Against education, UNESCO promotes terrorism

UNESCO, one of the very few UN organizations which is supposed to promote  education, science and  culture, as its name attests, and could  fulfill its job objectively, leaving politics behind and devoting itself to cultural, scientific and educational causes, to respond to many of the world's needs, especially in the developing world of Asia, America , the Middle East and Latin America, mostly by the generous funding of the West, has forfeited its authority, shed its reputation and sullied itself with petty politics, regardless of the dire implications for its mission.

 

Indeed, without heeding the fact that the rules of the UN have entrusted the task of admitting new nations to its membership to the Security Council,  subject to certain conditions and procedures, UNESCO has voted overwhelmingly to admit Palestine as full member betraying its own rules and  usurping the role of other UN institutions, while some of the Great powers  who are members of the Security Council, voted for the resolution, and its perennially  reticent Secretary General, abstaining from alerting the world to this abuse.

 

Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with embracing another emerging nation to UNESCO, but rules should be respected, the circumstances examined and the Palestinian intentions scrutinized. Here we have a situation where while the Security Council has been considering the Palestinian request to join the UN, the Palestinian Authority is trying simultaneously to force its way through the window, without first giving a chance to the those in charge of the main gate top pronounce their verdict.

 

And does that happen? Exactly on the day the Palestinians shower from Gaza some 30 missiles on the main southern cities of Israel, bringing about the deprivation of 200,000  terrified students of all ages from going to their classes. That is hardly a way to promote education. What will the Arabs conclude? That the more they use terror, to  disrupt the sacred goals of UNESCO, of which they are the most needy customers, the more they achieve politically on the international scene, with the active or silent acquiescence of the  third world of which they part, and which benefits  most  from such institutions as UNESCO

 

The US, which  generously contributes most of its budget, needs UNESCO less than those who benefit from it  most without lifting a finger to ensure its means of operation. The US, which is bound by congressional law, will reduce its contributions and so the majority of those who applauded the  un-procedural cooption of the Palestinians into UNESCO will be the first to suffer from their own impropriety. Worse, a helpless and impoverished UNESCO risks to sink deeper into its own politization,  and provoke the break of western democracies from the UN and the creation of  an alternative  organization, where a Libya cannot  serve as the Chairman of the Human Rights Commission, an Iraq cannot serve in the Commission of Disarmament and  false anti-Semitic blood libels cannot be hurled at its members with impunity.

 

Until 1996 Bethlehem Arabs themselves spoke of Rachel's Tomb at the gates of Bethlehem and recogniozed as a Jewish holy site. But then, at the height of the terror offensive[known as the Aqsa Intifadah,  the Palestinians switched to calling it the Bilal Ibn-Rabah Tomb. Ibn-Rabah was an African slave and Muhammad's muezzin, reputed to have fallen in battle in Syria. In July 2000 Yasser Arafat insisted to Bill Clinton at Camp David that no Jewish temple ever existed. This is now an official PA mantra. PA headliner cleric Sheikh Taissir Tamimi proclaims repeatedly that "Jerusalem has always only been Arab and Islamic." The Cave of the Patriarchs, he declared, "is a pure mosque, which Jewish presence defiles. Jews have no right to pray there, much less claim any bond to Hebron, ­ an Arab city for 5,000 years. All Palestine is holy Muslim soil. Jews are foreign interlopers."

UNESCO last year stunningly voted to recognize the Rachel Tomb as a Muslim holy site. That Arabs and Muslims should aspire to expand their  spiritual domain, as they do in Europe these day, can be expected because it follows a long tradition known to all of us. But that European and other Christian countries, who are a party to the Judeo-Christian tradition, should yield to this cultural blackmail and forego their own culture to accommodate their  current  political  accommodation of the Muslims and aversion of the Jewish state, does not augur well for the future of the UN and its appendices, the latest of which has been just been manifested in the latest  skewed UNESCO vote.