Nikki Haley, the leaving U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, published a harsh assessment of UNESCO on Tuesday, one day after the U.S. and Israel officially withdrew from the agency, due to an anti-Israel bias, Fox News informed.
“UNESCO is among the most corrupt and politically biased UN agencies,” Haley wrote in a Twitter message. “Today the U.S. withdrawal from this cesspool became official. #USStrong”
The U.S. filed its application for quitting in October 2017 from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), and the government of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed suit.
The organization of UNESCO has been denounced by the critics for their position against Israel’s occupation of east Jerusalem, naming ancient Jewish sites as Palestinian heritage sites and allowing full membership to Palestine in 2011.
Israeli UN envoy Danny Danon said Tuesday that his country “will not be a member of an organization whose global is to deliberately act against us, and that has become tool manipulated by Israel’s enemies.”
“UNESCO is a body that continually rewrites history, including by erasing the Jewish connection to Jerusalem,” Danon said, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The withdrawals are mainly procedural as both U.S. and Israel stopped paying their financial parts in the organization after it granted a full membership of Palestine.
UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay took up her post just after Trump announced the withdrawal.
Azoulay, who has Jewish and Moroccan heritage, spent the last year lobbying for the two countries to remain part of the organization.
She presided over the launch of a Holocaust educational website and UN’s first educational guidelines on fighting anti-Semitism – initiatives that might be seen as responding to U.S. and Israeli concerns.
However, Trump administration ignored Azoulay’s efforts to get to the two countries to reconsider their decisions.
Officials said that many of the reasons the U.S. cited for withdrawal do not apply anymore, noting that since then, all 12 texts on the Middle East passed at UNESCO have been consensual among Israel and Arab member states.
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