{"id":8266,"date":"2026-09-06T21:36:30","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T21:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=8266"},"modified":"2026-09-06T21:36:30","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T21:36:30","slug":"four-days-before-9-11-an-ominous-warning-about-islamisms-growing-influence-emerged-at-the-un","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=8266","title":{"rendered":"Four days before 9\/11, an ominous warning about Islamism’s growing influence emerged at the UN"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The coming week will be heavy with 9\/11 commemorations, which for many New Yorkers still feels like yesterday. But this week, I\u2019ll also be remembering another event that also feels like yesterday: thousands chanting \u201cFree, Free, Palestine!,\u201d \u201cJew, Jew, Jew!,\u201d and \u201cIsrael commits genocide!\u201d No, I don\u2019t mean Columbia University in 2024. I mean the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001.<\/p>\n

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This now-infamous UN event, 25 years ago this week, was ideologically hijacked by a group of autocratic nations called the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which commandeered the proceedings to focus exclusively on Israel \u2014 thereby averting the world\u2019s eyes from their own crimes. The Hitler-themed posters that blanketed the UN conference in Durban were funded by the family of Osama bin Laden.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The clown show began in early 2001, when Iran, hosting the Asia region\u2019s pre-planning conference in Tehran, barred Israeli officials and Jewish groups from attending. At their blissfully Jew-free conference, delegates from authoritarian states drafted a UN declaration naming only one country \u2014 Israel \u2014 as a racist human-rights violator. The OIC included regimes whose ideas of tolerance ranged from legalizing child rape to gassing civilians with chemical weapons. These states were delighted to sign on. Later in Geneva, the OIC proposed language for the main UN declaration about Israel committing \u201cgenocide.\u201d (The 2001 death toll from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was just under a third of that year\u2019s homicide rate in Baltimore.)<\/p>\n

The goal was clear to American delegate Tom Lantos, a congressman and Holocaust survivor. \u201cIf the OIC delegates could turn Israel into the new apartheid South Africa \u2014 the world\u2019s sole racist regime \u2014 the broad agenda of the WCAR [World Conference against Racism] could be overthrown,\u201d he later wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lantos saw that the OIC regimes\u2019 plan was precisely to destroy the meaning of human rights. To UN human-rights commissioner Mary Robinson, Lantos argued that \u201callowing these same forces to appropriate terms like \u2018ethnic cleansing,\u2019 \u2018genocide,\u2019 and \u2019crimes against humanity\u2019 to describe Israel\u2019s behavior would forever debase their meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is exactly what happened, except much worse.<\/p>\n

In Durban, 20,000 protesters swarmed the conference venues, chanting \u201cFree, free Palestine!\u201d and carrying a banner reading \u201cHitler was Right.\u201d Inside, delegates distributed copies of the century-old antisemitic screed \u201cThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion\u201d and cartoons of bloody-fanged Jews. Ubiquitous posters featured Hitler\u2019s face over the text \u201cWhat if I had won? There would be NO Israel.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The wall-to-wall Jew-hate silenced dissent, literally. At one point, Jewish groups organized an emergency press conference to publicize the hatred. There, one delegate recalled, a \u201cphalanx of Iranian women in black\u201d rushed the podium to prevent them from speaking. By then, conference security advised Jewish delegates not to walk the few blocks to Durban\u2019s Jewish community center; it was too dangerous.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When the NGO conference forum voted on its official Declaration and Action Plan, Jewish groups attempted to add language about antisemitic violence. With precious few exceptions, 3,600 NGOs all voted to delete it. After that, surrounded by jeering crowds, the Jewish delegates walked out \u2014 quickly, with bodyguards.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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In the seventy-page Declaration voted and approved by those 3,600 NGOs, only one country on earth was named. Israel was the world\u2019s only \u201cracist nation,\u201d a \u201ccolonial apartheid state\u201d guilty of \u201cgenocide.\u201d In a victory for regimes worldwide actually engaging in racist, colonial, apartheid, genocidal rule \u2014 and a defeat for millions suffering under their reign \u2014 no other countries were even mentioned. Al Qaeda, equally unworthy of mention, waited in the wings.<\/p>\n

To its credit, the American delegation walked out of this clown show. \u201cI have taken this decision with regret, because of the importance of the international fight against racism and the contribution the conference could have made to it,\u201d US Secretary of State Colin Powell said as he announced the walkout, but \u201cI am convinced that will not be possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

It wasn\u2019t. Words like \u201cracism,\u201d \u201cantisemitism\u201d and \u201cgenocide\u201d were rendered meaningless, which was the goal. These words were now shiny things dictators wore on their lapels, distracting everyone from the populations they tortured back home. The world\u2019s premier human-rights organizations, whose courage once brought down the world\u2019s worst tyrants, had now all bowed down to tyrants, and flushed their credibility down the toilet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This left the UN and human-rights advocates worldwide emptied of words and meaning when the conference triumphantly ended \u2014 four days before Sept. 11, 2001.<\/p>\n

I still can\u2019t believe they all fell for it. Twenty-five years later, too many still do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dara Horn is the author of \u201cThe Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living\u201d (Avid Reader Press) from which this essay is adapted.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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