Trump is right: The U.S. should leave UNESCO

"Last week, the Trump administration announced it would withdraw the United States from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Critics predictably assailed the White House for its decision. But they're wrong. The move is long overdue.

UNESCO has a dismal track record. It has advanced the agendas of numerous dictatorships, indulged in virulent anti-Israel bias and offered textbook lessons in bad management. The United States has repeatedly tried to reform UNESCO and failed. So President Trump's decision was the right call...

In one particularly notorious case, UNESCO elected Sudan - led by the dictator Omar al-Bashir, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court on genocide charges - to its governing body. Astonishingly, it has even allowed Syria to serve on its human rights committee.

UNESCO also accepts money from an array of dictatorships, legitimizing their rule in the process. The notoriously brutal dictator of Equatorial Guinea, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, funded the organization's science prize. And Bahrain finances the King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa Prize for achievements in the use of technology for education, even though Al-Khalifa has overseen a long-running crackdown on human rights...

UNESCO's anti-Israel bias has been profound; the U.S. withdrawal is about much more than the admission of Palestine as a member. Between 2009 and 2014, UNESCO adopted 46 resolutions criticizing Israel - but only one on Syria, and none on countries such as North Korea, Iran, China, Russia or Sudan. UNESCO stood silent while the military wing of Hamas bulldozed the Anthedon seaport, which the organization had designated a 'World Heritage Site,' to build a terrorist training camp.

And UNESCO has repeatedly gone beyond its mandate to neutrally preserve historical memory to instead take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This past summer, the organization adopted a resolution denying all historical Jewish connections to Jerusalem and referred to the Temple Mount exclusively as a 'Muslim holy site of worship,' ignoring Jewish ties to the Western Wall, all that remains of the Second Temple built more than 2,000 years ago..."