(JNS.org<\/em>) — In October, the U.S. State Department notified<\/a> the director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that America would be withdrawing from the U.N. body. The U.S. cited the need for fundamental reform, mounting arrears and \u201ccontinuing anti-Israel bias\u201d at the organization. But the problem is much deeper: UNESCO denies Israel\u2019s very right to exist, a fact that its defenders would do well to acknowledge if they\u2019re serious about reforming the agency.<\/p>\n In recent commentaries in The Hill and elsewhere, some have obfuscated<\/a> UNESCO\u2019s efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state. Commentators such as Dan Wagner, a special adviser to the UNESCO director-general, have minimized the organization\u2019s troubling agenda, stating, \u201cWhen it comes to Israel and some other hot-button political issues, the majority of UNESCO member nations and the U.S. have sometimes found themselves on opposite sides.\u201d <\/p>\n The reason? \u201cBecause UNESCO\u2014as the U.S. insisted at its founding\u2014is a fully democratic body that gives each member nation a single vote,\u201d according to Wagner, \u201cthe majority truly does rule.\u201d Yet this omits that the majority of UNESCO member nations have engaged in, or passively enabled, efforts to single out Israel. That it was done via \u201cmajority rule\u201d hardly makes it any better, as the history of anti-Semitism regrettably illustrates.<\/p>\n UNESCO claims that it aims to \u201ccontribute to the building of peace,\u201d and lists \u201cfostering cultural diversity\u201d and \u201cintercultural dialogue\u201d as some of its top objectives<\/a>. But as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) and others have documented<\/a>, UNESCO has engaged in political warfare against Israel, seeking to delegitimize the Jewish state and erase the Jewish people\u2019s historical connection to their ancestral homeland.<\/p>\n For example, on April 15, 2016, UNESCO adopted<\/a> a resolution that removed any Jewish historical ties to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall area in Jerusalem, referring to the former as the \u201cal-Aqsa Mosque\/al-Haram al-Sharif\u201d and the latter as \u201cal-Buraq Plaza.\u201d The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism. The existence of both structures\u2014as verified by archaeologists\u2014predates the founding of Islam by hundreds of years. UNESCO not only sought to strip these holy sites of their Jewish identity, but condemned Jewish visits and policing of the sites.<\/p>\n This politically motivated resolution is just one of many in UNESCO\u2019s campaign against Israel. By singling out Israel for opprobrium\u2014including during a period in which Islamists are targeting ancient sites throughout the world\u2014UNESCO shows its bias.<\/p>\n In October 2016, UNESCO passed<\/a> another resolution that omitted mention of any Jewish connection to Jewish holy sites, referring to them only in Arabic and Muslim terms. That resolution charged Israel with being an \u201coccupying power\u201d in Jerusalem\u2014a city that is not once mentioned in Islam\u2019s Quran, but which has been central<\/a> to Judaism for thousands of years. <\/p>\n As CAMERA Senior Analyst Ricki Hollander has noted, \u201cThis historical revisionism and attempted religious suppression is an affront to Jews and Christians alike as these sites are central to both religions.\u201d<\/p>\n In doing so, UNESCO blatantly takes the side of the Palestinian Arab leadership, which has sought to expunge any Jewish\u2014and therefore important Christian\u2014connections to Jerusalem\u2019s holy sites. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, for example, called the Jewish history of Jerusalem a \u201cdelusional myth\u201d in an Aug. 1, 2015, speech<\/a> that was aired on the official PA TV station. <\/p>\n By passing politicized resolutions, UNESCO serves the objectives of the PA and other entities that routinely attack the Jewish state and, in the PA\u2019s case, routinely incite<\/a> anti-Jewish violence. <\/p>\n Indeed, in the speech noted above, Abbas falsely claimed that Jews held designs to \u201crid\u201d Jerusalem of the al-Aqsa mosque, located on the Temple Mount. As the Middle East analyst Nadav Shragai has noted<\/a>, this libel has long been used by Palestinian and Arab rulers to provoke attacks against Jerusalem\u2019s Jewish residents. True to form, Abbas\u2019s remarks were followed shortly thereafter<\/a> by the so-called \u201cstabbing intifada\u201d in which dozens of Israelis were attacked, and in some instances murdered, with bats, knives, rocks, vehicles and firearms, among other weapons.<\/p>\n Worse still, in an April 2016 resolution, UNESCO blamed<\/a> Israel for the terror attacks that followed Abbas\u2019s speech.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By contrast, when Palestinians have been caught\u2014including on camera\u2014desecrating religious holy sites like Rachel\u2019s Tomb<\/a>, Joseph\u2019s Tomb and the Church of the Nativity, UNESCO is often silent despite its stated goal to protect culturally significant sites. In 2013, for example, more than 200 terror attacks occurred at Rachel\u2019s Tomb, where the Jewish matriarch Rachel is believed to be buried; 119 of those attacks included the use of explosives at the sacred site.<\/p>\n In September 2015, four Palestinian terrorists were arrested for plotting an attack on another Jewish sacred site, Joseph\u2019s Tomb in Nablus\u2014the biblical city of Shechem in Samaria. They planned<\/a> to set off explosives at the site. They were caught and arrested by Israeli security forces despite the fact that the men lived in areas governed by the PA, which is bound by the 1993 Oslo Accords to apprehend terrorists and prevent attacks. This failed to merit a UNESCO resolution.<\/p>\n Simply put, UNESCO does not consider Jewish culture and heritage worthy of protection.<\/p>\n (Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"Share](\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\")