Seven years ago I penned an oped for Arutz Sheva in which I asked the State of Israel to leave UNESCO, the UN's agency for science and culture.
“After halting its annual fees to the UN's cultural agency, the State of Israel should suspend any cooperation with UNESCO. This is an historical battle that Israel can win with the support of Westerners who still care about the fate of their civilization. But the Jews have to stop playing according their enemies’ guillotine”.
This week, the United States and the State of Israel announced the decision to abandon this corrupt UN agency. It was a brave decision. It meant that the world's most important nation and its most precious ally in the Middle East refuse to submit to the world's highest "cultural body."
At the time when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher abandoned UNESCO in the '80s, that era was dominated by the Soviet Bloc, and America accused UNESCO of politicization and anti-Israeli bias. In the wake of the Kippur War, on the initiative of Arab countries, UNESCO had excluded Israel from every group. This year, UNESCO erased the Jewish roots from Jerusalem and Hevron. It was a cultural Holocaust, no less severe than the denial of the gas chambers.
A year ago, Algerian writer Boualem Sansal came to Rome at a conference I organized titled “Israel, the border of Europe”. He said that UNESCO had committed symbolic homicide: “It is saying that the Jews have nothing to do with Israel, they come from elsewhere, they will go back there”.
To deal with such an anti-Semithic UN agency, you have to frighten it and push it into the corner to hope for any reform. A lie, repeated many times, ends up becoming truth, said Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels. And UNESCO has spread many lies about Israel. And the ground that welcomes lies is more and more fertile today so the lie must be cut before it becomes an oak.