: Durban and September 11th
Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.... The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.”
—-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1872)
When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews.... Anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic. It is the denial to the Jewish people of the fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord to all other nations of the globe.
—-Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)
The road—ideologically, not practically speaking—from Durban to Bergen-Belsen is shorter than many people think.
—-Sever Plotzker, Yediot Ahronot, September 3, 2001

The terrible destruction of September 11th came out of the sky but not out of the blue. The World Conference Against Racism (WCAR)—concluding two days before in Durban, South Africa—provided a preview of the worldview that terrorism’s apologists want to impose on the Jewish people, the United States, and the international community. The WCAR had to be extended over the weekend so that face-saving “compromise” resolutions could be adopted papering over the Conference’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Western biases. Then, within 48 hours of its adjournment, this propaganda circus disappeared instantly from media consciousness when the first hijacked plane impacted the Word Trade Center on Tuesday morning.
Yet for those of us profoundly saddened by the WCAR’s results, the gnawing sense remains of a disturbing symmetry between the travesty in Durban and the tragedy in New York and Washington.
As President George W. Bush explained in his speech before a Joint Session of Congress, the perpetrators of September 11th’s terrorist carnage hijacked more than four airplanes; through their propaganda, they had hijack-ed one of the world’s great religions, trying to convert mainstream Islam into a fanatic gospel of hate and violence.
There was also a hijacking at Durban. It was the truth about the Shoah. The pathological creed belittling or denying the Holocaust had spread from the ranks of hard-core Holocaust deniers to a majority of the UN’s NGOs (non-governmental organizations) from around the globe attending the Durban Conference. For so many participants in the international community to sink to this level within the lifetime of survivors was a sad day for humanity. Today, as we strive to improve our physical security against future terrorist attacks, we also need to act to reclaim the language and morality of internationalism, stolen by terrorism’s fellow travelers at Durban.
Amidst the terrible carnage in New York and Washing-ton and Pennsylvania September 11th, the values of Ameri-can patriotism and humanitarianism have reawakened. To defeat terrorism, the United States needs to do more than lead an international alliance of governments. It must forge a worldwide community of civilized people—across lines of race, creed, and national boundaries—united by the bonds of respect for the dignity of human life and a commitment to tolerance.
This account of high hopes and bitter disappointments at the Durban Conference is based heavily on the observations of participants representing the Simon Wiesen-thal Center: Dr. Shimon Samuels, Director of Internation-al Liaison; Sergio Widder, Latin American representative; and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Center.1 The Wiesenthal Center is a Jewish NGO with consultative status at the United Nations.

Orwellian Double-Speak
For the third time in a quarter of a century, a UN Conference has failed almost totally to promote the fight against “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance”—the ostensible purpose of the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR).
The term “racism” was coined in 1936 to rally scientific and political opinion against Nazi doctrines of “Aryan superiority” over Jews and other alleged “untermenschen.” In 1948, a popularizer of the term, Julian Huxley, served as the first director general of the United Nations Education-al, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). That was the year when the struggle against “racism” so conceived helped inspire both the UN Declaration of Human Rights and Israel’s declaration of statehood with the UN’s blessings. Who, then, would have believed that, within a generation, not only would these two landmark events be decoupled but that the UN General Assembly would vote, as it did in 1975, to equate “Zionism with racism”?
George Orwell would not have been surprised. Coining the term “double-speak” in 1948, Orwell tried to teach us that the perversion of language by political ideology was among the 20th century’s most dangerous trends. In 1978 and 1983, UN antiracism conferences held in Geneva were derailed precisely by the political abuse of language in the service of international hatred and violence. Proving petrodollars thicker than water or blood, the Arab world and its totalitarian allies twice manipulated “Third World” opinion to dictate conference resolutions that demonized “the Government of Israel and its Zionist and other supporters” for “diverse forms of racial discrimination against Palestinians” and denied the Jewish people the same right to self-determination accorded every UN member state and claimed by Palestinian Arabs for themselves. The governments of Israel and the US boycotted these earlier propaganda circuses. Now in 2001, the United States and Israel again had to withdraw from another Orwellian event that perverted its own promise.

A Wasted Opportunity
Invoking the “the dream of a world free of racial hatred and bias [that] remains only half fulfilled,” the sponsors of WCAR, 2001, promoted it as “a unique opportunity to create a new world vision for the first [time] against racism in the 21st century.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center—the only Jewish nongovernmental organization elected to the NGO Forum’s Coordinating Committee and voted a place on the 20-member NGO Steering Committee—made a sustained effort to see that the WCAR lived up to its billing. There were reasons for cautious optimism. The 2001 Confer-ence was scheduled for the tenth anniversary of the General Assembly’s repeal of the 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism. Secretary General Kofi Annan promised that this “a low point” in UN history would never be repeated. During the decade since the passage of the 1991 repeal resolution, the Oslo peace process raised hopes, the apartheid regime in South Africa collapsed, international courts of justice commenced investigations of crimes against humanity in Bosnia and Rwanda, human rights-oriented NGOs increased in number and sophistication, and a growing community of claimants—exploited women and children, the disabled, asylum seekers, gypsies, indigenous peoples, untouchable castes, and victims of slavery and colonialism—asserted their right to recognition and respect.
The WCAR indeed had a unique opportunity to showcase a maturing global crusade for human rights and develop consensus strategies for attacking racism and re-lated forms of intolerance across a broad front. As UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson observed, the WCAR should have been “a conference about victims of racial discrimination, a conference to move us forward toward reconciliation. This conference cannot solve the Middle East problem.” Unfortunately, such cautionary words were wasted on Yasir Arafat, whose inflammatory WCAR speech attacking Israel for a “new and advanced type of apartheid” coincided with a new suicide bombing in Jerusalem by one of the “heroic martyrs” whom Arafat has eulogized as “noble souls” and “the model of manhood and sacrifice for Allah and the homeland.” For Arafat the WCAR had no meaning except as an extension by demagogic oratory of the terrorist Intifada II.
The Road to Failure: Teheran and Geneva
In retrospect, it is clear that the Palestinians and their allies were committed to a rule-or-ruin strategy that foredoomed the WCAR before the first speech was made. Dr. Shimon Samuels, who is a founder and board member of ENAR (the European Network Against Racism), which groups over 600 anti-racist NGOs across the European Union, and chaired the Jewish Caucus at the WCAR, had a unique vantage point.
During the two-year lead-up to the Durban Confer-ence, Dr. Samuels attended preparatory meetings in Strasbourg, Warsaw, Santiago, and Geneva. Across Europe, he witnessed “an incremental process of semantic theft” as left-wing movements marked “Kristallnacht 1938” in November, 2000, while ignoring over 100 antisemitic attacks on synagogues worldwide in the same month. Ceremonies honoring “Righteous Gentiles” in France were marred by municipal protests against the presence of the Israeli ambassador.
In April 2001, Dr. Samuels and Rabbi Cooper, in violation of his UN consultative status, were excluded from the Teheran meeting, which also barred Israel and brought back the “Zionism is Racism” formula while deleting the phenomenon of “antisemitism” from the governmental draft declaration. According to the Teheran Times, Iran was “the best venue for holding this preparatory meeting, as the Iranians can rightly boast that they have an ancient culture and civilization free from all kinds of bias and discrimination.” Discreetly going without mention were such contemporary manifestations of Iranian “tolerance” as the show trials of Iranian Jews as “Israeli spies” and the persecution of Iranian Bahais for practicing their faith.
Instead of removing the rabid terminology introduced in Teheran, the Geneva Prepcom 3 meeting refined such Teheran strategies as:
• The expropriation of the term “Holocaust,” reflected in the new doctrine of “the three holocausts” (note the use of the lower case and the plural to trivialize the unmentioned Nazi genocide): “the twin holocausts” of the Atlantic slave trade and new world slavery (the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades in Arab and Muslim societies are downplayed), and the “third holocaust” of the “Naqba” or the Israeli-perpetrated Palestinian “Catastrophe.”
• The assimilation of “anti-Semitism” (note the hyphen) into the new concepts of “Arabophobia” (hence the accusations of “Anti-Arabism” and “Zionist practices against Semitism”) and Islamophobia (no mention of discrimination in Arab and Islamic societies against non-Muslims).
• The proposal to eliminate any mention of anti-Jewish practices, including Holocaust Denial on the Internet, because “antisemitism is not a manifestation of ‘contemporary racism.’”
• The redefinition of Israel’s history of national liberation and legitimate self-defense against aggression and terrorism as the acts of “a racist apartheid state” guilty of “war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing” and even “environmental racism.” Israel’s leaders are to be prosecuted and its people isolated as pariahs and Israel subjected to punitive sanctions.
• The denunciation of Israel’s “Right to Return Law,” coupled with a demand all diaspora Palestinians be granted such a right.
• The justification of Palestinian terrorism in terms of a blanket, international “right to resist,” coupled with the rejection of Israel’s self-defense against terrorism as a “pretext.”
At Geneva, prestigious NGOs such as Amnesty International, Save the Children, and Franciscans Inter-national expressed alarm at this inflammatory language, but would not speak out in solidarity with its Jewish targets. Indeed, Human Rights Watch refused even to protest “calls for violence” in the NGO Draft, which it defended as “being justified if against apartheid or on behalf of the Intifada.” The most that Jewish participants were able to accomplish was the substitution of “occupying power” for “Zionist” in sections of the draft.
A special, pre-WCAR programming that included a daily “Voices Forum,” under the patronage of UN Human Rights High Commissioner Mary Robinson, featured victims of racism. The Wiesenthal Center’s nomination of a sole Israeli candidate was rejected. “The region was overrepresented,” Dr. Samuels was informed by the organizers, who hastened to assure Center officials they would accept a victim of antisemitism from Russia or Central Europe. Simultaneous with the Geneva preparatory summit, a children’s book, Stand Up For Your Rights, with a Foreword by High Commissioner Robinson, was released in England by World Book Encyclopedia to celebrate “50 years of human rights.” The Wiesenthal Center protested its listing of “Palestine” but not Israel in its roster of nations.
Thus, in 2001, the UN resumed its pre-1991 role as an ideological and political juggernaut for marginalizing Israel, on the model of apartheid South Africa. In longer perspective, its goal was the antithesis of the Zionist aspiration to “normalize” the Jewish condition. The isolated vulnerable position of the individual Jew in a hostile diaspora would now be replicated by Israel’s embattled position in the community of nations.

The Three-Ring Circus in Durban
The WCAR proceeded in three overlapping arenas: a youth summit (August 26-27), a nongovernmental forum (August 28-September 1), and the official governmental track (September 1-7). There were approximately 14,000 participants, representing 3,900 NGOs, and 15 heads of state from 166 nations. Among them was Fidel Castro, lauded as leader of the “most democratic country in the world” by Dr. Nkosasana Dlamini-Zuma, South Africa’s foreign minister, and applauded by crowds for his criticism of “the dreadful genocide perpetrated, at this very moment, against our Palestinian brothers.”

The Youth Summit: Intimidation and Insult
The pageantry of anti-Israel invective both within and beyond South Africa was thoroughly coordinated and choreographed. On the Internet, Palestinians alerted their networks of the need for “Islamic ‘Concrete Results’.” On his way to Durban, Faruq Qaddumi, the PLO’s political chief, explained that this meant demonstrations showing that “Israeli practices against the Palestinians have surpassed the holocaust in horror.” On August 22, 10,000 to 20,000 demonstrators organized by Capetown’s Muslim Judicial Council staged a March chanting “We Will Liberate Al-Quds” and “Free Palestine,” and displaying posters with bloody hands painted on them demanding the indictment of Ariel Sharon as a “war criminal” and telling “America to Go To Hell, Zionism Is Racism.”
On August 31, an even larger, more boisterous demonstration, claiming 60,000 participants, took place in Capetown. An international contingent included African American visitors, some of whom carried placards reading: “UN Stop Killing Iraqi Children.” One South African protester, Mohammed Chung, told the Associated Press that he “would like to put his faith in God and become a suicide bomber.” The crush of demonstrators was too great for General Kofi Annan and Thabo Mbeki. They failed to arrive at the Speaker’s Corner about 100 meters from the Inter-national Convention Centre to receive a “People’s Mani-festo” from the massive march, organized by the Durban Social Forum, including the South African Palestine Solidar-ity Committee and other organizations grouped around the South African National NGO Coalition.
In Baghdad, Iraq hosted its own parallel summit where 350 Muslim clerics from 15 countries heard Izaat Ibrahim, the Deputy Chairman of Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council, demand that Arab and Islamic states unite to “expel the sons of apes and pigs from the holy places in Palestine.” In Israel, where there was a small pro-Israel demonstration by foreign workers in Eilat on the 3lst, the Palestinians even tried to use the Internet to discourage participation. Potential demonstrators were lectured that they were held “in virtual slavery” and that the Talmud considers “all non-Jews as ‘animals in human shape’.”
Back in Durban, such venomous hatreds spilled over from the streets and the parking lots into the conference halls. On Thursday and Friday, August 29-30, the Durban police had difficulty controlling clashes between rival street demonstrators. Jewish demonstrators waved Israeli and South African flags, sang Hebrew songs, and offered flowers to shouting Palestinians who did not reciprocate with bouquets. On Monday, a “Hitler pamphlet” with a picture of the Führer and a caption reading, “If I had won the war there would be no...Palestinian blood lost,” surfaced at the Durban Exhibition Center. Though the Palestinian Caucus denied responsibility, members of a group of 60 Palestinians, who also had five anti-Israel, Neturei Kata rabbis in tow, were seen handing out the pamphlet and placing copies on car windows.

The NGO Forum: Ratifying Teheran and Geneva
Hate literature also made it into the official NGO Program. An Arab NGO, the Cairo-based Arab Lawyers’ Union, distributed a pamphlet depicting Jews with fangs dripping blood and wearing helmets inscribed with Nazi swastikas. At a donors’ dinner, the High Commissioner reacted to the booklet with an impromptu speech:
I am a Jew. The purpose of this Conference is to achieve human dignity. When I see this Arab Union Lawyers’ cartoon book, I say it is racist. My husband is a cartoonist and I love political cartoons, but this racism makes me say I am a Jew, for the victims of this booklet are hurting. I will not allow this fractiousness to torpedo this Conference.
The Wiesenthal Center commended Ms. Robinson’s words, though there is no evidence that any disciplinary action was taken against the Arab Lawyers’ Union. Moreover, in her opening remarks at the NGO Forum, she put the Palestinians at the head of the list of “particular victims of racism” with whom the Conference must deal. As she left the stage, the audience was prompted to sing Bob Marley’s reggae hit, “One Love, one Heart, let’s get together and feel alright,” as an enormous banner passed overhead reading: “President George W. Bush, Palestinian blood is on your hands.”
Many Jews from South Africa and abroad felt, as one participant put it, “very intimidated” both on the streets and in the conference halls. Jewish delegates walked around in groups for protection. Some even hid accreditation badges identifying them as Jews or from Israel.
At the lone session of the “Commission on Anti-Semitism,” Rabbi Cooper was able to give a presentation which he dedicated to the memory of Judith Greenbaum, the 31-year-old teacher originally from Los Angeles, who was murdered in the Sbarro Pizzeria suicide bombing in Jerusalem in early August. Focusing on officially sanction-ed antisemitism by the Palestinian Authority, Cooper’s presentation was given to a group of about 600 members of various NGOs and the media as well as Palestinian activists and others from the Arab world.
Among other Jewish experts was Professor Anne Bayefsky, visiting professor of law at Columbia University, who demanded: “Where are the NGOs? What is this moral equation between unintended civilian victims, callously situated by their kin in a self-inflicted war zone, and the deliberate mutilation of babies and their mothers in pizza parlors?”
Palestinian protesters and their supporters burst into the tent and staged a 45-minute mini-riot in an unsuccessful attempt to close down the Commission. The following day, the 11-member Jewish Caucus’s press conference was disrupted by Palestinian protesters screaming “Israelis are killers” and “Israel is an SS, racist state.” To add insult to injury, only one small reference to antisemitism was permitted in the final document of the NGO conference, and even that was redefined, Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, as “anti-Arab sentiment.” The Jew-ish delegates had enough. They walked out before the final NGO draft was steamrollered through to approval.
The final NGO Declaration not only called for a revival of the “Zionism equals racism” equation, but emphasized all the other libels—war crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide, even “ecocide”—carried over from Teheran and Geneva. Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Rabbi Michael Melchior, viewed the old, simple “Zionism equals racism” equation” as “less dangerous” than these multiple Big Lies. Rabbi Melchior also accused the drafters of making Israel “the new anti-Christ...or the devil of the international community.”
A dozen NGOs, a small but prominent minority including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, balked at the NGO Declaration. “Israel has committed serious crimes against the Palestinian people,” according to Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch, “but it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide and wrong to equate Zionism with racism.” UN Human Rights High Commissioner Mary Robinson, who chaired the Durban NGO Forum, refused to accept the anti-Israel NGO Declaration about which she expressed “dismay.” However, when asked whether she considered Israel “an apartheid state,” she declined to comment.
After adopting eight virulently anti-Israel resolutions amounting to an updated “blood libel,” the NGO Forum adopted an “action program” calling for:
• The enforcement of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which includes measures to be employed against apartheid, a protection force, and the dismantling of “Israeli colonies.”
• The “right of return” of all Palestinian refugees.
• The reinstitution of UN resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism.
• The repeal of Israel’s Law of Return.
• The preparation by the UN of “educational packets” for schools and universities exposing “the Israeli racist apartheid system.”
• The establishment of a UN Special Committee on Israeli apartheid.
• The development of UN programs and institutions “to combat the racist media distortion, stereotyping, and propaganda that demonizes and dehumanizes Palestinians as being violent terrorists.”
• The launching by the UN of an international anti-Israel apartheid movement.
• The convening of a War Crimes Tribunal to prosecute Israel’s leaders.
• The demand that the international community impose a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state, including embargoes, and the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, and military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel.
• The condemnation of those states supporting, aiding, and abetting Israel.

About the author

Abraham Cooper is a rabbi and associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Harold Brackman holds a Ph.D. and is a Wiesenthal Center Consultant on Intergroup Relations.