Durban – Ground Zero
Many people say they’re shocked.
Since October 7, they have discovered that at leading Western universities, mourning a murdered Jewish child can make you a target. That murals of kidnapped hostages are defaced or removed. That prominent human rights NGOs issue reports about Gaza that omit any mention of Hamas’s atrocities. That Jewish artists are disinvited — not for anything they’ve done, but for who they are.
The reaction has been one of confusion. Bewilderment. A sense that something has broken, suddenly and catastrophically. That we are witnessing a rupture.
We are not.
What we are witnessing is the long-delayed culmination of a shift that began more than two decades ago, at a cricket stadium in Durban, South Africa.
It was September 2001. The United Nations was hosting its World Conference Against Racism. On paper, the event was a celebration of universal human dignity. In practice, it became something else entirely: a political and ideological spectacle in which the language of anti-racism was turned into a weapon of hate.
From the start, the signs were clear. In the NGO forums, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were being sold openly. Flyers praised Hitler. Israeli flags were burned. Jewish delegates were physically attacked, shouted down, and prevented from speaking. A panel on antisemitism was overrun by demonstrators and ended in chants of “You are not part of the human race.”
And from the world’s leading NGOs — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and others — there was no protest. No withdrawal. No principled objection to the adoption of a final declaration that singled out one country — the only Jewish one — for unique condemnation.
Durban was not a mistake. It was a foundational moment.
It was there that a symbolic reversal took place — one that continues to define a significant segment of contemporary intellectual and activist life: Jews, once viewed as the quintessential victims of racism, were recast as its primary perpetrators. Israel, founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust, was reframed as a colonial state born in sin. Jewish history, suffering, and vulnerability were no longer a claim to empathy, but a mark of suspicion.
What followed was a systematic reconfiguration of moral categories:
– Zionism became a slur.
– The Holocaust, a political tool.
– Antisemitism, a nuisance.
– Jews who care about Israel, collaborators.
– Those who denounce antisemitism, bad-faith actors.
Durban didn’t just normalize hatred. It altered the definition of justice.
Anti-racism ceased to be a universalist ideal. It became a geopolitical narrative, organized around identity hierarchies and ideological allegiance. Good and evil were no longer measured by actions or intentions, but by historical narratives and collective guilt. Victims could become oppressors by virtue of their identity. And oppressors could claim the status of victims by virtue of their cause.
Into this moral vacuum returned some very old ideas, dressed up in progressive language:
– The Jew as a global manipulator.
– The accusation of ritual murder, now called “genocide in Gaza.”
– The martyrdom of the Palestinian child, reframed as a blood libel.
– The Holocaust, relativized and repurposed as an indictment of Jews.
Durban was not just a conference. It was an ideological assembly line — one that manufactured a new world in which Jews could not claim victimhood without caveats. A world in which the moral standing of a Jewish individual depended on their political views. A world in which Jewish suffering was rendered conditional, suspicious, or expendable.
Durban was an origin point. It was the first global convergence of a new ideological movement that blended anti-Zionism, anti-Westernism, and repackaged antisemitism — all under the banner of human rights. Pierre-André Taguieff has shown how it grew out of deeper currents: postcolonial ideology, third-worldist romanticism, and a distorted reading of justice rooted not in law, but in resentment.
Since then, the narrative forged at Durban has traveled far. It’s in university lecture halls and activist handbooks. In cultural institutions and humanitarian NGOs. It has entered the vocabulary of law, art, and international diplomacy. It cloaks exclusion in the language of inclusion. It rebrands prejudice as principle.
And because it no longer speaks in the old vocabulary of hate — because it presents itself as moral, progressive, even noble — it has become harder to name, and more effective in practice.
So, no, what we’re seeing today is not surprising.
It is not an aberration. It is not a sudden wave.
It is a long current.
It began decades ago.
It has been excused, amplified, and subsidized.
And for twenty years, it has grown in the shadows of our complacency.
Today, it’s out in the open. Institutionalized. Emboldened.
But its name remains the same.