Beware: the Durban Delirium Trumped the Essential Lessons of 9/11

The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were cataclysmic. They shattered Americans’ complacency about Jihadi terrorism and united the nation. The U.N. anti-racism conference at Durban, that ended only three days before, was just another U.N. farce, hijacking the noble desire to fight bigotry into an excuse to bash Israel, the United States, and the West. Yet, today, with the once-targeted New York City led by Zohran Mamdani, with a Democratic Party lionizing Abdul El-Sayed and a growing list of socialism-loving, America-bashing, antizionist candidates, Americans must face the uncomfortable facts. Most people remember 9/11 but seem to have forgotten its essential lessons – and while few remember Durban, too many follow the Jihadi-supporting Durban Delirium’s template.

At 7:15 p.m. on that nightmarish day, 150 members of Congress gathered on the Capitol steps, defiantly, proudly. The Speaker of the House, Republican Dennis Hastert (Ill.), proclaimed: “We as a Congress and a government stand united and we stand together to fight this evil threat.” Democrats and Republicans, senators and members of Congress, stood silently together, not separated by tribe or status for a moment. Then they started singing “God Bless America” spontaneously.

Political differences didn’t disappear that day – but the patriotism was palpable. The president pro tempore of the Senate, Harry Reid (D-Nev.), affirmed: “No party affiliation, no partisanship, no attempt to gain political advantage ‑ nothing – will erode our solidarity or undermine our united resolve as we respond to protect our country and our people.” In that spirit, when Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) accepted his party’s nomination to oppose President George W. Bush in 2004, he saluted while announcing: “John Kerry, reporting for duty.” 

By affirming their common bonds, Americans established some boundaries too. When Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.)wondered in April, 2002 what Bush had “to hide” about 9/11, implying the administration may have profited from an attack, her fellow Georgian Democrat, Senator Zell Miller, called her remarks “loony… dangerous and irresponsible.” Georgia Democrats then backed a newcomer who defeated her in the August primaries. Similarly, fans recoiled when the Dixie Chicks’ lead singer announced in London, shortly before the March, 2003 Iraq War, “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all … and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” 

This was not cancel culture in action; this was Americans tempering partisanship with patriotism. 

Even six years after 9/11, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign teetered when reporters discovered that his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, had rationalized the terrorism, saying “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” Knowing he couldn’t afford to pussyfoot, Obama declared: “I reject outright the statements by Reverend Wright. …”

Admittedly, patriotic sensibilities mixed with political savvy. Most Democrats had zero tolerance for such violence-supporting, self-sabotaging heresy.

Tragically, since then, as many Americans have lost faith in their institutions, their fellow citizens and their country, members of both parties have lost the self-discipline to self-regulate. During Obama’s presidency, all-or-nothing culture wars over abortion, gay marriage and Obamacare’s contraception mandates polarized the nation. By 2014, the Pew Research Center discovered that the center had collapsed.  Ninety-two percent of Republicans were to the right of the average Democrat, while 94% of Democrats were to the left of the average Republican. Partisans from both extremes agreed that the rival party threatened the “nation’s well-being.” By 2017, more and more even considered political violence justified sometimes.

When common ground disappears and politics becomes total and tribal, every political disagreement becomes existential: right or wrong, do or die, high stakes and no compromise. Even scientific questions about masking and vaxxing became ideological purity tests – let alone George Floyd’s murder, Jan. 6, 2021’s violence, Joe Biden’s decline and Donald Trump’s return. And social media’s algorithmic assault on our body politics and our senses keeps Americans escalating, oversimplifying issues while demonizing rivals. 

These days, when your party is out of office, America seems lost, and with millions of Americans suffering economically, it’s easy to despair. Capitalism requires living with complexity, and trusting markets over the long term – socialism dances with short-term delusions. 

Meanwhile, a systematic campaign to make Americans doubt America kept progressing. The world’s totalitarians deliberately hijacked the World Conference against Racism in a post-apartheid South Africa. They weaponized racism to put Western democracies on trial, once again. Delegates targeted Israel and Zionism to shame America and its allies.

Durban is best remembered today for the crass antizionism that marred the conference, especially in the parallel NGO meeting.  Proving how Israel-haters keep fusing antizionism with antisemitism, some NGOs sold the antisemitic screed, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” while others distributed pamphlets showing Hitler’s face with the sickening message: “What if I had won? The good thing is there would have been no Israel and no Palestinian’s [sic] bloodshed. The bad things: I wouldn’t have allowed the making of the new Beetle.  …” 

In this sea of human rights activists, Israelis and Jews were bullied. Delegates shouted: “You are all murderers! You have Palestinian blood on your hands!” One hooligan pursued a Jew wearing a skullcap, shrieking: “Chosen people? You are cursed people! I won’t speak to you, as long as you do not remove this thing.” Even American human rights activists attending stayed silent amid the harassment – while their organizations supported the anti-Israel – and anti-American – protocols.

This ideological pogrom eerily mapped out the antizionism mania that has now hit America’s shores, using the noble fights against racism, colonialism, and oppression for ignoble ends. The NGO conference’s final declaration used the “Zionism is racism” charge as its keystone, condemning “the systemic practice of a brand of apartheid in Israel, which has been designed to subject the Palestinian people to a regime of domination, systematic oppression and acts of genocide.” And treating Israel as a substitute for America and its allies, speakers condemned it as a “Western implant in the Middle East.”  

This vision spawned the “Durban Strategy,” a two-pronged assault fusing ostracism with criminalization. First, they demanded the “complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state.” That triggered the Palestinian movement’s 2005 decision to launch its BDS – Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions – campaign, followed by its anti-normalization decree, banning all contacts with Israelis and Zionists, including peace-building initiatives. And second, they sought to indict Israel through lawfare – singling out Israel in international forums, including, now, the International Criminal Court.

Representative Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) noted: “the conference was a disaster for the United States” too. It “disintegrated into an anti-American, anti-Israeli circus.” The Hungarian-born Lantos had survived the Holocaust, and, in his words, “devoted my entire career in Congress to combating racism and promoting human rights.” Now, the values he cherished and the country he represented were under assault.

Even before the conference began, America was in the crosshairs. Forty-seven American human rights activists petitioned the conference’s leader, Mary Robinson, to target American racism, claiming minorities there “continue to face pervasive and persistent patterns of racial discrimination that threaten their livelihood, their liberty and even their lives.” In mid-August, 5,000 South African activists menaced the U.S. embassy in Pretoria, bellowing “Panzi” – down with – “the U.S.” Protesters outside the conference hall waved placards proclaiming $hame on U$A, UNITED STATES STOP SUPPORTING RACISM, calling America an “imperialist aggressor state” and maligning it as a “global architect of racism and state-sponsored terror.” 

Then, at the main conference and the NGO forum, America was the second most popular punching bag. And in that infamous NGO Forum Declaration and Programme of Action (2001), the authors attacked “colonialism… globalization … imperialism … structural racism … wealth … the global capitalist class … transnational corporations … militarization” as wiggle words that really meant “America.” The message was clear – and would then be spread on Woke campuses, among corporate Social Justice Warriors, in DEI bureaucracies nationwide, and now, Senate and Congressional candidates: “The eradication of racism… and related intolerance … calls for a radical transformation of society, and for a re-ordering of global institutions which are presently dominated by rich countries.”

In short, Durban mapped out what today we recognize as Woke Third Worldism – seeing America as systemically broken. Durban also shows how intertwined anti-Americanism is with antizionism. The antizionism is purposeful, central and often an effective masquerade. When it’s inconvenient to look too anti-American, simply calling Israel “genocidal” or branding Zionism as “racism” will do. But the broader agenda remains: to debase America.

Durban also shows how intertwined anti-Americanism is with antizionism. The antizionism is purposeful, central and often an effective masquerade. When it’s inconvenient to look too anti-American, simply calling Israel “genocidal” or branding Zionism as “racism” will do. But the broader agenda remains: to debase America.

For the few who paid attention, the evil anti-American thoughts articulated in South Africa “came home to roost” in the killing fields of Manhattan, the Pentagon  and the United Airlines Flight 93 crash site. The Canadian parliamentarian and human rights activist, Irwin Cotler, who attended the Durban conference, later recalled a colleague declaring: “If 9/11 was the Kristallnacht of terror, then Durban was the ‘Mein Kampf.’” 

A State Department official, Efraim Cohen, was evacuated with the other American delegates when Washington gave orders to walk out of the conference in protest. They left, protected by “armed security officers,” because of concerns “that our decision to leave prematurely might engender a violent response.” Cohen recalls: “Our report to State Department officials on the conference early the following week was interrupted as we were informed that New York’s Twin Towers had been hit. I watched the smoke rising from the Pentagon and participated in an evacuation for the second time in less than a week, this time from the State Department in Washington.”

Today, this antizionist anti-Americanism, ideologically bullet-proofed by its anti-racist posture, has wormed its way into the American establishment. Calling Israel “genocidal” is a hot trend despite the fact that “genocide” requires systematic, intentional mass murder on an epic scale. Antizionist writers win book awards, as Zionist or even mildly pro-Israel Jewish writers increasingly find it hard to get published. Celebrities virtue signal by tweeting out anti-Israel slurs or calling themselves “peace activists,” while wearing lapel pins evoking the bloody hands of Palestinian terrorists who lynched Israeli reservists. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, uniting over 100 anti-Israel organizations, proudly proclaimed the noxious nexus, announcing that its goals include “the total eradication of Western civilization.”

Tragically, this Israel-bashing of the high-falutin’ intersectional antizionists is so mainstreamed, it’s encouraged street hooligans to bash Jews walking home from synagogue and conservative podcasters to join in the anti-Jewish, anti-Israel pile-on.

Meanwhile, anti-American cheerleaders of the 9/11 terrorists, like Hasan Piker, make millions and endorse political candidates, who beam in their presence rather than turning red with shame. And the blind hatred of Trump blinds a new generation of Democratic leaders from repudiating candidates within their party whose antizionism exposes their deep anti-Americanism too. 

One can only imagine what some 9/11 survivors and relatives will be thinking when Zohran Mamdani presides over a World Trade Center Memorial service – or if Hasan Piker’s comrade Abdul El-Sayed dares to attend a Michigan memorial. 

It’s too easy to forget that America has bounced back from worse before. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union seemed ascendant, while America was mired in stagflation, crime, corruption, defeat. By 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed and America was flourishing. Similarly, Communists infiltrated the Establishment from the 1930s through the 1950s, dominating many universities. And yet, we survived.

Two forces have consistently saved America. First, beyond the life-style gap between this imperfect democracy and perfectly awful dictatorships, trust the evil of so many of our enemies. Like Iran’s Islamic Republic today, the Soviet Union was self-destructively hostile to its own citizens. Ultimately, Soviet Russia imploded. Similarly, American Communists couldn’t cope with Stalin’s mass murders, as their own hypocrisies and denials caught up with them. 

Second, despite all of America’s faults, its founding formula still works. Third-worldism ignores what millions of Third Worlders, yearning to immigrate to America, understand: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” isn’t just a slogan, it’s a blueprint. This aspirational statement has kept expanding the idea of liberty, the search for equality, the miracle of mass prosperity. Nearly two centuries later, the universities ultimately saved themselves, thanks to the liberal and capitalist commitment to objectivity, fair processes and excellence. The rise of the post-Marxist pre-Woke meritocratic university made America’s university system the great American dream fulfiller and life-improver for talented individuals, America, and the world it was for decades. 

Charles Darwin was not American. The United States has not evolved cleanly, gradually. It’s advanced spasmodically, and sometimes, as in the 1860s, violently. This roller coaster occasionally makes many Americans nauseous – as we see today, with both leaders and celebrities, from the far left and the far right, knocking us down, doubting our ideals, not just our current conditions. 

Americans have long toggled between grievance and gratitude, between despair and hope. Today, Americans face a social media that profits off the negative, and demagogues who exploit that spiral downward.  But if our leaders and systems keep failing us, it’s more important than ever to remember the true key to democratic success. Our values may provide the lyrics we need, but it’s the song of the street, the rhythms and melodies of everyday Americans living everyday life, who will save us from the merchants of despair by igniting 350 million beacons of hope. 

Professor Gil Troy is a Senior Research Fellow at the JPPI, the Jewish People Policy Institute. He is the author of nine books on presidential history, and nine books on Zionism, including the award-winning, “Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism,” and his latest e-book, “The Essential Guide to the U.S.-Israel Partnership: the 250th Anniversary Edition.”