Four days before 9/11, an ominous warning about Islamisms growing influence emerged at the UN

The coming week will be heavy with 9/11 commemorations, which for many New Yorkers still feels like yesterday.But this week, I’ll also be remembering another event that also feels like yesterday: thousands chanting “Free, Free, Palestine!,” “Jew, Jew, Jew!,” and “Israel commits genocide!” No, I don’t mean Columbia University in 2024.

I mean the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001.This now-infamous UN event, 25 years ago this week, was ideologically hijacked by a group of autocratic nations called the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which commandeered the proceedings to focus exclusively on Israel — thereby averting the world’s eyes from their own crimes.The Hitler-themed posters that blanketed the UN conference in Durban were funded by the family of Osama bin Laden. The clown show began in early 2001, when Iran, hosting the Asia region’s pre-planning conference in Tehran, barred Israeli officials and Jewish groups from attending.

At their blissfully Jew-free conference, delegates from authoritarian states drafted a UN declaration naming only one country — Israel — as a racist human-rights violator.The OIC included regimes whose ideas of tolerance ranged from legalizing child rape to gassing civilians with chemical weapons.

These states were delighted to sign on.Later in Geneva, the OIC proposed language for the main UN declaration about Israel committing “genocide.” (The 2001 death toll from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was just under a third of that year’s homicide rate in Baltimore.)The goal was clear to American delegate Tom Lantos, a congressman and Holocaust survivor.

“If the OIC delegates could turn Israel into the new apartheid South Africa — the world’s sole racist regime — the broad agenda of the WCAR [World Conference against Racism] could be overthrown,” he later wrote. Lantos saw that the OIC regimes’ plan w...