The United Nations--your tax dollars at work

If you pay attention to news items, I'm sure you remember that Unesco, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, admitted the Palestinian Authority as a member, even though it's not a country and therefore ineligible. The U.S. in response ended funding for this group, so taxpayers will save $80 million a year. What's interesting is the awful history of this U.N. agency.

According to an article in The Wall Street Journal Unesco has been best known since the 1970s for its New World Information Order, a set of recommendations that would regulate journalists and legitimize the suppression of free speech by authoritarian governments.

This isn't the first time time the U.S. has withdrawn funding from Unesco. During the Cold War, Soviet officials ran Unesco's education programs, and a former head of an African military tribunal responsible for executions was in charge of culture. When France expelled 47 KGB agents in 1983, 12 were Unesco employees. When the U.S. defunded Unesco, its leadership solicited countries to make up the shortfall and got a big donation from Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. That should tell you something.

Unesco has shown blatant hostility to Israel for a long time. Back in 1974 it granted observer status to the Palestine Liberation Organization. Despite Israel's protection of antiquities claimed by Christians, Muslims and Jews, Unesco accused Israel of "persistent alteration of historic features in Jerusalem." The organization dropped its boycott of Israel in the 1970s only after the U.S. threatened to withdraw funds. In the 1990s, Unesco held a symposium on Jerusalem at its Paris headquarters that excluded any Israeli groups. Sounds less than fair.

The Journal reports that in 2009, Farouk Hosny was the lead candidate to run Unesco. He had been the culture minister of Egypt under Hosni Mubarak for 20 years; his responsibilities including censoring news media and Internet. After losing to a Bulgarian diplomat in the fifth round of voting, he blamed "Zionist pressure" and "a group of the world's Jews." He had told the Egyptian Parliament the year before that if there were any books by Israeli authors in Alexandria's library, "I will burn them myself." And this man was close to running Unesco?

But there are more examples of Unesco's unfair treatment of Israel. Last year, at the request of several Arab countries, Unesco reclassified Rachel's Tomb—the 4,000-year-old burial site of Judaism's patriarchs and matriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah—as a mosque. And last year the organization published a history of science that replaces the rabbinic scholar Moshe Ben Maimon—Maimonides—with a Muslim named "Moussa Ben Maimoun."

The point of all this is simple. Unesco is a reliable reminder that there is little accountability for U.N. actions or inactions. This world body is a joke, and we shouldn't bow to its whims nor alter our courts to reflect its standards.