Op-Ed: Unesco is Complicit in Temple Mount Terrorism

Unesco's stance on the Temple Mount is a violation of its promise to “create the conditions for dialogue among civilizations, cultures and peoples, based upon respect for commonly shared values.”

Published: Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Giulio Meotti

The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly...

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Unesco, the UN cultural agency which has the temple of Parthenon as a logo, is complicit in the vandalism and terrorism taking place at the world's most important temple site: the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. 

Shouldn’t Unesco be vigilant about the Jews’ religious freedom? Shouldn’t Unesco safeguard the rights of non-Muslim prayer on the holy mountain?
Unesco didn’t inspect the irremediable damage caused by the digs the Waqf perpetrated on the Temple Mount. But the UN’s cultural agency challenged Israel’s re-construction of a pedestrian bridge. 
Where was Unesco when the Muslim “authorities” damaged the historic archeological remains of Solomon’s Stables beneath the Temple Mount? No one, not certainly Unesco, listened to Israel’s plea against that desecration.

Since then, after this physical desecration, the Temple Mount has been at the center of a religious war against the Jewish people. Shouldn’t Unesco be vigilant about the Jews’ religious freedom? Shouldn’t Unesco safeguard the rights of non-Muslim prayer on the holy mountain?

History, culture and education should be Unesco’s goals, while in fact what is going on over the Temple Mount is a war whose goal is to erase Jewish history. The same as what it is happening in Iraq under the Islamic State.

These days, Unesco is seeking to save Jewish sites from ISIS' destruction, such as the tombs of the Biblical prophets, Ezekiel, Daniel and Nahum. Why Unesco doesn't raise its voice against the Islamic totalitarianism and physical and spiritual terrorism on the Temple Mount?

Unesco's stance on the Temple Mount is a violation of its promise to “create the conditions for dialogue among civilizations, cultures and peoples, based upon respect for commonly shared values.”
Israel should remove all the Unesco posters adorning the walls of the Misrad Hachinuch, Israel's Ministry of Education. A UN agency reknowned for anti-Israel resolutions and famed for its obsession with the Jews, has posters all over the walls of this ministry. Why? Are the Israelis crazy?
Slapping history in the face, Unesco adopted the PLO's propaganda and declared that Rachel’s Tomb and Hevron’s Cave of the Patriarchs are “Muslim mosques". Do we have to wait to read that Unesco did the same with the Temple Mount?

Unesco's anti-Semitism on the Temple Mount issue can be seen clearly in Oleg Grabar's research. He was Unesco's special envoy during the 2000's. His most famous book, "The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem" (1996), details the role of Islam in defining Jerusalem. It is a book full of descriptions of the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock, complemented by a set of photographs. It was meant to support and give credence to Islam's supercessionism of Jewish Jerusalem.

Unesco has made many mistakes in the past, but this particular abuse of authority and great blindness is so massive, so abominable and so utterly incomprehensible.

If an entity like Unesco deliberately rewrites history into fiction to promote beliefs that are contradicted by the facts, it is evil and needs to be confronted as such. That is why we, the people involved in journalism, writing and opinion making, and the ordinary people who still care about the fate about the Jewish people, should set up an international campaign of moral and political pressure and positive intimidation to bring Unesco over to the side of Jewish people, not the side against them.

The Temple Mount, this most important treasure of humanity, is in danger. It should be returned to the Jewish people.