U.S. Exits Corrupt, Communist-led UNESCO

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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) fell from grace at astounding speed. From being touted as the Obama administration’s “global partner” in globalizing education just a few years ago, to facing a massive financial crisis and even a U.S. government exit today under President Trump, UNESCO is on track to become a byword for globalist corruption and tyranny. It also offers Americans a powerful example of how easy it is to restore ceded U.S. sovereignty and crush globalist schemes that undermine liberty, morality, self-government, and common sense. Israel also announced its departure. Now, it is time to focus on the broader United Nations.

Today, the U.S. State Department formally notified UNESCO boss Irina Bokova — an actual communist swamped in corruption scandals — that the United States is leaving the organization. In a statement, the U.S. State Department said the decision “was not taken lightly.” The reason for the decision, officials said, includes “U.S. concerns with mounting arrears at UNESCO, the need for fundamental reform in the organization, and continuing anti-Israel bias at UNESCO.” More on each of those important points in a moment.

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In its official statement, the Trump administration said the U.S. government “indicated to the Director General its desire to remain engaged with UNESCO as a non-member observer state in order to contribute U.S. views, perspectives and expertise on some of the important issues undertaken by the organization, including the protection of world heritage, advocating for press freedoms, and promoting scientific collaboration and education.” But pursuant to UNESCO’s constitution, the U.S. will withdraw, with the decision taking effect on the last day of 2018 — despite intense lobbying by globalists and foreign powers.

Speaking about the Trump administration’s decision, widely criticized UNESCO Director-General Bokova issued a statement touting UNESCO and expressing regret over the U.S. government’s move. “At the time when conflicts continue to tear apart societies across the world, it is deeply regrettable for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations agency promoting education for peace and protecting culture under attack,” she said. “This is a loss to the United Nations family. This is a loss for multilateralism.” Multilateralism is another term for globalism.

Even before the Trump administration announced an “Amexit” from UNESCO, though, relations were already strained. Thanks to 1990s federal laws banning U.S. funding of international organizations that admit the “State of Palestine” as a member, even under the Obama administration, the U.S. government was forced to cut off most American financial support to the UN agency. Of course, Obama tried hard to get around that — and even found creative ways to illegally send U.S. tax money — but the hole in UNESCO’s budget, close to 25 percent of its budget, was still catastrophic. UNESCO claims U.S. taxpayers “owe” it about half of a billion dollars at this point. Other major donor governments, reacting to UNESCO’s extremism and corruption, also withheld funding.

Among the most serious problems identified by critics around the world was UNESCO boss Bokova. Despite support from international communism and leading establishment globalists such as the Rothschild dynasty, among others, Bokova, a longtime communist operative from Bulgaria, has become infamous worldwide for lawlessness and corruption. She originally joined the Bulgarian Communist Party as a youth member, despite the party’s track record of mass murder and brutality. She later served in senior posts in the communist regime, which murdered hundreds of thousands of people — something for which she has never apologized. Her father was a high-ranking communist bigwig, too. That helped to secure Bokova’s spot at the KGB-controlled Moscow State Institute of International Relations, an elite training center for future communist spies and operatives.

The stench of corruption scandals has been swirling around Bokova for years, as well, much of it exposed by investigative watchdog group Bivol. From lying on her résumé and owning luxury properties around the world that her tax-funded income could not possibly account for, to using public money and handing out “awards” to people in positions of influence in her campaign to lead the UN, to appointing cronies without qualifications to top posts, Bokova has attracted scrutiny worldwide. Most recently, she was exposed by Bivol for using her luxurious UN-funded apartment-office in Paris as the registered address for a shadowy business named after her and her husband. Her husband, another communist operative burrowed into an international organization, is already under investigation in Bulgaria for mega-corruption and huge alleged bribes from murderous regimes.

Bokova’s corruption is so extreme and so well known that, in addition to destroying UNESCO’s reputation, her own staffers been been begging for external audits and investigations. As The New American reported, a large number of UNESCO staffers sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a fellow socialist linked to Bokova’s communist network through his leadership of the Socialist International, pleading for help. To protect herself, though, Bokova is working hard to ensure that a “friendly” candidate takes over when she leaves her post later this year. The New American was the first publication to report, citing insider sources at the agency, that she was considering a Communist Chinese operative as ideal for the post. Today, the communist agent has been widely reported to be a frontrunner.

Even the “legitimate” activities of UNESCO under Bokova’s leadership have drawn fierce criticism from defenders of liberty, national sovereignty, common sense, education, science, culture, Christianity, biology, and more. Consider, for example, a recent report disgorged by UNESCO that demands propaganda in textbooks pushing globalism, statism, the “LGBT” agenda, and other “values” that the UN agency claims all children must possess. The UN agency has also been fiendishly working to sexualize children as young as four-years old with perverse and wildly inappropriate “sex education.” And that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to UNESCO, which has long been seeking to standardize “education” around the world using, among other tools, the radical “World Core Curriculum” modeled on the bizarre teachings of Lucifer Publishing Company founder Alice Bailey.

On Israel, UNESCO has long been criticized for its bizarre obsession with demonizing the tiny Jewish state. Most recently, the disgraced UN outfit came under criticism for adopting a resolution last year describing Israel as an “occupying power” while downplaying the historical Jewish connections to the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and more. Also sparking outrage was the resolution’s reference to the “Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram Al-Sharif” as holy Muslim sites, completely erasing the historical and religious links of Jews to the sites. In 2015, UNESCO passed a similar resolution purporting to rename famous Jewish historical and religious sites with Arabic names, again sparking global outrage. Adding fuel to the fire, just today voting UNESCO member states gave a plurality of votes to Qatari candidate Hamad bin Abdulaziz Al-Kawari, widely accused of anti-Semitism, in the race to be the outfit’s next leader.

According to UN Watch, each year, UNESCO adopts about 10 resolutions criticizing a particular country. Unsurprisingly, considering the UN agency’s membership roster, 100 percent of those resolutions target the state of Israel, with one exception occurring in 2013 when Syria was condemned in one resolution. The obsessive focus on Israel has become so extreme that more than a few prominent Jewish and non-Jewish critics have referred to UNESCO as systemically anti-Semitic. UNESCO is among the worst when it comes to UN agencies, many of which consistently demonize Israel more than all other governments and dictatorships combined.

Following Trump’s lead, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling the U.S. government’s move “brave and moral,” also announced that his government would be withdrawing from UNESCO. “This is a courageous and ethical decision because UNESCO has become a theater of the absurd and instead of preserving history, distorts it,” he added. Netanyahu has previously accused the UN outfit of promoting “fake history.” Other senior Israeli officials also praised Trump’s decision. “Today is a new day at the U.N., where there is price to pay for discrimination against Israel,” Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon was quoted as saying.

But while it may have gotten more extreme and more corrupt under Bokova, UNESCO has a long and sordid history of extremism and corruption. In fact, this is actually the second time the U.S. government has withdrawn from UNESCO. The agency’s extremism and hostility to basic liberties got so outlandish that, by 1983, President Ronald Reagan decided to formally cancel the U.S. government’s membership in the Soviet-dominated outfit, along with American funding for it. In a series of scathing statements about the organization, senior U.S. officials lambasted the UN agency and its collectivism. U.S. State Department officials, for example, said UNESCO “has extraneously politicized virtually every subject it deals with.”

The UN agency’s totalitarian extremism, which has accelerated in recent years under communist operative Bokova’s tenure, was another key issue in Reagan’s decision. UNESCO “has exhibited hostility toward the basic institutions of a free society, especially a free market and a free press, and has demonstrated unrestrained budgetary expansion,” officials said, lambasting the organization for wasting money promoting Soviet schemes and other totalitarian absurdities.

President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Gregory Newell, meanwhile, said at the time that, despite frequent warnings from U.S. officials, UNESCO has “served anti-U.S. political ends.” Specifically, Newell cited “misguided policies,” including “collectivist” schemes that promote “group rights” at the expense of individual rights. He also blasted UNESCO’s promotion of licensing schemes for journalists, its obsession with imposing a “New International Economic Order” in which taxpayers in freer countries are fleeced so their wealth could be redistributed to the UN and oppressive Third World regimes, and numerous other problems.

The U.S. government re-joined UNESCO in 2003 under neoconservative President George W. Bush. “As a symbol of our commitment to human dignity, the United States will return to UNESCO,” Bush claimed, without explaining how joining a dictator-dominated organization dedicated to anti-American ideologies and plagued by scandal would be a symbol of commitment to “human dignity.” Bush also claimed, falsely, as it turns out, that the organization had been “reformed.” Recent events and actions by UNESCO prove that the outfit has not only not “reformed,” but that it is actually worse today than it was in 1984 when the U.S. government withdrew.

The Trump administration made a very wise decision in exiting UNESCO. But it is not enough. While it is a key agency, UNESCO is merely one tentacle of the globalist-controlled monster that is the UN dictators club. To protect the liberties and self-government of the American people over the long term, Congress must act. Fortunately, there is legislation already introduced in Congress, the American Sovereignty Restoration Act (H.R. 193), that would end all U.S. government involvement with the dictators club. Now it is up to the American people to push the effort over the finish line by educating their communities and their elected representatives.

Photo of UNESCO headquarters in Paris: Thinkstock

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe but has lived all over the world. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook. He can be reached at [email protected].