It was said in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that “the whole world changed.” I
don’t know if the world is any different, but it is clear that 9/11 had a
transformative impact on our politics and psyche.
But, if 9/11 was a
transformative event, the same description applies to another event that ended
on the eve of 9/11. I am referring to “The World Conference against Racism,
Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” in Durban, South
Africa, which emerged as the tipping point for a new wave of anti-Semitism
masquerading as anti-racism. Yet, the 10th anniversary of this event has gone
largely unremarked.
As one of my colleagues put it at the time, if 9/11
was the Kristallnacht of terror, Durban was the
Mein Kampf. Those of us who
personally witnessed the Durban festival of hate – with its hateful
declarations, incantations, pamphlets and marches – have forever been
transformed. For us, “Durban” is part of our everyday lexicon as a byword
for racism and anti-Semitism, just as 9/11 is a byword for terrorist mass
murder.
When the World Conference Against Racism was first proposed, I
was among those who greeted the news enthusiastically. This was to be the
first world conference of its kind in the 21st Century. Anti-racism was
finally going to be a priority on the international human rights agenda. The
underrepresented human rights cases and causes, such as the Roma of Europe,
would now have a platform and presence. The fact that Durban was chosen as host
city was a commemoration of the dismantling of South African apartheid, itself a
watershed event in the international struggle against racism.
But what
happened at Durban was truly Orwellian: A conference purportedly organized to
fight racism was turned into a festival of racism against Israel and the Jewish
people. A conference intended to commemorate the dismantling of South Africa as
an apartheid state resonated with spurious calls for the dismantling of Israel’s
as an apartheid state. A conference dedicated to the promotion of human rights
as the new secular religion of our time increasingly singled out Israel as a
sort of modern-day geopolitical anti-Christ. HOW DID this happen?
The
World Conference Against Racism was organized around four regional conferences –
in Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. Each regional conference was to
formulate a declaration against racism and a plan of action. Then the
four regional declarations and plans of action were to be collated in Durban
into a composite draft declaration against racism.
The problem originated
with the Asian regional conference, held in Teheran in February, 2001. Although
Israel belonged to the Asian group, the conference organizers excluded Israel
and Jewish non-governmental organizations from participation. Contrary to the
United Nations’ own principles with respect to universality and equality, a
member state was made a pariah. The Teheran conference also supported a
country-specific indictment of Israel, yet another breach of international
human-rights principles and the UN’s own procedures in this regard.
The
six-point indictment emanating from the Teheran regional conference, which
became a dominant blueprint for Durban, has emerged as one of the more
scurrilous documents relating to Israel and the Jewish people to appear since
World War II.
The first specific indictment of Israel spoke of the
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a “crime against humanity, as a new form
of apartheid, as a threat to international peace and security.” While UN
Security Council Resolution 1373, adopted in the aftermath of 9/11, would
characterize terrorism itself as a threat to international peace and security –
which no cause or grievance could ever justify – Teheran and later Durban would
characterize terrorist acts against Israel as “resistance” to occupation, and
since delegates at Durban saw “resistance” against apartheid states as eminently
praiseworthy, Durban served to validate terrorist acts against
Israel.
Second, Israel was accused of the “ethnic cleansing” of
“Mandatory Arab Palestine” in 1947-48 – of being, in effect, an “original sin”
in its very creation, though its international birth certificate was sanctioned
by the UN Partition Resolution of 1947, which recommended the partition of then
mandatory Palestine into two States – a Jewish State and an Arab State. The
Jewish leadership accepted the Partition Resolution, while the Arab and
Palestinian leadership rejected it, and launched, in their words, a “war of
extermination” against the embryonic Israeli state.
Third, Israel was
cast as being responsible for all the evils in the world, the “poisoner of the
international wells,” the contemporary analogue to the medieval anti-Semitic
libel. In this regard, the delegates at Teheran and Durban were very much taking
their cues from the larger UN itself, where, on the occasion of the Teheran
conference, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights condemned Israel – and
Israel alone – for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Fourth, the
documents emanating from Durban introduced a new perspective on the notion of
“holocausts,” intentionally written in the plural and in lower case. A large
number of states even sought to minimize or exclude any references to the
Holocaust, or to marginalize and ignore anti-Semitism, while holding up Israel’s
treatment of the Palestinians as an example of a “real” holocaust. Zionism was
characterized not only as “racism,” but as a violent expression of racist
supremacy – indeed, as a form of anti-Semitism itself.
AS IT happens, all
of this hateful Durban- speak became a legitimizing instrument for a new wave of
anti-Semitism in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, as evidenced by the following
examples:
1. The Jews were blamed for 9/11 in a set of new “protocols”
reflective of what some see as a new international Jewish conspiracy. For
example, in many Arab and Muslim countries, teachers, religious leaders and the
media propagated the theory about the 4,000 Jews who supposedly had been tipped
off to stay away from work at the World Trade Center, and the Jewish film crew
that supposedly had advance notice to be on the scene to film the planes plowing
into the Towers. Upon the fifth anniversary of 9/11, polls showed that some 50
percent of British Muslims believed 9/11 to have been an American-Israeli
conspiracy.
Now, on the 10th anniversary of this horrific tragedy, these
myths have resurfaced with a vengeance, with social media now the medium of
choice for blaming Israel and Jews for 9/11. Copious Facebook groups such as
“Jews Behind 9/11,” and “9/11 was an inside (ZIONIST) job” provide a platform
for incitement and the demonizing of the Jews on this solemn occasion of
remembrance.
2. In the anti-terrorism debate that took place at the UN in
the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Arab states and their supporters opposed any
attempt to classify “resistance” as terrorism, thereby appropriating the Durban
rhetoric of the delegitimization of Israel, on the one hand, and the
legitimization of terrorism as “resistance” against Israel, on the
other.
3. A global campaign against Israeli “apartheid” was launched in
the form of post-Durban calls for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions. In an
astonishing but revelatory development at a pro-divestment conference in
Michigan, just weeks after Durban, a resolution calling for a two-state solution
“if Israel were to transform itself and become a real democracy” was defeated,
but a resolution calling for the dismantling of Israel as a racist apartheid
state was adopted.
4. The first UN Human Rights Commission meeting in the
aftermath of Durban – not unlike the one on the road to Durban – sought to
single out Israel for differential and discriminatory treatment, with 40% of all
the resolutions passed at the meeting indicting Israel, while the major
international human rights violators, such as Libya, Sudan, Syria or Iran,
enjoyed exculpatory immunity. This Alice in Wonderland human-rights perversion
continues to be replicated in the successor UN Human Rights Council.
5.
The convening, in December 2001, of the Contracting Parties to the 1949 Geneva
Conventions on international humanitarian law was a particularly egregious
discriminatory act. For 52 years, the contracting parties had never met –
notwithstanding the genocide in the Balkans, the unspeakable and preventable
genocide in Rwanda and the killing fields in Sierra Leone. The first and to date
only time that the contracting parties have ever come together to put a country
in the docket was in the immediate aftermath of Durban. That country, again, was
Israel, an offensive singling-out that undermined the whole regime of
international humanitarian law.
IN SUM, Durban became the tipping point
for the coalescence of a new, virulent, globalizing anti-Jewishness reminiscent
of the atmospherics that pervaded Europe in the 1930s. In its “benign” form, it
found expression in the singling out of Israel and the Jewish people for
selective and discriminatory treatment; in its lethal form, this animus
continues to find expression in the state-sanctioned genocidal anti-Semitism of
Ahmadinejad’s Iran and its terrorist proxies, Hamas and Hizbullah.
None
of this is intended to suggest that Israel is somehow above the law, or that
Israel is not accountable to the international community like any other state.
On the contrary, neither Israel nor the Jewish people are entitled to any
privilege or preference because of the horror of the Holocaust or the threat of
anti-Semitism. The problem is not that anyone should seek to place Israel above
the law, but that Israel is being systematically denied equality before the law;
not that human rights standards are applied to Israel – which they must be, but
that they are not being applied equally to everyone else; not that Israel must
respect human rights – which she must – but that the rights of Israel deserve
equal respect.
On the tenth anniversary of 9/11 – a terrorist atrocity
borne out of radicalism and hate – let us not overlook the racism and evil still
prevalent today. Anti-Semitism – both old and new – is the canary in
evil’s mine shaft. As history has taught us only too well, while it begins with
Jews, it does not end with Jews. Combating racism, hate and anti- Semitism is
everyone’s responsibility.
The writer is a Member of the Parliament and
former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. He was a member of
the Canadian delegation to the Durban Conference, and is a Professor of Law
(Emeritus) at McGill University.