US leaves crackpot UNESCO

Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US as funder-in-chief for UNESCO, which is supposedly the world’s paramount educational, scientific and cultural organisation, is as well founded now as it was when he pulled out in 2017 during his first White House term. Joe Biden foolishly restored the US to full membership after the 2020 election and stumped up more than $US600m in arrears.

But UNESCO has learned nothing. It remains the same sprawling, Paris-based bureaucracy, besotted by wokery on gender and determined to push anti-Israel bias and anti-Semitism while allowing itself to be used by Beijing, its second biggest funder, to downplay the fate of China’s oppressed Uighur minority. As US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce says, UNESCO has strayed far from its founding mission when, in 1945, Australia was among its 37 initial members. Instead of fulfilling the mandate it was given to encourage educational and cultural understanding across the globe, it has devolved into an organisation that works to advance divisive social and cultural causes. What other conclusion be drawn from UNESCO’s preoccupation with nonsensical wokery such as the gender equality quest in video games, the Transforming MEN’talities initiative to combat harmful norms of masculinity, and focusing on “climate change (that is) deepening the vulnerabilities of minority groups”? All this while setting out to offend Jews by designating Jewish holy sites as “Palestinian World Heritage” reserves, declaring Palestine is “occupied” by Israel, and condemning the Jewish state’s fight for survival against Hamas without criticising the terrorists’ murderous reign in Gaza.

The US first withdrew from UNESCO in 1983 when Ronald Reagan was president and he complained that the organisation “has extraneously politicised virtually every subject it deals with. It has exhibited hostility toward a free society, especially a free market, and a free press.”

That indictment is no less valid. Others among UNESCO’s 194 member-states would do well to reassess their commitment to what increasingly looks like a seriously crackpot body.