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Over the course of the past half-century, virulent anti-Western ideology has become a permanent feature of our international institutions. One of the key inflection points in this transformation took place at a United Nations conference 25 years ago: the U.N.’s World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.
The conference’s stated purpose was to confront alleged racism and bigotry. Today, the United Nations touts the Durban Declaration — the ideological framework adopted at the conference — as “the U.N.’s blueprint to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance globally.” In reality, it represented the instantiation of a set of radical ideas about race, history and Western civilization as the formal dogmas of our most powerful global institutions.
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Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat (R) speaks to Cuban President Fidel Castro (L) 31 August 2001, at the opening of the U.N. World Conference Against Racism, in Durban. (PPO/AFP via Getty Images)
Since then, the anniversary of the Durban Declaration has frequently served as an opportunity for radical bureaucrats to reaffirm and double down on their anti-Western hatred. Nearly every five years since the conference, including next week, the U.N. commemorates and revels in the falsehoods and civilizational self-hatred that the conference has propagated across the international system. The United States will not have any part in celebrating this poisonous legacy. In fact, we are urging countries to join us in rejecting this propaganda and taking a meaningful step forward in repairing the rot within the U.N.
The U.N.’s embrace of racial grievance, collective guilt, unapologetic antisemitism, and fervent hostility toward our shared Western heritage is fundamentally incompatible with the American way of life. It runs counter to American virtues established 250 years ago. Americans need no instruction from international bureaucracies on the principle that men are created equal. Two hundred and fifty years ago, our founders declared that our unalienable rights did not come from kings, emperors or any earthly government — least of all unelected globalist bureaucrats. They were inherent in man, endowed by God.
U.S. Representative for U.N. Ambassador Jeff Bartos addresses a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on the situation in Libya, at the U.N. headquarters in New York City, U.S., November 25, 2025. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
Because of the Durban conference, extremist ideologues who had long festered at the fringes of the international system were pulled under one tent, handed credentials and microphones, and given the imprimatur of the United Nations.
The result was radically anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Christian, antisemitic and dedicated to the destruction of the very civilization that gave birth to the United Nations itself.
The Durban conference itself was a testament to the radicalism of this project. Attendees used the event as a platform to demand reparations from the United States and other Western nations for slavery and colonialism. These calls were backed by speakers such as Fidel Castro, the brutal communist dictator of Cuba, who used the conference’s stage to denounce the West for its crimes of “conquest and colonization, of slavery, of the ruthless exploitation and the extermination of hundreds of millions of people.”
Yasser Arafat delivered a speech denouncing Israel as a racist colonial oppressor, while the conference’s NGO Forum called for Israel’s “complete and total isolation” through sanctions and embargoes, laying the groundwork for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement years before BDS became fashionable on Western campuses. Protestors outside circulated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and chanted that Hitler should have finished the job.
The United States walked out.
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Members of unidentified Non-Governmental Organizations demonstrate, shouting anti-US slogans, Sept 4, 2001 outside the International Convention Center, the venue of the World Conference Against Racism, in Durban. (Alexander Joe/AFP via Getty Images)
Since then, the radicalism codified in Durban has metastasized and spread. The diversity regimes and frameworks promulgated from the Durban Declaration would inspire and codify new slates of discriminatory laws, further fomenting the racial strife, poverty, grievance and violence that has come to define life in modern South Africa.
What began in conference tents in South Africa made its way into U.N. chambers in New York and Geneva, universities, boardrooms, activist organizations, city governments and eventually the streets. Under the guise of promoting tolerance, inclusivity and human rights, captured institutions instead furthered the propagation of radical and ideological leftism.
Anti-Israel students occupy a central lawn at Columbia University in New York City on April 21, 2024. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
Worse, adherence to this leftist radicalism became a litmus test for commerce and public life. Those who refused to submit to this new dogma were cast out. Those who embraced collective guilt were celebrated as “enlightened.” We lost a generation of good work, good people and common sense along the way.
The United Nations lost something too: credibility. Every time it returns to Durban, it poisons its own brand — and helps fuel the same conflicts it should be fighting to end.
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President Trump has made clear: America will not apologize for being America — or perpetuate a system that teaches others to hate us for our success.
The world has had 25 years to see where the Durban conference’s ideology leads. We must reject its poison of grievance politics and anti-Western hatred. It’s time to burn and bury the Durban conference’s legacy of Third-Worldism and hostility toward Western civilization. Under President Trump and Secretary Rubio, the United States will continue to speak out against this evil ideological project in the U.N. system or wherever it appears around the world.
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Instead, we welcome allies, partners and friends: Join the United States in embracing pride in our past and confidence in our future — and rejecting the politics of shame, self-hatred and decline.