Israel bashing is UNESCO's drug of choice

"As a lifelong Israeli diplomat, especially when at the United Nations, I took comfort in Churchill's definition of success, of 'going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm'.

But the past two weeks have yielded relative successes regarding UNESCO. The United States announced its withdrawal from UNESCO, Israel followed suit, and the French candidate for director-general of the organisation won an unlikely election victory against candidates from Egypt and Qatar.

UNESCO, the United Nations Organisation for Education, Science and Culture, was founded in 1945 to bring nations together around liberal democratic values such as education, equality, science, press freedom and the preservation of world heritage sites. 'Building peace in the minds of men and women,' proclaims its slogan.

Yet it often poisons minds with the politics of conflict, making peace further away. Anti-Israel obsession is a driving force of its hypocrisy and incompetence...

To truly gauge the extent of the hostile takeover of UNESCO, look at how low the bar for success has fallen. We celebrated a victory of a candidate over an Egyptian who advocates Sharia law as the path to education and women's rights, and over a Qatari who in an 'uninterrupted' process would have had as much chance as Qatar winning an 'uninterrupted' World Cup bid.

In a credible organisation such a victory should be a given. That it isn't helps explain why the US and Israel took action..."