At this meeting, Marc Knobel, a CRIF researcher, expressed the worry of the Jewish community: “We remember what happened at the Durban conference in 2001. The conference was supposed to be an appointment with history and an opportunity to return to history. In the end, it was more like a Western. And we attended the first great antiracist and anti-Semitic conference in history! We do not wish to see this repeated. Last year, at the annual CRIF dinner, on 13th February 2008, the President of the Republic had referred to “the trauma of the 2001 Durban conference, and the many intolerable excesses which turned the conference into a platform against the State of Israel.” Nicolas Sarkozy had added on that occasion that he would not “accept the outrageous excesses of 2001 being repeated”, added Marc Knobel. “The question then is to know at what precise moment the French delegation and the European Union will leave the conference, for having failed to obtain a consensus on some of the essential questions. We know that there are countries that are seeking to muzzle freedom of expression under cover of opposing religious defamation. We know too that there are a number of countries that want to revise international law, endangering the existing corpus. When all is said and done, the repeated accusations against Israel, making the country into the absolute quintessence of evil and an exception, are simply not tolerable. This conference is a vast hypocrisy,” concluded Marc Knobel.
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