Durban’s 10th anniversary is no cause for celebration
Which nation doesn’t let women drive? Jails dissenters by the thousands? Beheads minors?
Which nation doesn’t let women drive? Jails dissenters by the thousands? Beheads minors?
UN, Durban iii and Israel
Young black and Jewish cyclists from South Africa joined for a 400-mile journey to Durban as part of the Cycalive outreach program.
Ten years after the notorious U.N. anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, that devolved into an Israel-bashing frenzy, anti-Zionist forces are mobilizing again to hold another anti-Israel conference in South Africa.\n
The United States will not participate in Durban III, this September, the State Department said. In a letter to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Joseph E. Macmanus, acting assistant secretary for legislative affairs, confirmed the United States would not attend the conference, which in its previous iterations has been a forum for anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment.
A day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tirade against Israel triggered a walkout by the European delegation and generated headlines around the world, diplomats at the U.N. forum scrambled to ratify the conference’s final document on Tuesday — three days before the parley’s close, when the document was scheduled to be adopted.\n
The 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, otherwise known as the Durban Conference, was a parley hijacked by radicals betraying the real purpose of the event — the confrontation of racial discrimination worldwide.
In a stunning reversal, the Ford Foundation has admitted it erred in funding anti-Israeli Palestinian groups and has vowed to establish tough new guidelines to stop its funds from being used for anti-Semitic action anywhere in the world.
The foundation said it was \”disgusted\” by anti-Israel and anti-Semitic agitation action taken at the 2001 U.N. Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which the foundation helped finance.
\”We now recognize that we did not have a clear picture of the activities, organizations and people involved,\” conceded foundation President Susan Berresford in a letter this month to U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.).
Geneva and Ann Arbor, Mich., may be a world apart, but they now have something in common: both are settings for a reinvigorated effort to undercut the very legitimacy of Israel.
The same folks responsible for turning this summer\’s Durban conference on racism into an anti-Israel free-for-all are getting set for an encore performance in Geneva next week. And in college towns like Ann Arbor, Arab and Muslim student groups are using spurious comparisons with South Africa to discredit Israel.
The following is excerpted from a statement by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior, read Monday at the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, by Ambassador Mordecai Yedid, the head of the Israeli delegation.