By

Shimon Samuels

Analysis

Durban III: the hatefest is back

Durban III, the second reprisal of the UN's 2001 "anti-racism" conference in Durban, South Africa, was held in New York this week. The gathering, now famous as a forum for antisemitism and attacks on Israel, was this year boycotted by 12 countries, including Britain, France, Israel and the US. Below, Shimon Samuels, International Relations Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and a participant in the original conference in 2001, maps out the history of the Durban phenomenon.

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As the only Jew elected to the International Steering Committee (ISC) for Durban, I was gagged in the preparatory meetings in Warsaw and Santiago; offered a deal in Geneva by the PLO legal counsel ("we will give you the Holocaust if you give us Palestine"); denied access to the last preparatory gathering in Tehran and expelled unceremoniously in Durban itself as "the world Jew".

Three months later, on December 6, 2001, I attended, uninvited, the final ISC meeting in Geneva. An eight-point plan was circulated for the next decade, to be reviewed at this week's Durban gathering in New York.

Based on the campaign against South African apartheid, the plan listed measures to isolate Israel, through UN agencies, the internet, universities, trade unions and sport.

The "Durban manifesto", by 2003, was being promulgated by the anti-globalisation World Social Forum (WSF), in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and its European Social Forum satellites across the EU.

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