WE MUST LEAVE UNESCO AT ONCE.
By Paul Merkley.
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Once again, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has rolled up its sleeves to advance its mandate – “to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through educational, scientific, and cultural reforms in order to increase universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and human rights along with fundamental freedom proclaimed in the United Nations Charter.”
To accomplish this, it has cast out the Bible of the Jews and the Christians as a source of truth for anybody on earth. And, in the same act, it has declared invalid, every other source that contains information that anyone might think can be historically proved, and has put in their place fantasies about the glorious prehistoric past of Islam – fantasies that take us back to about twenty-five centuries before Muhammad existed.
Once again there has been no hint of complaint from any person or institution whose credibility stands upon either the authority of science or the authority of Scripture.
A few months ago, UNESCO piled yet another Resolution on top of the long sequence of Resolutions condemning the State of Israel for its oppression of the “Palestinian people”– the aboriginal inhabitants of what people like to call the Holy Land. (See my essay, UNESCO CASTS OUT CHRISTIANITY,” www.thebayviewreview.com, November 22, 2016.) This purpose it accomplished by its reference to the sites upon and around the Temple Mount exclusively by their Muslim names. This has the intended effect of erasing memory of the Temple and of any belonging of Israel and the Jews – defining Jerusalem as exclusively “Palestinian” and the State of Israel’s presence as that of an illegal occupier.
Israelis claim that such a declaration obviously takes away all legitimacy from Israel; furthermore, it legitimizes terrorist acts against the illegal Jewish state and it anathematises all of Israel’s self-defensive activity. And so Israel holds UNSCO responsible for murderous attacks that have taken place recently against the Jewish people in Jerusalem.
At the same time, these UNESCO declarations cast out the Old Testament and New Testament texts which amply describe the presence of the Jewish People and of their Temple – not incidentally leaving Christianity as a religion based on falsehood and undeserving of belief. In place of all the evidence of Jewish presence in Jerusalem (archeological and literary, including the testimony of both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible) they have put in place simple assertion that the entire region was the habitat of “the Palestinian people”– the exclusive aboriginal denizens of the Holy Land.
To accomplish these and similar victories, the Muslim bloc depends on two circumstances: the first is the willingness of a majority of the United Nations to line up, on no notice at all, in support of anything that serves to denigrate Israel and the Jews; the second is the unwillingness of leaders of all nations having Christian majorities to appear friendly towards Christian faith.
The Muslim claim to historical primacy in the lands described in our Bible is strictly and merely a theological assertion, utterly incompatible with the historical record, but designed to fill the ideological vacuum left as Western intellectuals cast theology out of consideration. Among the few intellectuals in our part of the world who thinks this is worth challenging is Guy Milliere, a Professor at the University of Paris, who notes:
Although Europe claims to respect human rights and the rights of peoples, it has been a party to violating the most essential right of the Jewish people: the recognition of its existence for more than 3,000 years, and the anchoring of this existence to its sacred monuments. Worse, Europe does so in the name of a people fictitiously invented less than 50 years ago. No serious scholar can find any trace of a “Palestinian people” before the 1960s. Europe has apparently been all too happy to accept lies. (“UNESSCO is an immoral, anti-Semitic Organization: Decent Countries should Leave,’ https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10703/unesco-israel-antisemitism)
As expected, the historic churches of the Western world churches have so far ignored these resolutions altogether – on the gratifying assumption that they are intended to diminish respect for the Jews and demolish the claim of the people of Israel to the Land of Israel.
There is every reason to believe that the gang at UNESCO were caught off guard by their spectacular propaganda victory last November — given that it has required the unanimous acquiesce of the Western academic establishment as well as the mainline (ecumenical) church.
And so this initial victory has been quickly followed up with another bold Resolution. This comes from another meeting of UNESCO, held a Kracow, Poland, July 2-12. Krakow, as Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO noted, is fewer than 50 miles from the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, “the largest mass grave of the Jewish people.” The hosts agreed to a minute of silence in memory of the victims of the Holocaust – but then followed this up with a minute of silence in memory of the “victims of Israel”. Such is the current state of moral calculation in the highest echelon of the Parliament of Mankind.
The principal accomplishment of the Krakow gathering was a resolution asserting that Hebron, like Jerusalem, has always been a site beloved of its aboriginal inhabitants – the Palestinians. Any association of Israelis with this site – such as, for example that found in the Book of Genesis — is simply denied. Again, the entire political and intellectual class in our part of the world has remained silent in face of sabotage of historical facts.
Any person not stunned into silence by the demands of ideology must surely see the absurdity of the Islamic claim to aboriginal possession of Jerusalem — now extended to everything else that was ever inhabited by Israelis. This requires rejection of the testimony of the Bible, Old and New Testaments, of consistent witness of Greek and Roman literature, and of all the history textbooks and of all archeological evidence.
As for historical evidence: our culture surrendered long ago any interest in the distinction between fact and fantasy. For educated Western people to pretend that there is parity between the stories about Abraham which appear in the Old Testament and the stories about Abraham (or anybody else, for that matter) which appear in the Qur’an, is unworthy patronizing: it amounts to placing the same evaluation upon the fruit of learning and the fruit of slavish fear.
In Muhammad’s texts, both in the Qur’an and the Haditha, we find monumental ignorance about matters of chronology and blithe indifference to the distinction between historical matters and matters of fable, legend, myth and other sorts of anti-History. In these matters, Muhammad displays the cheerful vagueness about chronology and the sovereign, free-wheeling attitude towards historical fact that characterized the pre-literate culture in which he was reared. In Muhammad’s imagination, as in the imagination of elementary school children today, all of the Famous Men and Women jostle each other in the shapeless time past – the days of yore.
What keeps Muhammad’s anti-history in place in the hearts of Muslims today is not thought and certainly not learning, but emotion – anger that the Arab people have been cheated – cheated by Isaac, way back when. William Foxwell Albright, one of the pioneers of modern, scientific biblical archeology, learned this truth the hard way and returned again and again to this thought: “A Muslim is unable to become a historian …. To become an historian is to escape from Islam.” To illustrate his point about the Muslim’s congenital inability to think historically, Albright drew attention to passages in the Qur’an where Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is confused with Miriam, the sister of Moses (Sura xix: 28) and to the passages where Haman (the villain in the story of Esther) is identified as an ally and contemporary of the Pharaoh in persecuting the Jews in the days of Moses (principally Sura al-Qasas (xxviii.) (L. G. Running & D.N. Freedman, William Foxwell Albright (Morgan Press, 1975), 384.)
UNESCO has validated as the product of the best learning in the world the Muslim claim about the aboriginal and exclusive presence of the Palestinian people in what the rest of us regard as the Holy Land, the land of the Bible, and has in that same gesture declared irrelevant the best science as well as the agreed historical record .
Clearly, there is no way for anyone who expects thought to be respected to rest quietly while the Parliament of Mankind mandates this ideological claptrap.
UNESCO is beyond repair. It has to be cast out into the same dark region where it has intended to consign both historical science and the Bible.
Beginning at home: Canada must leave UNESCO immediately. If that means leaving the UN as well, all the better.
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