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Source: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-907042
How NGOs Helped Mainstream Anti-Israel Hatred
(Jerusalem Post) Gerald M. Steinberg - The UN held an event 25 years ago that previewed today's Israel-obsessed Jew-hatred - the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa. Officially aimed at celebrating the apartheid regime's end in that country, the summit was hijacked into a platform for anti-Western, anti-Zionist, and antisemitic demonization - creating the foundation for the rampant hate directed nowadays at the Jewish people and the Jewish state. The main venue for attacking Israel was the conference's NGO Forum, where 1,500 organizations came together to hurl accusations of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide at Israel. The NGO industry that claimed to promote universal human rights picked up the antisemitic and anti-Zionist agendas on full display at Durban's NGO Forum. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other groups launched bogus "research reports" and pseudo-legal analyses which were copied by mainstream media platforms, parroted in UN documents, and quoted by politicians and academics. This process culminated in the full-scale explosion of anti-Israel hate led by the NGOs launched immediately after the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7, 2023. It is clear that many ostensibly humanitarian NGOs are political actors with malevolent agendas. NGOs with annual budgets in the tens of millions should be required to publish details of foreign government donations. The writer is founder and president of the NGO Monitor research institute and professor emeritus of political studies at Bar-Ilan University.