SWC STATEMENT AT THE 56-STATE OSCE BUCHAREST CONFERENCE ON COMBATING DISCRIMINATION AND PROMOTING MUTUAL RESPECT AND UNDERSTANDING

Bucharest, 7 June 2007

Statement by Dr Shimon Samuels, Director for International Relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, to the 56-State OSCE High Level Conference On Combating Discrimination and Promoting Mutual Respect and Understanding. Follow-up to the Cordoba Conference on Antisemitism and Other Forms of Intolerance.   

Mr Chairman,

As the only Jew elected to the NGO Steering Committee of the UN World Conference Against Racism in 2001, I there witnessed the birth of the new antisemitism.

In the years since that cataclysm in Durban, the blueprint turned the traditional charge of "all that is Jewish is evil" on its head to "all that is evil is Jewish", and a claim that the Holocaust had empowered the Jew in exonerating his multitude of crimes - the greatest being "the Naqba" of Palestinian misfortune.

The Durbanites moved on to Porto Alegre, Brazil, where in the central stadium, banners decked the World Social Forum, proclaiming "No to Nazis, Yankees, Jews - No More Chosen Peoples!"

There the blueprint was refined to the prescribed correction - the slogan B.D.S. - "Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions".

A carefully crafted strategy is fed through the vectors of the media and, especially, the Internet, NGO's and Inter-Governmental Organizations, universities, trade unions, churches, sports and cultural associations, scientific research and tourism authorities.

Two thousand years of stereotypes and bigoted fixations were to be telescoped and focused on ghettoizing the Jewish State, with pernicious impact on attitudes towards Jews globally.

Through blackmail and brainwash, individuals will boycott; companies, universities and churches divest, and governments are to impose trade and communications sanctions. This momentum is harnessed to a critical mass that delegitimizes all those associated or sympathetic to the purpose-built icon of evil.

Academic and architectural boycotts garner a self-perpetuating publicity. Church divestment cannot be quantified in terms of its repercussions on attitudes and concepts.

The process is incremental, for a campaign increasingly born in London has a mimetic effect in Paris, Geneva, Athens or Oslo.

The process is driven exponentially by the calendar: Summer 2007, the 40th Anniversary of the Six Day War; 2008, Israel's 60th anniversary as "the year of the Naqba catastrophe"; a global mobilization is planned to begin with this event and to grow until Durban II in 2009.

These boycotts are clearly in violation of the EU's and the World Trade Organization's provisions on freedom of commerce. The singling out of Israel contravenes the prohibition of "national discrimination" in Article 13 of the EU's Amsterdam Treaty.

"BDS", in laterally demonizing the Jews through Middle East blowback, negates the principles of the EUMC "Working Definition of Antisemitism" and the OSCE's Berlin Declaration.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre's telephone hotline in Paris for victims of antisemitic assault receives an average of 3 to 4 calls per day. When events from the Middle East capture media priority, they rise to between 60 and 70.

The OSCE, as an assembly of democracies, can act as the bulwark against the next Durban. To do otherwise, would betray its exemplary path from Berlin to Cordoba and here to Bucharest.

Hitler called the Jews "our misfortune". Then it was "Ungluck". Now it is "Naqba".

The prelude to the Holocaust was sounded by the order "Kaufen nicht bei Juden" - "Buy Not from Jews". Today it is "BDS".

May that tragic period in what we now call "the OSCE region" be a warning and not a precedent.

Thank you, Mr Chairman.

For further information, please contact Shimon Samuels at +33 6 09 77 0158.