Hungary became the first EU member state to announce that it will not participate in the 20th anniversary of the United Nations “Durban World Conference against Racism” due to the anti-Semitic nature of these gatherings.
The Hungarian government has intolerancepolicy against anti-Semitism and fully committed to ensuring the security of the Jewish people that we also constantly represent in international forums,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto wrote in a letter to Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
“In this spirit, Hungary does not support the Durban process and voted against the resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 31 December 2020 to convene a high-level meeting to mark the twentieth anniversary of the approval of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action.”
The 2001 World Conference Against Racism, also known as Durban 1 after the South African city where it took place, was a hotbed of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda and the largest public display of anti-Semitism since the end of National Socialism in 1945.
An initial draft of the resolution passed at the Durban government conference equated “Zionism” with “racism,” prompting the United States and Israel to withdraw from the conference. The final draft did not condemn Zionism as racism, but did list the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the only conflict under the heading “Victims of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance”.
The Durban NGO Forum approved a resolution calling Israel an “apartheid state” and accusing the state of genocide. Anti-Semitic material, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Other anti-Semitic materials were distributed during the event.
The Secretary-General of the Durban Conference, Mary Robinson, refused to accept the document due to the “appalling anti-Semitism” it contained.
Shimon Peres, then Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel, describe it Conference on behalf of “A grotesque expression of a turbulent world.”
The United States did not participate in the follow-up Durban 2 and 3 conferences in 2009 and 2011, respectively, because the original conference became “a session in which people expressed their hostility to Israel in ways that were often hypocritical and counterproductive,” President Obama said in 2009.
Also Israel, Canada, Italy, AustraliaThen Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Poland boycotted the conference. In 2011, the number of countries boycotting Durban 3 increased to 14.
Last week, the UK said it would join the US, Canada and Australia to boycott Durban 4 “following historic concerns about anti-Semitism”.
A diplomatic source said last month that France was also expected to withdraw, but he had not yet issued an official statement. A German Foreign Ministry official said Berlin had not yet made a decision on the matter.
Earlier this month, the ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, said he plans to hold an alternative event to the Durban conference that would be about fighting racism without outbursts of anti-Semitism.
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