Durban and the Red-Green Alliance

Twenty-five years ago, in Durban, South Africa, something happened that almost immediately disappeared from public attention. From August 31 to September 8, 2001, the United Nations held its World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. It was supposed to be one of the great moral gatherings of the post-apartheid, post-Soviet era, a moment when governments, activists and civil-society organizations would come together to confront racism, slavery, discrimination and persecution around the world.

Instead, Durban became the scene of an extraordinary and poisonous political convergence. What was supposed to be opposed to racism and hatred, became a festival of hatred and racism.

On one side were activists of the global Left: anti-colonialists, anti-imperialist, revolutionary intellectuals and “human rights” NGOs speaking the language of universal human rights but targeting the countries with the best, not the worst records. On the other were activists for supremacist Islam, regimes and movements whose attitudes towards women, non-Muslims, homosexuality, freedom of speech and minority rights were profoundly at odds with those of the Western progressive Left. These two camps should have been natural adversaries. Instead, they found each other.

They found common enemies: Israel, America, Western power and, increasingly, the liberal democratic order itself. And they found momentum. As Eric Hoffer put it a half-century earlier, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”

This alliance of hatred stormed onto the international stage and by 2003, when it had mobilized tens of millions around the globe, claimed to replace the USSR as the balancing hegemon to American imperial dominion. Some called it the Red-Green Alliance: red for the revolutionary Left, green for Islamism. It was not an alliance in the conventional sense. There was no formal headquarters, membership cards or central coordinating committees. It was something more important and, in many ways, more durable: a convergence of narratives and a formal broad agenda laid out at Durban. Bring down the two Satans, Israel and the USA.

The most revealing part of Durban was not even the official diplomatic conference. Running alongside it was a massive NGO Forum bringing together thousands of activists and civil-society organizations. Its language went dramatically beyond what the governments themselves ultimately adopted. Israel was presented not simply as a state whose policies could be criticized, but as a uniquely criminal entity, described in the language of apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Openly Nazi antisemitic propaganda flourished. The NGO campaign called for making Israel a pariah state in the world, and promoted a political framework modeled on the campaign against apartheid South Africa.

Even organizations normally associated with the human-rights establishment later acknowledged that the NGO Forum had been poisoned by extremism, obsessive focus on Israel and antisemitic behavior; that it obsessed over slavery in the US 150 years earlier, while promoting the voices from cultures that still trafficked in slaves. This marriage of “Human Rights" NGO gathering showed where activist culture was heading. The red-green alliance had tied the knot on a marriage of hatred and enmity.

On the Israeli front – which was the most shrill – Durban provided a vocabulary that transformed a complex national, territorial, religious and political conflict into an upside-down morality play in which the most open violators of human rights became the heroes. Israel was no longer merely a country whose actions could be right or wrong. It became the embodiment of oppression. Palestinians became not merely one people engaged in a tragic and violent struggle with another, but paradigmatic victims. Once those roles were assigned, evidence became secondary. It was the birthplace of “the Cult of the Occupation.”

The postwar human-rights movement developed an extraordinarily powerful moral vocabulary, much of it for very good reason. Racism. Colonialism. Apartheid. Genocide. Oppression. Victimhood. These words emerged from some of the worst experiences in human history. They were intended to identify abuses of power and defend those who could not defend themselves. But moral vocabulary can, when its meaning is inverted, also become political weaponry.

If one side can establish itself as the victim before the facts are examined, much of the moral argument has already been won. The victim acquires uncontestable innocence. The designated oppressor acquires original guilt. Violence committed by the victim becomes understandable, contextualized, justified. Violence committed by the designated oppressor becomes confirmation of the accusation itself.

The result was an extraordinary moral asymmetry: the very oppressed and victimized group – the now free Jews – who were successfully defending themselves from Muslim supremacist assaults, became the oppressors and the efforts of the frustrated, genocidal imperialists became the “resistance” to the Jews in Palestine who refused to submit to Islam. Exactly causally inverted.

It was here that the radical Left and political Islam discovered how useful they could be to one another. Western progressives supplied the vocabulary. Islamist movements supplied the grievance. Western activists translated a religious, political and civilizational war on the West into the language their own societies found morally compelling: anti-colonialism, anti-racism, indigenous resistance, liberation and human rights.

Islamist actors, meanwhile, learned something enormously important about Western political culture. They learned to articulate the Jihadi war narrative for infidel consumption and quickly realized how easily they could manipulate Westerners, how easy to make them behave like dhimmi and repeat their war propaganda.

A movement does not need to believe in liberal values in order to use liberal vocabulary. It merely needs to understand what Western audiences reward. Political actors learn which words open doors. They learn what journalists recognize, what academics reward, what NGOs fund and what persuades Western audiences to identify one party as victim and another as aggressor.

This is one of the great vulnerabilities of an open society. We tend to assume that when someone invokes human rights, that person necessarily believes in human rights as a universal principle. When someone speaks of justice, we assume the same conception of justice. When someone speaks of peace, we assume the same understanding of peace.

But political language can be strategic.

The radical Left, for its part, was increasingly predisposed to accept the accusation. Its intellectual map divided the world between powerful and powerless, colonizer and colonized, privileged and oppressed. Israel fit neatly into the first category as did Americans. Palestinians fit neatly into the second as did other “people of color.” Once that framework hardened, inconvenient facts became increasingly difficult to process.

What happens when the supposed victim behaves barbarically? What happens when religious extremists deliberately murder civilians? What happens when a movement openly glorifies martyrdom, persecutes dissidents or announces intentions radically incompatible with progressive values?

For years, the answer was remarkably consistent: contextualize it. Explain the grievance. Return attention to the stronger party.

Durban helped institutionalize that habit.

Then came one of history's most extraordinary juxtapositions. The Durban conference formally concluded on September 8, 2001. Three days later, nineteen jihadists hijacked four airplanes in the United States and murdered nearly 3,000 people.

The coincidence in timing guaranteed that almost nobody would spend the following months asking what had just happened in South Africa. The world entered an entirely different era.

Yet even after September 11, the ideological convergence visible at Durban did not disappear. In some respects, it strengthened. The jihadists who attacked New York and Washington presented their actions in explicitly religious and civilizational terms. Yet much Western analysis quickly turned toward the question of what America had done to provoke such hatred.

This instinct often presented itself as sophistication. Do not merely condemn, we were told. Understand. Examine root causes. Consider Western imperialism. Consider American foreign policy. It would be cruel, said on UN Justice, not to accept people’s grievances.

All of those subjects can legitimately be studied. The problem begins when explanation turns into exoneration, when our passion to critique every subtle layer of “power” the West becomes so intense that we perpetrators of far more savage power.

That is not analysis. It is self-destructive self-flagellation.

We tell ourselves that their violence must ultimately be about us because we have difficulty taking seriously ideas radically different from our own. An ideological movement can tell us repeatedly and explicitly what it believes, and Western intellectuals will still translate those beliefs into a language they find more comfortable.

Then came October 7, 2023.

Hamas terrorists crossed into southern Israel and carried out an assault whose victims included families, elderly civilians, young people at a music festival and children. Roughly 1,200 people were killed, some raped to death, and more than 250 were taken hostage to Gaza.

One might have expected such an event to produce a moment of moral clarity.

Instead, something remarkable happened.

Before Israel had even begun its major military response, demonstrations and public statements appeared describing the attack as resistance, justifying it as a consequence of oppression or placing primary responsibility for the massacre itself on Israel.

Not everyone on the progressive Left reacted this way. Many condemned Hamas clearly and immediately. But enough did not. And what had previously been an intellectual problem suddenly became visible as a moral one.

For years, activists had spoken in the language of protecting victims. Now Jews had been massacred. Here were victims. Actual victims.

What followed should have been easy.

Instead, for some activists, the identity of the victims created a problem because the ideological framework had already assigned the roles. Israel was the oppressor. Palestinians were the oppressed. If moral status depends primarily on identity and power rather than behavior, then evidence becomes almost impossible to absorb.

The massacre did not break the paradigm.

For many, the paradigm swallowed the massacre.

That is one of the most disturbing legacies of Durban.

Yet political alliances are not always built around agreement about the future. Sometimes they are built around agreement about the enemy in the present.

The revolutionary Left can view Western civilization as imperialist, colonialist and structurally oppressive. Islamists can view that same civilization as decadent, unbelieving and morally corrupt. The diagnoses differ. The hostility converges.

Israel occupies a particularly important place in that convergence. It is Western-aligned, democratic, militarily powerful, Jewish and intimately connected to the United States. It therefore becomes an almost perfect object upon which radically different resentments can be projected.

Durban demonstrated the possibilities. The decades that followed demonstrated the consequences.

Twenty-five years later, the most important question is therefore not simply what happened at one ugly international conference. The deeper question is why Western institutions proved so vulnerable to the hatred that crystalized there.

How did organizations devoted to universal human rights become comfortable with radically selective indignation? How did people trained to identify hatred become unable to recognize antisemitism when it arrived dressed in the language of anti-racism? How did movements devoted to defending minorities find themselves making excuses for movements that persecute minorities, and allow them to drown out every voice at Durban that did not denounce the two Satans? How did the word resistance become capable of morally sanitizing atrocities that would be immediately condemned if the identities of perpetrator and victim were reversed, and, still worse in a sense, easily be turned on themselves as a justification for more 9-11s?

And perhaps most importantly, how did a civilization famous for questioning everyone else's narratives become so reluctant to question the narratives of those who present themselves as its victims even as they openly proclaim their intention to dominate?

Durban matters because it was an early warning. It revealed a new way of conducting political warfare: not necessarily by defeating Western armies, but by recruiting Western consciences. Not by rejecting the vocabulary of human rights, but by exploiting it. Not by silencing Western criticism, but by turning it on its head.

The genius of this strategy is that the people carrying it into Western institutions can sincerely believe they are doing precisely the opposite. They believe they are speaking for victims. They believe they are fighting racism. They believe they are defending the oppressed. They believe they are standing on the right side of history.

Twenty-five years later, after September 11 and October 7, we should at least be willing to ask whether some of the people claiming most loudly to speak for victims have helped construct an intellectual system that targets the very people who adopt it.

That conversation should have begun in Durban.

It is twenty-five years overdue.