Game Plan for the UNESCO Shakedown - There’s a renewed push to circumvent U.S. law and fund the U.N. agency.

Leave the UN forever and it will will get the message that we really mean business!
Fat chance with this internationalist first administration. m/r

Game Plan for the UNESCO Shakedown - Claudia Rosett - National Review Online

By Claudia Rosett

December 13, 2012 5:00 P.M.

Alarm bells ought to be going off because of the quiet trip to Washington this week of the head of the Paris-based UNESCO — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. For at least the fourth time since last December, UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova is visiting the U.S. capital. There are disturbing signs that her trip is part of a renewed push by the Obama administration to waive U.S. law in order to flood UNESCO once again with American taxpayers’ money.

More than money, though, is at stake. Also at issue is the credibility of U.S. foreign policy. Two laws passed by Congress in the early 1990s block American funding to any U.N. body that admits the Palestinians to full membership before they fulfill their promise of direct negotiations with Israel. The aim of these laws, which worked well under three previous presidents, is to prevent the Palestinians from exploiting the U.N. as an avenue to acquiring on paper the statehood they have not yet qualified for in practice.
But last year, perhaps banking on hints that the Obama administration was exploring ways around these laws, UNESCO’s members went ahead anyway. Cheering as they massively outvoted the U.S., they admitted the Palestinian Authority to full membership. That immediately cost them U.S. contributions of more than $78 million per year, or 22 percent of UNESCO’s core budget.
In theory, UNESCO, by treating “Palestine” as a member state, opened the door for the Palestinian Authority to join a number of other U.N. agencies. But at the U.N., for all the impassioned rhetoric, a credible threat of losing hard cash makes a lot of folks think twice. If there is an obvious reason why the Palestinians have not so far pressed ahead with joining other U.N. agencies, it is that the U.S. withdrawal of funding to UNESCO made other agencies wary of welcoming the Palestinians — and lo! the Palestinians got the message.
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