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Durban
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Twentieth anniversary of anti-Israel hate fest a spectacular flop By ROWAN POLOVIN
Published in SA Jewish Report, 7 October, 2021
At the turn of the 21st century, five decades after the Holocaust, the infamous Durban conference became the latest hotbed of antisemitism against the Jewish people.
Some “human rights” activists in attendance distributed the crude antisemitic polemic of a century earlier known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Some Jewish human-rights activists who attended were intimidated, abused, and taunted with the insult that they “don’t belong to the human race”.
A Pro-Palestinian march where thousands rallied in the streets of Durban included pro-Nazi flyers with the text, “Hitler Should Have Finished the Job” and proclaimed that if Hitler had only won the war, Israel wouldn’t exist.
The outcome of Durban was the launch of a global, organised, and funded antisemitic machine, mouthing the language of human rights and masquerading in the guise of anti-apartheid activism. We know it as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and various activist organisations affiliated to it. These include university chapters that target impressionable university students and future leaders with the annual hate fest known as “Israel Apartheid Week”, academic boycott campaigns, Palestinian “solidarity” organisations, and factions within mainstream political parties.
