The United Nations held its 10-year anti-racism commemoration conference, commonly referred to as Durban III, on Sept. 22, 2011 to honor the fiercely anti-Israel and anti-Western Durban I event.
Anne Bayefsky took up the fight against this UN anti-Semitism by becoming lead organizer of a counter-conference with 18 prominent personalities on “The Perils of Global Intolerance: The United Nations and Durban III.” This year’s meaningless Durban III can be viewed as a kind of crowning achievement of Bayefsky’s tireless work to debunk a racist endeavor dressed up as anti-racism.
The counter-conference was hosted by The Hudson Institute and Touro College at the Millennium UN Plaza Hotel near the United Nations building in New York.
The 2001 “World Conference against Racism” took place in Durban, South Africa, and the name Durban quickly became associated with UN-funded anti- Semitism, intolerance and racism. In 2009, a successor conference, Durban II, was held in Geneva, where Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied the first Holocaust and called for a second one against Israel. In 2011, there was Durban III, which was addressed by Ban Ki-Moon, and with delegations from 179 nations present and 14 boycotting.
Counter-Conference chair, Anne Bayefsky, pointed out that the Palestinians are attempting to obtain membership as a state in the UN at the same time as Durban III and said: "The showdown that the Palestinians are starting at the Security Council today will have consequences. Americans are connecting the dots between their pocket books, Palestinian intransigence and an international organization that serves those who reject peaceful coexistence with Israel."
Anne Bayefsky, furthermore, exposed a decade of efforts by anti- Western and radical Islamic countries to use Durban as a mechanism to strip Israel of its legitimacy. On the Durban III conference itself - intended to "commemorate" the 10th anniversary of the 2001 event within days of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 - Bayefsky said: "It's time for us to connect the dots between global hate mongering and violence."
At the conference, Mike Huckabee and John Bolton called for significant U.S. push-back against the Palestinian request for full United Nations membership, which goes before the UN Security Council today.
"The U.S. should do far more than threaten a veto ..." said Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, now a popular television personality, who mounted a strong campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.
"I think that we should have made it clear not merely that we would veto any attempt to bring that vote to the United Nations, but that furthermore the very attempt to bring the vote would mean immediate cessation of all funding for every aspect of ... UN activities, including any support for it remaining in the United States," Huckabee stated during a speech last week.
Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the UN, says that starving the UN of U.S. cash would be the most effective measure for dissuading attempts at the UN to isolate and condemn Israel.
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz saw the Palestinian bid squarely as a testament to something awry with today's UN. "The United Nations has no moral authority when it comes to Israel, or to the Jewish people, or to the Jewish nation,"
Zudhi Jasser, President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, argued that ordinary Palestinians had been duped into thinking that the statehood bid before the UN was in their interests. It was not, he declared. According to Jasser, the Palestinians would not be ready for "even asking" for a state "until they get to the real root causes of their own oppression, which is the ideologies of radical Islamism from which their endemic anti-Semitism arises."
Jason Kenney, Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, condemned Durban III. “Today, the United Nations – an organization built on a foundation of peace and unity – will commemorate an event that was used as a platform to single out and demonize Israel. And it will be used to spread anti-Semitic views on a global scale.”
“Canada is clearly committed to the fight against racial injustice, but we do not support an agenda that has been usurped by some to promote racism rather than combat it.”
“The new anti-Semitism has adopted more sophisticated language. Its rhetoric is now disguised as anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Israel, but it ultimately espouses the same old hatred and intent.”
“Lies and propaganda are running rampant” at the U.N., said Academy Award-winning actor Jon Voight, 72, adding that the U.S. “should discontinue aid to the U.N. as long as there are anti-Semitic people running the roost.”
Simon Deng, a Sudanese human rights activist, told of how he was nine years old when he was enslaved by an Arab family. He was forced to work around the clock, beaten, and subject to harsh living conditions for three years. Mr. Deng was not alone. Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have been kidnapped and sold into slavery. Here was a living demonstration of the “emerging forms of slavery such as human trafficking,” perpetrated within Sudan by the racist Arab government and population, which Sudan’s undersecretary so piously condemned at the Durban III conference.
The UN, he said, knew about the Arab enslavement of black Sudanese and the Arab government’s policy of apartheid against the black population, but chose to do nothing. His fellow blacks and other persecuted minorities were abandoned by the UN, Mr. Deng said, in favor of giving the racist Arabs a global platform to persistently push their false accusations of Israeli racism against the Palestinians.
Former New York mayor Ed Koch said, “Durban III has been a flop. There is no media. People on the street aren’t interested. They have failed in their efforts and their PR strategy,” according to a JTA report.
Other voices echoed Koch’s conclusions about the failure of Durban III. Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, a German Middle East expert told The Jerusalem Post that the Durban process only “resonates very marginally.” He said the “most important countries” boycotted Durban III, adding that in comparison to Durban I and II, the current conference is largely unimportant.
The Jerusalem-based group NGO Monitor argued, “More important than Durban III is the Durban Strategy, which political advocacy NGOs continue to lead. The strategy is defined by tactics of demonization and delegitimization that in no way promote coexistence and a two-state solution. Instead, the Durban Strategy results in boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns [BDS], the Flotilla incident, ‘apartheid’ rhetoric, and the like. All of this is in keeping with the general Durban message: Instead of creating something positive for the Palestinian people, the aim is wholly negative about punishing Israel.”
It added: “While Durban III has come and gone, ‘mini Durban’ conferences continue, along with the continued isolation of Israel in international arenas, such as the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court.”
Anne Bayefsky, an international human rights lawyer, is a Senior Fellow, of the Hudson Institute and Director of the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. She holds a B.A., M.A. and LL.B. from the University of Toronto, an M.Litt. from Oxford University, and is a barrister and solicitor of the Ontario Bar.
A recipient of Canada's premier human rights fellowship, named after Canadian Chief Justice Bora Laskin, she has been a member of numerous delegations to the UN since 1984. In 1995 Bayefsky received a grant from the highly regarded MacArthur Foundation to investigate issues related to peace and international cooperation.
A frequent media commentator, she is the author or editor of eleven books on the UN and on human rights. She has also created two websites: www.bayefsky.com and www.EYEontheUN.org.
In January 2003, Bayefsky launched her website, www.bayefsky.com, a compendium of resources related to the UN human rights system and treaty bodies. The website, which has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Consultative Council of Jewish Organizations, "was designed for the purpose of enhancing the implementation of the human rights legal standards of the United Nations. Accessibility to UN human rights norms by individuals everywhere is fundamental to their successful realization."
EYEontheUN is dedicated to making transparent the UN's record on its fundamental promise - to identify, condemn, and protect against human rights violations and confront and respond to threats to international peace and security. The site, A project of the Hudson Institute, New York, will provide an information base for the re-evaluation of priorities and directions for modern-day democratic societies..
Her writings include a discussion in April 2011 on the failure of the UN after 15 years of negotiations to come up with a definition of terrorism. The main objection came from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) because they believe that a definition of terrorism should "distinguish it from the legitimate struggle of peoples against foreign occupation."
On Nov 1, 2010, Anne Bayefsky wrote about the U.S. State Department's Duplicity at the U.N. Human Rights Council. “The U.S. State Department has adopted a practice of saying different things to different audiences. The State Department is distributing for American consumption speeches that it claims were delivered in Israel's defense at the recent session of the U.N. Human Rights Council. But the remarks American diplomats actually delivered to the U.N. audience were strikingly different.”
At the conclusion of this session, the Human Rights Council's demonization of Israel stood at an all-time high. The Human Rights Council had spent as much time attacking Israel than it did on its one agenda item for "human-rights situations that require the Council's attention" anywhere else in the world. U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Eileen Donahoe declared that the Human Rights Council had "made historic progress…in advancing the rights of human rights defenders throughout the world." But her claim turns on the virtue of legitimizing the demonization of Israel in favor of other people's human rights.
A new report produced for the session continued the conclusions of the Goldstone Report, a modern-day blood libel, alleging that the 2009 Gaza war was not fought in self-defense but was a deliberate move by Israel to murder Palestinian civilians. The new report, produced for this session, repeats the odious claim that Israel engaged in "violence against civilians as part of a deliberate policy" and goes on to criticize Israel's legal system for failing to mount a witch hunt for "officials at the highest levels."
Ambassador Donahoe told the Human Rights Council on September 27: "We appreciate that the Committee did not jump to conclusions…" Then Ambassador Donahoe varied her speech from the version now gracing the State Department website. She dropped these words: "Because Israel has the right and the demonstrated ability to conduct credible investigations and serious self-scrutiny, further follow-up of the Goldstone Report by UN bodies is unnecessary and unwarranted."
The flotilla investigative group on the flotilla incident in which 9 Turkish-backed extremists died after they tried to ram an Israeli blockade of Hamas-run Gaza said it couldn't trust Israeli video evidence of the incident, and called the thugs who nearly murdered Israeli soldiers "persons genuinely committed to the spirit of humanitarianism." “When this despicable report came to the Human Rights Council for discussion, on September 27, the State Department gave the U.N. a Donahoe speech to post on the U.N. website which includes an important defense of Israel – all of which was omitted from her actual delivery.”
On Sept. 9, 2009, Anne Bayefsky published an article on The UN's Worldwide Web of Anti-Israel Bias. In its new overhauled website, the UN presents the user with ten categories with one of them exclusively for "Palestinian Rights."
She remarks: “Of course, one thing that can be said in favor of the latest UN outrage is that it makes the double-standards applied to Israel even more obvious. The UN undoubtedly needed to expand the index because the mammoth number of resolutions, documents, press releases, meetings and conferences devoted to condemning Israel had become so large that the hate mongers needed assistance organizing all their Israel-bashing campaign material”.
