"Gay McDougall, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), faces a June 24 election despite concerns about her radical views on race and Israel...
When the UN held its infamous World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, which became a hotbed of antisemitic rhetoric and extreme anti-Israel bias, McDougall defended the conference against critics.
At the time, then-Democrat congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, singled out McDougall for being reluctant to criticize the antisemitic atmosphere that pervaded the non-governmental organization (NGO) forum at the conference.
McDougall responded to Lantos by accusing him of measuring the success of the Durban racism conference only by 'whether it was sufficiently supportive of Israel’s policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,' which was irrelevant to the fact (witnessed at the time by this reporter, in person, in Durban) that the conference was explicitly antisemitic. In one instance, anti-Israel activists broke up a meeting on antisemitism that had nothing to do with the Middle East.
In 2019, McDougall used her position as a member of CERD to criticize Israel harshly, accusing it — falsely — of 'wiping away the fundamental rights of large parts of the population.' She is considered a key supporter of the effort by Palestinians to have Israel declared an 'apartheid' state by CERD, despite the committee’s lack of jurisdiction over complaints brought by the 'State of Palestine,' which U.S. policy does not recognize in international forums..."