Friday, January 17, 2014

UNESCO cancels a pro-Israel event

This is no surprise, since they did approve of welcoming the PLO to their membership:
Days before it was scheduled to open, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization cancelled an exhibit in Paris entitled, “The People, The Book, the Land: The 3,500-year relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel.”

The exhibit, created by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was co-sponsored by Israel, Canada, and Montenegro. SWC worked closely with UNESCO on the exhibit since 2011, when UNESCO accepted Palestine as a member state, the first UN body to do so.
They made a serious mistake working with the UN.
The Wiesenthal Center is slated to hold a press conference on Monday to discuss the cancellation.

Nimrod Barkan, Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO, said that the excuse to shelve the event was “mean and stupid,” according to Israel Radio.

In an interview with Algemeiner, SWC Dean Marvin Hier called the moved an “absolute outrage.”

“The Arabs don’t want the world to know that the Jews have a 3,500-year relationship to the Land of Israel.”
More of Rabbi Marvin Hier's response is here:
Failure to open the exhibit as planned, warned the dean of the Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi Marvin Hier, would “confirm to the world that UNESCO is the official address of the Arab narrative in the Middle East.” [...]

“Let’s be clear,” Hier wrote in his letter to Bokova, “the Arab Group’s protest is not over any particular content in the exhibition, but rather the very idea of it – that the Jewish people did not come to the Holy Land only after the Nazi Holocaust, but trace their historical and cultural roots in that land for three-anda- half millennia. If anything will derail hopes for peace and reconciliation among the people of the Middle East, it will be by surrendering to the forces of extremism and torpedoing the opening of this exhibition – jointly vetted and co-organized by UNESCO and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.”
This is just another reason why Israel should not be part of the UN. It may not matter so much, since the SWC should be trying to arrange an exhibition with local political/educational outfits, and not with such a corrupt, repellent world body.

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