UNESCO GOES TO WASHINGTON
Claudia Rosett
National Review, March 14, 2012
When the member states of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization voted last October to confer membership on the Palestinian Authority, they knew their decision would trigger the withdrawal of U.S. funding, which in dues alone accounted for more than $78 million per year, or 22 percent of UNESCO’s core budget. Current American law requires the U.S. to pull funding from any U.N.-affiliated organization that tries to confer statehood on the Palestinians before they have qualified for it through negotiations with Israel. UNESCO did it anyway, the assembled delegates clapping and cheering as they voted. The tally was 107 to 14, with 52 abstaining.
Since then, UNESCO’s Bulgarian director general, Irina Bokova, has been campaigning—not to undo UNESCO’s admission of “Palestine,” but to persuade U.S. authorities to resume forking out money to UNESCO. Bokova’s efforts have included two trips to Washington these past four months, including a U.S. tour which started in Washington [two weeks ago]. UNESCO’s website [recently] feature[d] press releases with headlines such as “UNESCO Director General Presses Washington to Restore US Funding,” over a photo of Bokova meeting in December with a U.S. congressman.
To this I can add the news that to supplement Bokova’s forays to the U.S., Paris-based UNESCO is now quietly planning to open an office in Washington, sometime in the next few months. Were the aim simply to represent UNESCO to the U.S., there would be no need for this. UNESCO already has a liaison office at the U.N.’s headquarters in New York. But this new office, in Washington, will be positioned to maximize access to U.S. policymakers, especially Congress. UNESCO’s current plan is that this office will be run by a former congressional aide, George Papagiannis, who has been working since 2007 for UNESCO.…
A whiff of this plan turned up in a set of “Talking Points” that Papagiannis dispatched recently to various UNESCO advocates in the U.S., and that I obtained. In his talking points, Papagiannis lauds various UNESCO programs, such as literacy training in Iraq and Afghanistan, that he says will suffer unless the U.S. resumes bankrolling the organization. (There is no mention that UNESCO wastes millions, according to its own auditors, or that UNESCO could preserve its better programs by scrapping its worst.) At the bottom of these talking points, Papagiannis’s name and U.S. and French mobile-phone numbers appear, along with the label “UNESCO Washington Office.…”
While UNESCO’s mission is to promote culture, it seems the main aim of this office will be to promote UNESCO itself, with a special focus on the U.S. capital, where, Papagiannis says, there is a failure to fully appreciate UNESCO.… Does that mean he will be lobbying U.S. authorities to restore funding to UNESCO? “I am not lobbying,” Papagiannis [told me]. “I am raising awareness about the organization.…”
[Papagiannis] is now in the U.S., accompanying Bokova.… According to UNESCO’s website, her agenda includes meetings with the media, private-sector companies, charitable foundations, and “government officials.” This isn’t the first U.S. trip on which Bokova has availed herself of the talents of a former U.S. congressional staffer.… On her previous trip to Washington this past December, Bokova was squired to meetings with lawmakers by the current U.S. ambassador to UNESCO, David Killion. Killion is a veteran of the Hill, where he helped pave the way for America’s 2003 return to UNESCO, after President Ronald Reagan pulled the U.S. out in 1984.…
President Obama appointed Killion in 2009 as the U.S. envoy to UNESCO.… [He] is an impassioned advocate of “active engagement” with UNESCO, arguing that this is the way to influence the organization for the better. But on his watch as ambassador, there’s been little U.S. influence on display. One reason may be that Killion keeps hinting that no matter what UNESCO does, the Obama administration will seek ways to keep American money flowing.…
The Obama administration has since greatly expanded on Killion’s kow-tow to UNESCO. In February, President Obama submitted a 2013 State Department budget that lists $78.9 million for UNESCO, despite the legal ban on funding for the organization. In a footnote comes the explanation: “The Department of State intends to work with Congress to seek legislation that would provide authority to waive restrictions on paying the U.S. assessed contributions to UNESCO.…”
Meanwhile, over at UNESCO…[its] 58-member executive board, which includes Syria, voted to keep Syria’s bloody regime on UNESCO’s human-rights committee. UNESCO’s board also approved a long-debated $3 million science prize sponsored by dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, with the concession that it will be named not for Obiang himself, but for the country he has been tyrannizing for the past 33 years, Equatorial Guinea.…
When the Palestinian flag was raised in December at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen wisely warned that “asserting the existence of a Palestinian state does not make it so. It only makes real peace harder to achieve.” She added: “The only thing deterring more UN bodies from following in UNESCO’s reckless, anti-peace footsteps is the credible threat of a U.S. funding cutoff, as U.S. law requires. Money talks at the UN.”
Here’s a suggestion. Last April, UNESCO’s auditors reported that with better management, “UNESCO can make substantial savings of up to $3.1 million annually in Headquarters travel costs.…” Clearly UNESCO could achieve yet more savings by cutting back on excursions to Washington by Director-General Bokova and her retinue…[enabling them] to concentrate on cleaning up UNESCO, rather than trying to meddle with the laws of the United States.
THE UN’S ERODING MORAL COMPASS
Mike Fegelman
National Post, March 12, 2012
As another telling example of how the UN has lost its moral compass, on March 9, just one day after International Women’s Day marked the achievement and continued challenges of women, the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women passed exactly one country-specific resolution—condemning Israel for the supposed intolerable living conditions of Palestinian women.
No action was taken against Iran, where girls are stoned to death for allegedly committing adultery, or Syria, where women are indiscriminately tortured, raped, and murdered by the Assad regime. The plight of Saudi Arabian women who are treated as chattel under monarchy-sanctioned gender apartheid was altogether ignored. The United Nations only censured Israel, one of the world’s most progressive defenders of women’s rights, for exclusive and unwarranted opprobrium.
The resolution decried that the “Israeli occupation” in territories, including east Jerusalem, is the main obstacle for the advancement of Palestinian woman. Not a peep from the UN about the internal Palestinian conditions that stymie female self-determination. Israel’s envoy to the UN, Ron Proser, rightly proclaimed that the resolution “brings levels of absurdity and cynicism to new heights.…”
In a region where the terms “Middle East” and “women’s rights” are contradictory and not complimentary, Israel stands out as a beacon for the rights of women, not its serial abuser. It’s no wonder that when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly this past September, he referred to the UN as “a house of many lies” and a “theatre of the absurd.” A place where “Israel is unjustly singled out for condemnation more often than all the nations of the world combined” and where Israel is “not only cast as the villain, but where real villains are cast in leading roles.”
To support his argument, Netanyahu pointed out how Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights under Gaddafi’s ruthless and tyrannical rein. He referred to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq which headed the UN committee on disarmament and how the UN described the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest accessible site as “occupied Palestinian territory”.…
In order to foster fundamental freedoms and human rights, we need world bodies like the United Nations and our mainstream media to focus their attention on the plight of these women, and not just simply vilify and scapegoat Israel. In doing so, our policy makers can make informed decisions that promote the personal freedoms and professional opportunities of women in the region.
(Mike Fegelman is Executive Director of Honest Reporting Canada.)
UNRWA SLAMS ISRAELI SELF-DEFENSE
Omri Ceren
Contentions, March 14, 2012
Much has been written about the impotence and uselessness of the United Nations and its various Middle East missions. Peacekeeping operations like those in Lebanon fail to keep any sort of peace, while refugee organizations like those in the Gaza Strip fail to resolve refugee crises. But one thing has to be admitted: when they step up to help Israel’s enemies in times of war, they do so enthusiastically and even comprehensively. Because modern wars are fought both in the media and on the battlefield, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) officials make a point of assisting Hamas in both arenas.
The documentation on how UNRWA tried to manipulate the media during Israel’s 2009 Operation Cast Lead is extensive but probably the most surreal example came when UNRWA Commissioner Karen Abu Zayd hastily called a video press conference to blame Israel for the war. Claiming that “it was obvious that Hamas was trying” to observe a truce and that “only one rocket…went out on Friday [before the operation],” she accused Israel of violating an “informal 48-hour lull.” The degree to which Abu Zayd just flat fabricated that story can’t be overemphasized. Suffice to say that not only had Hamas been firing rockets at Israel for months, but on that very Friday morning they had fired 25 shells. That’s a lot more than the 1 Abu Zayd counted, but global media outlets duly parroted her propaganda anyway.
In addition to helping Hamas in the media war, UNRWA also tried to shift the tempo of actual warfighting. On January 6, IDF troops hit a Hamas team that was firing rockets at Israeli civilians from outside an UNRWA school in the Jabalya refugee camp. Hamas had been launching rockets from the UNRWA school grounds since at least 2007, but UNRWA officials took the opportunity to accuse Israel of firing into the building and killing civilians inside. The idea was to create a Gaza version of “Qana,” the Lebanon II incident in which IAF planes targeting a Hezbollah rocket cell accidentally hit the apartment building the cell was using for cover, killing 28 of the human shields inside. The resulting international pressure forced Israel into a 48-hour ceasefire, allowing Hezbollah to regroup and allowing journalists to blame Israel anew when fighting resumed. UNRWA tried to do the same thing with the Jabalya school, mobilizing international calls for a ceasefire just as Hamas had become “desperate for a lull in the fighting.”
But Israel never hit the school. UNRWA just pretended it had. Called to account for their blatant fabrication, UNRWA officials blamed the demonstrable falsehood on—no joke—“a clerical error.…”
UNRWA Spokesman Chris Gunness just got called out for being a “terrorist stooge” after he contended that Israel’s recent anti-Hamas operation is “sick sick sick.” Gunness is unapologetic about his personal affection for Hamas partisans…so it makes sense that he would lash out against Israel, even though the rockets falling on UNRWA schools right now are Hamas-launched Qassams that fall short.
It makes less sense for the United States to continue paying the salary of a guy who suggests that Israel is killing Palestinians for sport, but multilateralism is magic that way. At times like this I like to muse over the recent question presented by the Forward, once one of America’s great ethnic news outlets and now a shoddy proponent of neutrality about BDS: why must American Jews persist in their unfair “misconceptions” about all the good work UNRWA does?
THE UNHRC AND HAMAS
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, March 21, 2012
It was no bolt from the blue that the grotesquely misnamed UN Human Rights Council played host last week (albeit somewhat indirectly) to a Hamas representative, Gazan “parliamentarian” Ismail al-Ashqar. Although for technical reasons he couldn’t address the UNHRC’s official 19th session in Geneva last week, he did participate in one of the NGO forums ancillary to it.
This event, organized by the Ma’arij Foundation for Peace and Development, was conducted at the UN’s Geneva facility, parallel to the UNHRC session and publicized on UNHRC’s website.
Had Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu not slammed this travesty, it’s doubtful much attention would have been paid the creeping legitimization of Hamas in the Swiss-based subsidiary of the UN General Assembly. Not that this should surprise anyone with even rudimentary familiarity with the Council.
Pro forma, it was born only in 2006, but in actual fact it started out as the much-discredited UN Human Rights Commission. Former UN chief Kofi Annan took the extraordinary step of abolishing it because of unabashed politicization that mostly manifested itself in its fixated demonization of Israel—singled out for censure on any occasion and under any pretext.
The unlamented commission was replaced by the council amid promises for sincere introspection, contrition and most of all cleaning up of the commission’s admittedly shameful record.
Nonetheless, the commission’s preposterous patterns reasserted themselves in full from the get-go. The council consistently discerns nothing more urgent to occupy itself with than Israel’s alleged human rights abuses. The council is the commission’s carbon copy, with one exception. The commission held a single yearly session. The council treats us to multiple annual extravaganzas.
The majority of its 47 seats are Third World, which not only guarantees massive anti-Israel bias but makes mockery of human rights.… Among the council’s members are such stalwart champions of civil liberties as Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, Djibouti, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, Malaysia, Qatar and Cuba.
Little wonder that the Americans expressed profound displeasure with the current UNHRC agenda. Theirs is no trifling rebuke, however, precisely because it comes from the Obama administration that pointedly reversed a Bush administration decision not to seek a seat on the council due to its loss of credibility, obsessive preoccupation with Israel and failure to confront the world’s real serial rights abusers.
US Ambassador to the UNHRC Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe noted the council’s Agenda Item 7, under which, at every session, Israel’s human rights record is seemingly scrutinized. No other country has an agenda item reserved for it. The US “continues to be deeply troubled by this council’s biased and disproportionate focus on Israel, as exemplified by this standing agenda item,” Donahoe told the council recently, during a daylong debate on five UNHRC resolutions on Israel.
This is the same council that commissioned the Goldstone Report and which followed it up by scathingly condemning Israel for the Mavi Marmara incident.
The UNHRC is the last organization that should be relied upon to take into account the fact that the Hamas Charter rejects “so-called peaceful solutions.… There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad.” Hamas’s charter also calls for Israel’s obliteration because “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.…”
Jews, the Hamas charter charges, “instigated WWI and WWII,” and Jews later “inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule the world by their intermediary.” This should particularly interest the UNHRC, which needs ask itself how it can abide a xenophobic terrorist organization, which, while branding the UN as a Jewish scam, exploits it to pillory the Jewish state.
TOLERATING HAMAS INVITES A MIDEAST WAR
Ron Prosor
Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2012
‘War is the unfolding of miscalculations.” So noted historian Barbara Tuchman decades ago, yet this principle continues to fall on deaf ears in the international community. As terrorism in the Gaza Strip increases, threatening to set off instability across the region, the continued roar of rockets into Israel should keep world leaders up at night. But most remain mute and missing in action.
Their choice to stand idle is a grave miscalculation. The consequences…could be tragic.
This month, a targeted strike by the Israel Defense Forces canceled the travel plans of arch-terrorist Zuhair al-Qaisi as he headed from Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula. His itinerary included much more than snorkeling in the Red Sea. He aimed to launch another mass murder of innocent Israelis from the Sinai—and undermine the foundation of regional stability by driving a wedge between Israel and Egypt.
In the five days that followed, terrorists in Gaza stepped up their attacks on Israeli cities to 60 rockets per day (up from a years-long average of “only” two to four a day). As these terrorists sought to maximize civilian deaths, Israel worked to minimize them, with a precise and targeted offensive and defensive response. Israel’s new “Iron Dome” antimissile system intercepted more than 50 rockets over major cities, preventing more than 50 potential tragedies. Israel’s Air Force hit Palestinian rocket squads with minimal civilian casualties, even though they had been intentionally using neighborhoods and schools as launching pads.
The situation in Israel’s south remains as stable as a house of cards. Rockets continue to fly in from Gaza. Despite its spectacular performance, the Iron Dome is still only 90% effective at its best, whereas the terrorists in Gaza remain 100% determined to kill Israeli civilians. The clock is ticking until the next major escalation.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that if rockets fall on your head, you have a right to defend yourself.… Time and time again, Israel has warned the world that Gaza is a disaster waiting to happen. Yet, over the past decade, the ratio of rocket attacks to words of condemnation from the United Nations Security Council is 12,000 to zero.…
With the Middle East locked in a struggle for a democratic future, a significant escalation in Gaza would tip the scales toward the fundamentalists. From Marrakech to Manama, it would provide cannon fodder for radical clerics and politicians to promote their hateful ideology. The Arab world would be forced to drop its focus on the atrocities of the Assad regime, giving the region’s most cynical eye doctor the opportunity once and for all to blind his people’s vision for freedom.
Iran understands this well. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards are loading Bashar al-Assad’s tanks, funding his government, and training his troops—all while funneling weapons to Hamas and other terrorist proxies in Gaza. Today, a conflict in Gaza would answer all the prayers of Iran’s leaders, distracting the world as they take their final steps toward nuclear capability. For the Iranian regime, every dead Israeli or Palestinian provides an opportunity to install another centrifuge.
The terrorists in Gaza do not pose a threat only to the citizens of southern Israel. Each rocket is armed with a warhead capable of causing a political earthquake that would extend well beyond Israel’s borders. Our message to the international community is clear: Your silence is pounding the drums of war.
(Ron Prosor is Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations.)
