http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/cutting-off-unesco-nice-start-now-how-about-the-rest-of-the-israel-hating-u-n/
U.N. Reform: President Trump has announced the U.S. will pull out of UNESCO, the U.N.'s educational, science and cultural organization, because of the agency's "continuing anti-Israel bias." This should be a warning to the rest of the U.N., which is no better.
Among the many enduring disappointments of the United Nations is its profound and at times shocking anti-Israel sentiment, which verges on a kind of sick obsession that runs completely contrary to the U.N.'s founding principles. But UNESCO is particularly bad.
How bad? In 2011, it went too far even for the Obama administration by giving "Palestine," a state that doesn't exist, full membership in UNESCO. Under President Obama, the U.S. stayed in the organization, but suspended its payments.
That's not all, however. Even in its cultural pronouncements, UNESCO has displayed a petulant, politicized anti-Semitism, doing things like canceling an exhibition on the Jewish presence in Israel because Arab nations objected to it, backing a motion to deny any Jewish link to the Temple Mount, passing a resolution criticizing Israel's behavior in Jerusalem and Gaza, and calling Israel an "occupying power" in the ancient Jewish city of Jerusalem to suggest its political illegitimacy, among many other routine insults and slights.
In a region where nearly every inch of land is under dispute of some sort, such innocuous-seeming cultural moves can in fact be dangerous and even destabilizing. When coupled with an active hate for one particular group - that is, the Jewish citizens of Israel - it becomes outright poisonous.
Since 2011, the U.S. has tried to get UNESCO to live up to its responsibilities, but to no avail. Rather than pretending, President Trump decided to leave UNESCO entirely. Bravo for him, and it's money well worth not spending.
But the truth is, this isn't just a disease of UNESCO, but of the entire U.N. body.
The so-called U.N. Human Rights Council, which has existed only since 2006, has condemned Israel more than 60 times - more times than all other countries on Earth, combined, and that includes the mass murderers in Syria and North Korea.
Human rights? The only country in the Mideast that grants Arabs full participatory rights - rights to free speech, to vote, to serve in government and military, the right to a fair trial, not to mention the right to exercise their religion - is Israel. No Arab country does the same. And none grants full rights to non-Muslims. None.
More to the point, Israel is the only truly broad-based, participatory democracy in the entire region. The rest are dictatorships of one sort or another. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has already put the UNHRC on notice.
Then there's that other famous agency, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which has been in business since the late 1940s. It has turned from a "relief" agency into a perpetual bureaucracy and welfare source for the Palestinian cause, one that helps fund both the corruption of the Palestinian leadership and terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization's charter doesn't even recognize Israel's right to exist. It is exterminationist in character, seeking to drive Israel into the sea.
And yet the PLO finds a welcome reception in the United Nations General Assembly, the Security Council, and other bastions of the U.N.'s Israel-hate. Indeed, these days the U.N. seems to do little else than obsess over Israel.
We hope that Trump and his extraordinary U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, will soon serve further notice to the international organization: You are not living up to your responsibilities in the world. Either do so, or the U.S. will begin systematically defunding you, and invite you to locate elsewhere.
| 
