The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced Monday that the far-left administration of President Joe Biden has decided to return America to the organization.
The United States left the organization, whose most well-known objective is to aid countries in preserving sites of cultural and historical significance, under President Donald Trump in 2019 on the grounds that it consistently supported the interests of Palestinian terrorist groups and unfairly maligned Israel, often at the detriment of protecting heritage sites. Israel also withdrew from UNESCO in 2019. The Trump administration made the decision to withdraw in 2017 but had to formally wait for its membership in the body to expire.
As part of Trump’s foreign policy, he greatly reduced American spending and involvement in the United Nations generally, including withdrawing America from the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) and the Human Rights Council, whose members are mostly repressive dictatorships.
America’s return to the historical preservation body — which failed to prevent, among other disasters, the rampant destruction of priceless artifacts and ancient sites by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in the last decade — will also restore $600 million in funding that Washington did not pay after leaving the agency, according to the Associated Press. America has historically been a top funder of United Nations projects.
The head of UNESCO, French former Culture Minister Audrey Azoulay, celebrated Biden’s decision on Monday as a “strong act of confidence” in her organization.
“This is a strong act of confidence, in UNESCO and in multilateralism. Not only in the centrality of the Organization’s mandate – culture, education, science, information – but also in the way this mandate is being implemented today,” Azoulay said.
According to the Associated Press, anonymous “U.S. officials” said that Biden made the decision to return to the controversial agency because his administration is concerned about Chinese influence there, “notably in setting standards for artificial intelligence and technology education around the world.” UNESCO has increased its efforts in the past two years to elevate its influence in those areas, as well as investing in pressuring countries to adopt global speech laws that override domestic legislation to combat alleged “misinformation.”
Congress paved the way to allow Biden to return to UNESCO in December, attaching a provision to its massive end-of-year “omnibus” bill that granted the president waiver powers over a law that blocks the U.S. from funding United Nations agencies that recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a member. The law also bans the United States from funding a U.N. body that recognizes, as a state member, an entity that is not a state.
Far-left President Barack Obama, mandated by law, cut UNESCO funding in 2011 on the grounds that the agency admitted Palestine as a state but did not withdraw America from the organization. Trump made the decision to withdraw in 2017, doing so alongside the government of Israel, in response to a barrage of anti-Israel and antisemitic policies pushed through the agency. In addition to accepting Palestinian officials as a state party, UNESCO outraged Israelis and the global Jewish community in 2017 by declaring the Tomb of the Patriarchs — the second holiest site in Judaism after the Temple Mount — a Palestinian world heritage site.
UNESCO also proclaimed in 2017 that Jerusalem’s Old City and ancient walls were “occupied” by Israel, a declaration that outraged Israelis and preceded a deadly Palestinian terrorist attack at the Temple Mount. UNESCO has failed to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem generally.
“The purpose of UNESCO is a good one. Unfortunately, its extreme politicization has become a chronic embarrassment,” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, currently running for the Republican Party nomination for president, said in 2017, announcing the withdrawal. “Just as we said in 1984 when President [Ronald] Reagan withdrew from UNESCO, U.S. taxpayers should no longer be on the hook to pay for policies that are hostile to our values and make a mockery of justice and common sense.”
Reagan withdrew from UNESCO on the grounds that it promoted Soviet interests, a concern that evaporated with the dissolution of the communist state.
“UNESCO is a body that continually rewrites history, including by erasing the Jewish connection to Jerusalem,” Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon said in 2019. “It is corrupted and manipulated by Israel’s enemies, and continually singles out the only Jewish state for condemnation. We are not going to be a member of an organization that deliberately acts against us.”
While recognizing Palestine and repeatedly condemning Israel, UNESCO fails to recognize the sovereignty of Taiwan, a fully independent state. It has not just blocked Taiwan as an entity from partaking in its activities but discriminates against Taiwanese nationals as individuals.
Under Azoulay and bereft of the generous funding previously coming from America, UNESCO has reshuffled its priorities in the past year to elevate concerns about “disinformation” and “misinformation.” In February, UNESCO held a conference demanding “global guidelines for the regulation of social media” and featuring speakers insisting that governments cannot be trusted to make their own laws on speech.
“If these regulatory initiatives are developed in isolation, with each country working in their own corner, they are doomed to fail,” Azoulay said at the “Internet for Trust Conference.” “Information disruption is by definition a global problem, so our reflections must take place at the global scale.”
The promotional video for the conference featured a narrator describing online social media users speaking freely as “insects thriving in the dark.”
While prioritizing anti-Israel actions and fighting free speech, UNESCO did little in the past decade to prevent one of modern history’s most ambitious and successful campaigns to destroy world heritage sites: the Islamic State crusade to erase non-Islamic identity in Iraq and Syria. In 2015 alone, the Islamic State jihadists burned down the Mosul Library, destroying over 8,000 historical books, and filmed themselves using hammers and other rudimentary tools to smash historic statues.
Islamic State terrorists also destroyed the 2,000-year-old walls of Nineveh, targeted the ancient ruins of Nimrud, and in 2017 destroyed much of the ancient site of Palmyra, Syria.
UNESCO mentioned its alleged work in the “reconstruction of the old city of Mosul, Iraq” in its announcement on Monday, celebrating America’s return to the agency.