Free Republic

Congress must demand the US widthrawal from UNESCO: "Israel’s Foreign Ministry blasts UN’s cultural agency over resolution on the Gaza war which was critical of Israel but failed to condemn Hamas." https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/380137?utm_source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

On the night of January 31, 2018, the spies, the analysts, the technicians, and the operations chiefs of the Mossad, the State of Israel’s fabled intelligence arm, were gathered inside the agency’s state-of-the-art situation room on the outskirts of Tel Aviv to oversee an operation that they all knew could turn out to be momentous for their country—or, if things went awry, disastrous. Yossi Cohen, the dapper chief of the agency, dressed in his usual crisply ironed white shirt, sat at a desk, keeping his eye on the time, while the whole room was in a state of tense expectation,...

UNESCO has rewritten history in the Land of Israel before. It has declared the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism — which it refers to only by its Arabic name, Al-Haram Al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) — as an exclusively Muslim holy site. And now Jericho is about to be given similar treatment by UNESCO, its significance in the history of the Jews ignored, while the fact that the city is now populated entirely by Palestinians will lead UNESCO to ignore thousands of years of its Jewish history and to describe it as an exclusively “Palestinian heritage site.” “Is UNESCO...

The Heritage Committee of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced on Sunday that one of the newest entries on the organization's list of global heritage sites is Tel a-Sultan in Jericho. The UNESCO member states decided that the tel will be considered a "Palestinian world heritage site." The decision was made in a vote that took place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The UN clarified that there are Jewish and Christian sites near the site that are not included in the list - but there is a value to protect them. Tel a-Sultan, also known as Tel Jericho,...

A powerful earthquake struck Morocco’s High Atlas mountains late on Friday, killing at least 296 people, destroying buildings and sending residents of major cities rushing from their homes. The Interior Ministry said the number constituted a preliminary death toll and that 153 people had been injured. A local official said most deaths were in mountain areas that were hard to reach. Residents of Marrakech, the nearest big city to the epicenter, said some buildings had collapsed in the old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and local television showed pictures of a fallen mosque minaret with rubble lying on smashed...

A longtime aide to President Joe Biden who is a senior adviser in Vice President Kamala Harris’ office is Biden’s choice to represent the United States at the United Nations agency devoted to education, science and culture. The U.S. recently rejoined the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization after a five-year hiatus initiated by Biden’s immediate predecessor in the White House, Donald Trump. The Democratic president’s choice to become the U.S. permanent representative to the Paris-based UNESCO, with the rank of ambassador, is longtime aide Courtney O’Donnell, according to a White House official, who spoke Monday on the condition of...

First lady Jill Biden landed in Paris early Monday morning ready to celebrate the United States formally rejoining a U.N. arts and culture agency which has billed the White House $619 million for its trouble. After flying in from Washington, DC, Jill Biden will have a day of rest before speaking at a ceremony Tuesday at the headquarters of the globalist United Nations Scientific, Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The diplomatic trip will reverse former President Donald Trump’s decision in 2018 to withdraw the U.S. from the organization after he accused it of anti-Israel bias bound up in an opaque...

Weaponizing public schools for sinister purposes, an obscure United Nations institute is quietly working to transform education worldwide to impose radical political and spiritual values and beliefs on children. It is all happening under the guise of “social-emotional learning,” or SEL, a scheme hatched at a New Age organization whose founder and namesake was a follower of Lucifer Publishing Company chief Alice Bailey.The organization in question, part of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is known as the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, or UNESCO MGIEP for short. Dominated by pagans, communists, New...

The U.S. may soon rejoin UNESCO several years after exiting the body, in part because of what the Trump administration called a bias against Israel. UNESCO — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — said in a press release Monday that the State Department had sent the Paris-based organization a letter announcing its decision to rejoin the educational and cultural body, which is widely known for its list of World Heritage Sites. "This is a strong act of confidence, in UNESCO and in multilateralism," UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay said in a statement. "Not only in the centrality of...

PARIS (AP) — UNESCO announced Monday that the United States plans to rejoin the U.N. cultural and scientific agency — and pay more than $600 million in back dues — after a decade-long dispute sparked by the organization’s move to include Palestine as a member. U.S. officials say the decision to return was motivated by concern that China is filling the gap left by the U.S. in UNESCO policymaking, notably in setting standards for artificial intelligence and technology education around the world. The move will face a vote by UNESCO’s member states in the coming weeks. But approval seems a...

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Association, announced a number of resolutions just before the weekend started. One, submitted by the Russian Federation, called for defining UNESCO’s role in safeguarding and preserving Palmyra and other Syrian World Heritage sites. Another was about “Enhancing UNESCO’s contributions to promote a culture of mutual respect and tolerance.” A third was simply entitled “Occupied Palestine” and addressed the Jerusalem Old City hotspot that Jews refer to as the Temple Mount and Muslims call Haram Al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. Except that the Jewish link to the site, considered the holiest place for Jews,...

Spicy harissa paste from Tunisia, Morocco's Raï music, and Kalela dance from Zambia were selected to join United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO's) intangible cultural heritage list. The agency met in the Moroccan capital Rabat, to examine proposals for its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which aims to protect cultural traditions, practices, and knowledge. There was no debate over whether to include Tunisia's harissa - a paste made with sun-dried hot peppers, spices and olive oil, found in almost every restaurant in Tunisia and exported worldwide. The debates were longer for Kalela, a traditional dance that originated during...

A third of global glaciers located at World Heritage sites will disappear by 2050, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) warned on Thursday. Among the glaciers to vanish will be those at Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park and Mount Kilimanjaro, according to UNESCO. While those glaciers will melt regardless of efforts to limit temperature increases, it is possible to save the remaining two thirds of glaciers at these 50 sites, the organization stressed in a new report. But to do so, the authors cautioned, global heating must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit,...

Fire has damaged Easter Island's iconic megalith statues known as moai. An unknown number of the nearly 1,000 stone-carved statues were affected. Ariki Tepano, director of the Ma'u Henua community in charge of management and maintenance at the UNESCO heritage site Rapa Nui Natural Park, said the damage is "irreparable and with consequences beyond what your eyes can see." "The moai are totally charred and you can see the effect of the fire upon them," Tepano said in a social media post. The city of Rapa Nui said in the post that the site is closed to visitors while investigations...

Loot, a despicable word, was evidently among the first few Hindustani expressions to enter the British lexicon. It aptly illustrates the brand of British colonisation like no other word. On a chilly evening in the first week of December in 1862, British Empire’s railway engineer E.B. Harris reached a small riverside market village called Sultanganj on the south bank of Ganges some twenty miles west of Bhagalpur. Here his 4,771 workers were excavating a vast mound of bricks on the hillside to build a railway yard. Harris, recognised among the railway engineers for the construction of the challenging Jamalpur tunnel,...

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Biden’s ambassador to Israel appeared at a pro-BDS group’s webinar co-hosted by its CEO, who had described Israel as an “oppressive regime”, and told its audience that the real problem with the Palestinian Authority funding terrorism is that “it gives the ‘haters’ an excuse not to support the PA based on the argument that it is ‘paying for people who killed Jews.’” He also told the anti-Israel group which had cheered the Ben & Jerry’s boycott...

The English city of Liverpool was removed from UNESCO’s list of world heritage sites on Wednesday because new buildings undermined the attractiveness of its Victorian docks, making it only the third site to be removed from the prestigious list. Liverpool was named a World Heritage Site by the United Nation’s cultural organisation in 2004, joining landmarks such as the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. After a vote in China by members of its World Heritage Committee, UNESCO said the new buildings in Liverpool were undermining the city’s “authenticity and integrity”. Liverpool —...

“On this day (June 16) was born Ernesto Guevara De la Serna, known as 'Che,' in Rosario, Argentina. Let us remember this person (and quite fondly, the Tweet seems to imply) by watching his historic speech at the UN General Assembly December 1964.” (Tweet from UNESCO en Español, June 16). “If the (Nuclear) missiles had remained in Cuba we would have fired them at the heart of the U.S., INCLUDING NEW YORK CITY!” Che Guevara to Sam Russell of The London Daily Worker, Nov. 1962.) Alas! UNESCO, whose mission statement says in part: “Our purpose is to contribute to peace...

CANBERRA (Reuters) -The Great Barrier Reef should be added to a list of World Heritage Sites that are "in danger", a United Nations panel said on Tuesday, drawing an angry response from Australia, which called the recommendation politically motivated. ...Defending Australia's efforts to protect the reef, Environment Minister Sussan Ley said Canberra would challenge the recommendation, saying some hidden agenda had influenced its findings. ...China chairs the UNESCO committee, but when queried in parliament, Ley declined to say if she was pointing the finger at Beijing. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a government official told Reuters that China had been...

Archaeologists have, for the first time, found traces of a Bronze Age lakeside village under the surface of Lake Lucerne. The find shows that the city of Lucerne area was already populated 3,000 years ago.Traces of a pile dwelling (or stilt house) village came to light while laying a pipeline in the natural harbour area. The remnants were found by underwater archaeologists around four metres below the water surface...Archaeologists had been looking for proof of settlement for some time, but had been hampered by a thick layer of mud at the bottom of the lake. Work on the pipeline however...