Everyone knows about the somber 25th anniversary coming up next month. Few people remember what preceded 9/11, however. The week before the Islamist terror attack that killed nearly 3,000 people, the UN conducted the Durban Conference Against Racism, an effort that purported to focus on human rights. Instead, the NGO Forum at Durban in particular became a vehicle for Iran, Russia, and China to manipulate and corrupt NGOs while targeting the West, especially the US and Israel.
Professor Gerald Steinberg launched NGO Monitor largely in response to the clear politicization of NGOs in the human-rights space. He joined me earlier today from Israel to discuss the impact of the Durban forum in 2001 and how much it succeeded in warping these supposed human-rights groups into becoming the vanguard of the Marxists and Islamists. We can see its impact to this day, and in fact in this midterm election cycle.
Steinberg notes that the UN couched the conferences – it was a series, as he explains – in anodyne terms of equality and liberty. In reality, Steinberg testifies, it became a "three-ring circus" for extremist regimes. The direction of this effort became clear early on, he notes, by holding the main preliminary conference in Tehran despite the Iranian regime's appalling record on both human rights and terrorism. Then-leader Mary Robinson kept the Israelis out of that conference and isolated them diplomatically throughout the process.
The corruption of the NGO "industry," the term both of us reluctantly adopt, goes well beyond the foreign-policy paradigm. We have experienced it here in the US, perhaps most obviously with the SPLC. What may have started as a genuine effort to fight the Klan and associated groups got transformed into a political hatchet shop that used its connections to smear and target conservatives generally. That has been happening for at least a couple of decades, and may have preceded the Durban conference, but it became very overt in the last quarter-century. The problem was, though, that people had begun to notice, and that threatened their fundraising, so the SPLC started funding white supremacists to justify their continued existence.
The infamous Nicholas Kristof/New York Times smear about Israeli "rape dogs" has its origins in the NGO industry as well. Steinberg discusses how Kristof got the "story" about "rape dogs" in the first place – through an NGO that had been co-opted by Hamas and other Islamist groups. Much of that story has since been reported, but Steinberg links it to this generational effort to use the NGO 'industry' as a way to corrupt societies and warp politics against Israel and traditional Western values.
What can we do to push back against this massive propaganda effort? Professor Steinberg offers his thoughts – and of course, NGO Monitor will be indispensable in that effort.
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