**BREAKING: GERMANY WITHDRAWS FROM DURBAN III ** SWC Commends Austria for Pulling out of Durban III; Urges Berlin to Join Growing Boycott

BREAKING: GERMANY WITHDRAWS FROM DURBAN III SWC Commends Austria for Pulling out of Durban III; Urges Berlin to Join Growing Boycott

August 31, 2011

The Simon Wiesenthal Center commends the German government for pulling out of Durban III. "We hope that Berlin along with the other European Union members will refuse to provide any further direct or indirect funding for there disastrous 'Durban Process'," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

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The Simon Wiesenthal Center today commended Austria for announcing that they would not participate in this year’s so-called 'Durban III anti-racism' conference scheduled for this September at the UN. The conference is the third in the notorious series. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Associate Dean of the Los Angeles-based Center said, “Austria has joined the US, Israel, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Australia as countries that have chosen to reject this anti-Semitic process that uses the cloak of human rights to give itself legitimacy.”

Center officials have also urged Germany to join the boycott. In a letter to Germany’s Ambassador to the UN, Rabbi Cooper and Mark Weitzman, the Center’s Director of Government Affairs, wrote “to express our deep consternation and outrage” that Germany has not yet decided to join the boycott. Rabbi Cooper added that “As one of the spokesmen for the Jewish organizations at the original Anti-Semitic hatefest in Durban ten years ago, and who then again watched the spectacle of UN officials ushering Iranian President Ahmadinejad to deliver the first keynote in Geneva at Durban II, I am appalled that Germany has dithered over its participation at Durban III instead of leading the EU in calling for the defunding of the so-called Durban process.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).

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