RUTHFULLY YOURS

By withdrawing from UNESCO – again – President Trump is sending a powerful message to the international community: that we will no longer tolerate international organizations that serve as forums for Jew-bashing.

This important message was encapsulated in a powerful statement made by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley: “The purpose of UNESCO is a good one. Unfortunately, its extreme politicization has become a chronic embarrassment… US taxpayers should no longer be on the hook to pay for policies that are hostile to our values and make a mockery of justice and common sense.”

“There is no crueller tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.” — Charles de Montesquieu, French lawyer and philosopher (d.1755)

The State Department announced on Thursday that the United States would be withdrawing from the UN agency UNESCO.

The U.S. agency citied financial reasons, the need for reform and the body’s “continuing anti-Israel bias.” President Trump’s decision to leave UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – as of December 31, 2018, was an appropriate foreign policy decision that will hopefully prompt a much-needed rethink of the United Nations, its purpose and practices. It will also send a strong message to the Palestinians that statehood cannot be achieved on the basis of UN resolutions alone, and that the only way forward is to engage in direct negotiations with Israel, during which mutual sacrifices will be required.

In the aftermath of WWII, the intended goal of the Paris-based UN body was a noble one: to promote basic freedoms and security through international collaboration on education, science and cultural projects. UNESCO-sponsored projects focused on literacy, vocational training, equal access to basic education and preservation of human rights and historical sites are indeed praiseworthy. In practice, however, the 195-member body – with its automatic anti-Israel majority that exists in every institution of the UN – has become a springboard for Jew hatred and the rewriting of history.

To be sure, UNESCO is far from the only UN agency regularly to single out Israel for reproach. Yet, its anti-Israel adoptions have been abhorrent even by the low standards established by the broader multilateral institution. Consider a resolution introduced in May, which denied Israel – and the Jewish people’s – legal and historic ties to the city of Jerusalem, including its holiest sites. It called the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron – considered the resting place of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs – and Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, “Palestinian sites.” Shamefully, this vote was deliberately held on Israel’s Independence Day. Only two months later, the cultural body convened in Krakow, Poland – a city soaked in Jewish blood – and declared the city of Hebron, holy to Jews, an endangered Palestinian heritage site.

Even for some of the harshest critics of Israel, this historical ignorance is sometimes too much to swallow. In October 2016, for example, when UNESCO passed a resolution denying Israel’s connection to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall – referring to them only by their Muslin names – UNESCO chief, Irina Bokov (whose intentions and motivations are themselves often curious) questioned the text of the Arab-sponsored resolution on Jerusalem.

This egregious distortion of history is not particularly surprising when considering the anti-Semitic political culture that has come to underpin UNESCO, particularly since 2011, when it became the first UN agency to admit the Palestinians as a full member. Hillel Neuer of the watchdog organization, UN Watch, noted that between 2009-2014 the cultural body has adopted 46 resolutions against Israel, yet only one on Syria and none on Iran, Sudan, North Korea, or any of the other known violators of human rights around the world. In fact, a representative of the regime of Syrian dictator and mass murderer Bashar al-Assad sits on a UNESCO human rights committee.

Neuer further highlights this double standard: “UNESCO paid tribute to mass murderer Che Guevara, elected Syria to its human rights committee, and created prizes named after the dictators of Bahrain and Equatorial Guinea, whose ruler Obiang says God empowered him to kill whomever he wants. UNESCO has a noble founding mission, but that has been completely hijacked by the world’s worst tyrannies and supporters of terror.”

This is not the first time that the United States has pulled out of the hypocritical UN cultural body. Under President Reagan in 1984, the United States walked away from UNESCO owing to financial mismanagement and “hostility toward the basic institutions of a free society.” It was only in 2002 that President G.W Bush re-joined the body and stated that the United States wanted to “participate fully in its mission to advance human rights, tolerance and learning.” But this vision was upturned when President Obama halted funding to the UN body in 2011 (US funding at the time accounted for one-fifth of UNESCO’s budget) when Palestine was accepted as a full member. This original level of financial support has not been restored and the cultural body has since missed out on close to $600 million of American funding.

Among the reasons are that by withdrawing from UNESCO – again – President Trump is sending a powerful message to the international community: the United States will no longer tolerate international organizations that serve as forums for Jew-bashing. This important message was encapsulated in a powerful statement made by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley: “The purpose of UNESCO is a good one. Unfortunately, its extreme politicization has become a chronic embarrassment…US taxpayers should no longer be on the hook to pay for policies that are hostile to our values and make a mockery of justice and common sense.”

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley called UNESCO’s “extreme politicization” a “chronic embarrassment.” Photo: Getty Images.

The political thinker Charles de Montesquieu famously said: “There is no crueller tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.” It is precisely because UNESCO purports to be a cultural and educational body that its false credibility masks its pervasive bigotry.

As Abba Eban observed, “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.” So it goes with America and the Iran deal. President Trump announced Friday that the U.S. would stay in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), even while he refused to certify under U.S. law that the deal is in the national interest. “Decertification,” a bright, shiny object for many, obscures the real issue — whether the agreement should survive. Mr. Trump has “scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it.”

While Congress considers how to respond — or, more likely, not respond — we should focus on the grave threats inherent in the deal. Peripheral issues have often dominated the debate; forests have been felled arguing over whether Iran has complied with the deal’s terms. Proposed “fixes” now abound, such as a suggestion to eliminate the sunset provisions on the deal’s core provisions.

The core provisions are the central danger. There are no real “fixes” to this intrinsically misconceived agreement. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran is a party, has never included sunset clauses, but the mullahs have been violating it for decades.

If the U.S. left the JCPOA, it would not need to justify the decision by showing that the Iranians have exceeded the deal’s limits on uranium enrichment (though they have). Many argued Russia was not violating the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (though it likely was) when President Bush gave notice of withdrawal in 2001, but that was not the point. The issue was whether the ABM Treaty remained strategically wise for America. So too for the Iran deal. It is neither dishonorable nor unusual for countries to withdraw from international agreements that contravene their vital interests. As Charles de Gaulle put it, treaties “are like girls and roses; they last while they last.”

Pictured: A uranium conversion facility just outside the city of Isfahan, Iran, used as part of Iran’s uranium enrichment process. (Photo by Getty Images)

When Germany, Britain and France began nuclear negotiations with Iran in 2003, they insisted that their objective was to block the mullahs from the nuclear fuel cycle’s “front end” (uranium enrichment) as well as its “back end” (plutonium reprocessing from spent fuel). They assured Washington that Tehran would be limited to “peaceful” nuclear applications like medicine and electricity generation. Nuclear-fuel supplies and the timely removal of spent fuel from Iran’s “peaceful” reactors would be covered by international guaranties.

It was easy to miss it during a hectic week, but on Thursday, the United States announced its withdrawal from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Good riddance.

In 2011, the U.S. substantially cut funding to UNESCO after the organization granted the Palestinian Authority full membership. But while Barack Obama asked Congress to restore funding, the Trump administration has taken the appropriate next step.

UNESCO’s embrace of the Palestinians in 2011 was par for the course for an organization that is a dependable opponent of Israel. In 2012, UNESCO declared the Church of the Nativity to be a World Heritage Site in Danger, ignoring the objections of the U.S., Israel, and the three churches that preside over it. That was a victory for the Palestinians, who claim Bethlehem as their own and say that Israel endangers the site. The next year, the organization’s executive board issued six condemnations of Israel (and honored Che Guevara, the Communist mercenary). It announced in 2016 that the Temple Mount had no connection to Judaism, referring to it only as the “Al-Aqsa Mosque”: The Wailing Wall became the “Buraq Plaza,” and Israel the “occupying power” in Jerusalem. UNESCO’s stated mission is to promote peace and security, but in practice it is just another international institution giving shelter to the world’s ugliest ideas.

It was never appropriate for the U.S. to support UNESCO so long as it remained a nakedly political lobby. That’s something Ronald Reagan understood. In 1984, Reagan withdrew the U.S. from UNESCO back when the group, led by Amadou M. M’Bow, was not just political — anti-Israel as well as pro-Soviet — but corrupt. American diplomat Vernon Walters was fond of pointing out that the Paris-based organization spent 80 percent of its budget in the ritzy 16th arrondissement. Reagan’s decision to leave prompted UNESCO to enact reforms, and in 2002, the Bush administration decided to rejoin. But any reforms have proven temporary, and UNESCO’s return to its old ways is justification enough for Trump’s decision.

Withdrawing makes fiscal and moral sense. Since the U.S. cut off funding to the organization, we have been accruing hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to the group. Critics of Trump’s decision have tended to ignore UNESCO’s contemptible politics and emphasize its other initiatives, which include literacy programs and environmental conservation. But if those programs are jeopardized by a lack of U.S. support, UNESCO has none but itself to blame.

Perhaps this move, like Reagan’s in 1984, will lead to reforms. A State Department official sounded a hopeful note, telling the Washington Post that pulling out “sends a strong message that we need to see fundamental reform.” But opposing Israel and standing against human rights seems to be in the organization’s genes. On Thursday, the UNESCO director-general called the U.S. withdrawal a loss for the “fight against violent extremism.” This from a group that gives harbor to anti-Israel extremists and honors Che Guevara. UNESCO, not the United States, is on the wrong side of that fight.