Ambassador Jeff Bartos: UN must abandon anti-American, anti-Western legacy of Durban Conference

Over the course of the past half-century, virulent anti-Western ideology has become a permanent feature of our international institutions.

One of the key inflection points in this transformation took place at a United Nations conference 25 years ago: the U.N.’s World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.

The conference’s stated purpose was to confront alleged racism and bigotry.

Today, the United Nations touts the Durban Declaration — the ideological framework adopted at the conference — as "the U.N.’s blueprint to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance globally." In reality, it represented the instantiation of a set of radical ideas about race, history and Western civilization as the formal dogmas of our most powerful global institutions.

ISRAELI PRESIDENT HERZOG CALLS ANTISEMITISM A 'CONTAMINATION OF SOCIETIES' AS HATE CRIMES SURGE Since then, the anniversary of the Durban Declaration has frequently served as an opportunity for radical bureaucrats to reaffirm and double down on their anti-Western hatred.

Nearly every five years since the conference, including next week, the U.N. commemorates and revels in the falsehoods and civilizational self-hatred that the conference has propagated across the international system.

The United States will not have any part in celebrating this poisonous legacy.

In fact, we are urging countries to join us in rejecting this propaganda and taking a meaningful step forward in repairing the rot within the U.N.

The U.N.’s embrace of racial grievance, collective guilt, unapologetic antisemitism, and fervent hostility toward our shared Western heritage is fundamentally incompatible with the American way of life.

It runs counter to American virtues established 250 years ago.

Americans need no instruction from international bureaucracies on the principle that men are created equal.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, our founders declared that our unalienable rights did not come from kings, emperors or any earthly government — least of all unelected globalist bureaucrats.

They were inherent in man, endowed by God.

Because of the Durban conference, extremist ideologues who had long festered at the fringes of the international system were pulled under one tent, handed credentials and microphones, and given the imprimatur of the United Nations.