Good Riddance to a Repeat U.N. Offender

There was déjà vu for U.N. watchers last week when 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. U.S. law automatically ends funding for any U.N. body that admits the PA, so taxpayers will save $80 million a year by defunding an agency long focused more on politics than on its mission.

Founded after World War II, 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This is the third time the U.S. has withdrawn funding from Unesco. Some history is useful, especially during a week when the world awaits a report by another U.N. body, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which may or may not finally acknowledge Iran’s hardly secret nuclear arms program.

This columnist first became familiar with Unesco in the early 1980s when sources within the institution reached out to journalists. We couldn’t report this at the time, but many of those sources were from Soviet bloc countries. Even they were outraged by Unesco’s political and financial corruption—and by the West’s weak-willed acceptance of it. After a report in this newspaper about a planned U.S. audit of financial shenanigans, a mysterious fire in Unesco’s Paris headquarters destroyed key files. Ronald Reagan had the U.S. leave Unesco in the 1980s. Britain and Singapore followed. These countries returned only after 9/11.

Plus ça change: The current ambassador to Unesco from Uzbekistan, a country whose human rights record is deplorable even by the standards of former Soviet states, is Lola Karimova-Tillayeva, a daughter of strongman Islam Karimov. She was recently in the news for losing a libel action she brought against French news site Rue89, which had accurately called her father a dictator.

Unesco’s hostility to Israel goes back to 1974, when 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.

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.”

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.”

Unesco is a caricature of a politicized U.N. agency. Now eyes are returning to the IAEA, which is expected, perhaps, finally to warn that Iran is closer to nuclear capability.

Iran has kept U.N. inspectors away from its suspect facilities for years. IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said earlier this year that “Iran is not providing the necessary cooperation to enable the agency to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran.” This phrasing is convoluted even by U.N. standards of doublespeak, but the result is that Iran has been left free to pursue its nuclear program.

Unesco is a reliable reminder that there is little accountability for U.N. actions or inactions. We can be amused by the antics of an agency like Unesco that has no serious duties. It’s harder to be as sanguine about the IAEA. History teaches that matters of life and death are too important to be delegated to the U.N.