{"id":330947,"date":"2017-10-18T04:21:10","date_gmt":"2017-10-18T03:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-real-reasons-trump-is-quitting-unesco\/"},"modified":"2017-10-18T04:21:10","modified_gmt":"2017-10-18T03:21:10","slug":"the-real-reasons-trump-is-quitting-unesco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-real-reasons-trump-is-quitting-unesco\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Reasons Trump is Quitting Unesco"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>At first glance, the decision last week by the Trump administration, followed immediately by Israel, to quit the United Nation\u2019s cultural agency seems strange. Why penalise a body that promotes clean water, literacy, heritage preservation and women\u2019s rights?<\/p>\n<p>Washington\u2019s claim that the UN\u2019s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) is biased against Israel obscures the real crimes the agency has committed in US eyes.<\/p>\n<p>The first is that in 2011 Unesco became the first UN agency to accept Palestine as a member. That set the Palestinians on the path to upgrading their status at the General Assembly a year later.<\/p>\n<p>It should be recalled that in 1993, as Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo accords on the White House lawn, the watching world assumed the aim was to create a Palestinian state.<\/p>\n<p>But it seems most US politicians never received that memo. Under pressure from Israel\u2019s powerful lobbyists, the US Congress hurriedly passed legislation to pre-empt the peace process. One such law compels the United States to cancel funding to any UN body that admits the Palestinians.<\/p>\n<p>Six years on, the US is $550 million in arrears and without voting rights at Unesco. Its departure is little more than a formality.<\/p>\n<p>The agency\u2019s second crime relates to its role selecting world heritage sites. That power has proved more than an irritant to Israel and the US.<\/p>\n<p>The occupied territories, supposedly the locus of a future Palestinian state, are packed with&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/2017\/10\/the-real-reasons-trump-is-quitting-unesco\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At first glance, the decision last week by the Trump administration, followed immediately by Israel, to quit the United Nation\u2019s cultural agency seems strange. Why penalise a body that promotes clean water, literacy, heritage preservation and women\u2019s rights? Washington\u2019s claim that the UN\u2019s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) is biased against Israel obscures the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2525,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-330947","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}