Several western countries have already announced that they will not participate in the Durban IV conference on racism due to its history of antisemitism. France was the latest EU country to do so. Paris followed the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic but also the United States, the UK, Australia and Canada.
A Belgian Jewish group has called on Belgium not to participate in the UN conference against racism, to be held in September, ‘’as most major Western countries refuse to participate in a UN masquerade that has served as an echo chamber for anti-Semitism.’’
The UN General Assembly has called for a new world conference against racism on September 22, commonly known as Durban IV. This follow-up conference marks the 20th anniversary of the infamous Durban I conference, which was the place of all anti-Semitic abuses, under the guise of a conference against racism.
Several western countries have already announced that they will not participate in the Durban IV conference due to its history of antisemitism. France was the latest EU country to do so. Paris followed the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic but also the United States, the UK, Australia and Canada.
”Since that date, a concrete tool for denouncing global anti-Semitism has been available to the countries of the world: the refusal to participate in the Durban follow-up conferences, which have proven to be not only useless, but harmful and fundamentally anti-Semitic,’’ said Yohan Benizri, president of CCOJB, the coordination committee of Belgian Jewish organizations, who sent a request to the Belgian Foreign Minister for Belgium not to participate in this conference.
‘’We are fully aware that our previous calls on this matter have not been welcomed by our government, but we want to believe that today it will be heard, especially in light of the latest developments in anti-Semitism in our country,’’ Benizri said.
He added, “We know and respect Belgium’s strong multilateralist position and its diplomatic commitments. It is not a question of questioning them but of realizing that the insistence on participating in this masquerade is untenable. To error is human, of course, but to persevere in error is diabolical.’’
‘’The honor of our country is at stake, its credibility in the fight against anti-Semitism having been largely eroded in recent years, including very recently,” he concluded.
The first conference in Durban, from August 31 to September 8, 2001, a few days before the terrorist attacks of September 11, was marked by deep divisions over the issues of anti-Semitism, colonialism and slavery. The United States and Israel walked out of the conference, protesting the tone of the meeting, after Arab countries tried to equate Zionism with racism.
In 2011, in Geneva, several representatives of European countries had left the conference room during an anti-Israeli speech made at the podium by the Iranian president at the time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad had called the Holocaust “an ambiguous and dubious issue.”