The Unesco Opportunity

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The decision of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization to approve full membership for Palestine provides America an opportunity not only to halt its funding of the organization but to withdraw entirely — and permanently. The halt in funding is required by a law passed by Congress in the 1990s and signed by President Clinton. Unesco was warned of this consequence by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Secretary of State Clinton, shortly before Unesco took its vote. Her warning had a kind of rueful tone. The better way to look at it is as a chance for America to extricate itself once and for all from an agency that has defined repeated efforts at reform.

America and a number of other leading democracies withdrew from Unesco in the 1980s, when President Reagan grew fed up with the anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that had emerged at Unesco. The agency was given over to truckling to the Soviet Union. The hope when America withdrew was that its absence would trigger reforms the way our absence triggered reforms at the International Labor Organization. After war erupted on September 11, 2001, however, President Bush reckoned there would be a percentage in returning to Unesco, and America re-entered in 2002.

At the time, these columns warned it was a mistake. Our editorial, “The Unesco Blunder,” noted that if the organization were to undertake any valuable programs, such as preserving cultural antiquities, America could participate on an ad hoc basis. “Meanwhile,” we said, “there is the prospect that Unesco will fetch up on the wrong side in the war the Islamic extremists are fighting against America and Israel. The Associated Press reports that the U.N. agency said that Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Algeria, and other states have recently asked it for help in breaking the association between Islam and terrorism with a ‘cultural offensive against terrorism.’ This would be a case of the fox taking over the hen house, with Unesco at risk of becoming a propaganda device for those who wish to obscure the nature of the war we are fighting.”

Then, in February of 2006, we issued another editorial, “The Unesco Bunder II.” This was after Fidel Castro gave the $5,000 Unesco Prize to the Venezuelan Hugo Chavez. The photo of that event was snapped a few hours after the Venezuelan had called America’s president a “North American Hitler.” Nor was such talk an anomaly at the United Nations’ educational arm. One of its most famous “goodwill ambassadors,” had recently called the Department of Homeland Security a “new Gestapo” and gone to Venezuela to call President Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world.”

What we concluded then was that Mr. Bush was mistaken when he reckoned Unesco had reformed and that the best part of valor for America would be to pull right back out again. This should thus be an easy call for both President Obama and the Congress, not to mention Mrs. Clinton. Any attempt to dodge the law requiring America to halt funding will only place into sharper relief the demarche of the new chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who wants to reform funding of the entire United Nations system, giving America discretion on which agencies it funds. It’s a measure we’ve strongly endorsed and see as a stepping stone to a new world body composed entirely of democracies.


The New York Sun

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