Earlier this month, the United States lost its vote in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Israel suffered a similar fate as a result of a pair of laws affecting the status of the countries after Palestine was accepted as a member.
In October 2011, Palestine was afforded full membership in the United Nations agency, automatically triggering an end to U.S. funding for the group. The U.S. response was part of a law originally signed by President George H.W. Bush and renewed by President Bill Clinton. According to that legislation, the recognition of Palestinian statehood by any department of the world body would bring about an immediate end to U.S. funding for that agency.
After an 18-year absence from UNESCO, President George W. Bush signed legislation rejoining the organization.
“This organization has been reformed, and America will participate fully in its mission to advance human rights, tolerance, and learning,” Bush said in an address to the UN General Assembly in September 2002.
“As a symbol of our commitment to human dignity, the United States will return to UNESCO,” he added.
Now, after 12 years of participating in UNESCO’s various projects, once described by the Clinton administration as “mismanaged and overly political,” the United States is out again.
Given the persistence of the desperate indebtedness in which the government of the United States finds itself, the banking of the $80 million annually given to UNESCO can’t hurt. The U.S. contribution accounted for 22 percent of the agency’s annual budget.
Naturally, once the cutoff was announced, the cry went up that U.S. national security was at stake.
“How UNESCO contributes to national security isn’t as glaring as something like the International Atomic Energy Agency or the World Health Organization,” said UN advocate Mark Goldberg, as quoted in the Washington Post. “But it still does.”
Later in the article, Goldberg called the law triggering the automatic defunding “ridiculous,” labelling it the “canary in the coal mine” for U.S. national security interests, particularly with regard to the Iranian nuclear question.
Under the same law that stopped the flow of funds to UNESCO, the spigot sending cash to the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency would also be turned off.
Would it be so bad for the United States if funding were cut off for UNESCO and every other arm of the international kraken lurking in Turtle Bay?
Sadly, most Americans aren’t aware of the anti-American, irreligious, pro-pagan agenda of this bureau of the new world order in waiting.
Were the managers of UNESCO to get their way, Judaism, Christianity, and every other form of traditional worship would be supplanted by an atheistic approach to everything from abortion to education.
As has been recently reported, what Agenda 21 would do for property rights, a UNESCO-sponsored Common Core clone would do for education and classroom control.
Many of UNESCO’s most destructive attacks on traditional Western beliefs and on liberty are already being carried out surreptitiously on many fronts in the United States. As The New American has reported:
A 10-part series for teachers, published in 1949 under the title Toward World Understanding, asserted that “one of the chief aims of education today should be to prepare boys and girls to take an active part in the creation of a world society.” But government schools must stamp out love of country and the family must be viewed as the enemy: “As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only rather precarious results. As we have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes that favor jingoism.”
Seizing the right to rear children from parents and granting it to globalists with a socialist world view would be justified as an answer to harmful “jingoism.”
In 2003, then-Congressman Ron Paul made a speech during consideration of a bill calling for a return to UNESCO. The points made by Paul more than a decade ago are yet apt and deserved to be rehearsed here as it surely won’t be long before a similar bill is being debated in Congress once again:
Those calling for the United States to rejoin UNESCO claim that the organization has undertaken fundamental reforms and therefore the United States should rejoin. It is strange that in the 18 years since the United States left UNESCO, we only started reading about the beginnings of reform in the year 2000. Are we to believe that after nearly two decades of no change in UNESCO’s way of mismanaging itself things have changed so much in just two years? Is it worth spending $60 million per year on an organization with such a terrible history of waste, corruption, and anti-Americanism?…
Mr. Speaker, even if UNESCO has been “reforming” its finances over the past two years, its programmatic activities are still enough to cause great concern among those of us who value American sovereignty and honor our Constitution. Consider the following as a partial list of UNESCO’s ongoing highly questionable activities:
UNESCO meddles in the education affairs of its member-countries and has sought to construct a U.N.-based school curriculum for American schools.
UNESCO has been fully supportive of the United Nations’ Population Fund (UNFPA) in its assistance to China’s brutal coercive population control program.
UNESCO has designated 47 U.N. Biosphere Reserves in the United States covering more than 70 million acres, without Congressional consultation.
UNESCO effectively bypasses Congressional authority to manage federal lands, by establishing management policies without Congressional consultation or approval.
Finally, it is worth noting that there is something sinister about the fact that UNESCO openly supports population control and classroom control, the two primary purposes behind the millions of dollars being spent by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the money behind Common Core. For further evidence of the admitted aim of UNESCO, take a look at the projects listed under the “Themes” tab on the group’s official website.
Americans who oppose abortion, Agenda 21’s assault on private property, and Common Core’s data mining and thought control should applaud the United States’ departure from UNESCO. They must be wary, however, of the call for a return to the group that will undoubtedly percolate up from some congressional caucus warning of threats to the homeland and a disregard for health and safety throughout the world.
The threat to liberty and innocent life, however, is much more real and much more aggressively pursued when the American taxpayers are footing the bill.
Surprisingly, the support for a return to funding for UNESCO might be more widespread than one would suspect, especially in light of the undeniably un-American, anti-Christian aim of the group’s agenda.
A poll conducted in January by the Better World Campaign revealed that 83 percent of registered voters in the United States believe it’s “important for the country to be a member of and provide funding” to UNESCO.
Opposition to any call for restoration of U.S. membership must begin now and must be directed to federal representatives.
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He is the host of The New American Review radio show that is simulcast on YouTube every Monday. Follow him on Twitter @TNAJoeWolverton and he can be reached at [email protected]
