New York-EYEontheUN has reported that Iran, the world’s most notorious state exponent of anti-semitism, is being given a seat on the UN committee responsible for planning a UN-sponsored global anti-racism conference slated to take place in 2009. The preparatory committee will meet for the first time in Geneva on August 27, 2007 when Iran will assume its role as a member of the inner circle on mapping the UN anti-racism agenda.

“As a UN spokesperson against racism, Iran will invert totally the message and mission
of the United Nations,” Anne Bayefsky, Senior Editor of EYEontheUN.org said. “Iran is
now poised to wrap itself in a UN flag as a lead agent of the next global conference
against racism, Durban II.”

In 2001, the UN hosted Durban I – an anti-racism conference held in Durban, South
Africa, which degenerated into a platform for some of the worst anti-Semitic propaganda
witnessed since Nazi Germany.  Literature with caricatures of Jews and Israelis relishing
murder and money, along with photos of Adolph Hitler, were disseminated freely.  The
final document of the NGO conference which led into the government forum declared
Zionism was racism and the government declaration found Israel to be the one and only
racist state in the world today.

Bayefsky was the representative of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and
Jurists at the Durban Conference and moved to New York the day the conference ended –
September 8, 2001.  “The connection between hate, its global dissemination under a UN
umbrella, and the 9/11 atrocity, was plain,” Bayefsky said. “Rather than promote
equality and understanding, the conference was a global soapbox for terrorists and their
sympathizers the world over. It was nothing short of an outpouring of hatred directed at
Jews, Israel and the United States.”

Bayefsky is greatly concerned that Durban II, a so-called review conference intended to
push the implementation of the Durban I agenda, will proceed down the same path – if
architect Iran has its way.  With Iran bent on acquiring nuclear weapons while calling for
Israel to be wiped off the map, Iranian President Ahmadinejad is expected to attempt to
use the opportunity to further foment anti-semitism on a global scale.  The Organization
of the Islamic Conference has already given indications that it will seek to drive through
an agenda that would create international rules which would greatly expand concepts of
Islamophobia while severely limiting freedom of speech, diminish concern over anti-
semitism, and seek to cast Israel as another apartheid South Africa.

(EYEontheUN is the only UN watchdog headquartered in New York dedicated to making
transparent the UN’s record on its fundamental promise – to identify, condemn, and
protect against human rights violations and confront and respond to threats to
international peace and security. It is a joint project of the Hudson Institute and the
Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. Bayefsky, Editor of EYEontheUN, is
also a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and Director of the Touro Institute on Human
Rights and the Holocaust.)