UNESCO & the "war on terrorism". (Insider Report).

The U.S. withdrew from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1984. Earlier this year, Congress authorized $67 million to pay for U.S. re-enrollment in the UN organization. At the time of this writing, a House-Senate conference committee is working out final details for the U.S. to rejoin the body.

According to James H. Ottaway and Ronald Koven of the World Press Freedom Committee, U.S. re-entry into UNESCO is vital in the interests of -- what else? -- fighting the "war on terrorism."

"Sept. 11 and its aftermath underline the need to join a UN agency that is the world's leading forum for policymaking on ideas of culture and communication," wrote Ottaway and Koven in a July 17th Washington Post op-ed column. "Military security is not enough to guard against seriously poisoned minds that commit terrorist acts. UNESCO can become a major force for restoring rationality to this ideological struggle."

Those acquainted with UNESCO's origins would look on it as a singularly unsuitable ally in an "ideological struggle." Former Communist Joseph Z. Kornfeder pointed out in the early 1950s that "UNESCO corresponds to the agitation and propaganda department in the Communist party. This department handles the strategy and method of getting at the public mind, young and old." Founding UNESCO Director-General Julian Huxley appointed numerous Communists and unrepentant ex-Communists to key positions.

A 1956 report compiled by a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee documented that UNESCO was "by far, the worst danger spot, from the standpoint of disloyalty and subversive activity among Americans employed by international organizations...." In testimony before that subcommittee, Pierre Gerety, who had served as chairman of the International Organization Employees Loyalty Board, warned that "there existed in UNESCO a clique of people who placed the interests of the Communists and Communist ideology ... above their own country."

This was not a perversion of UNESCO's function, but an illustration of its purpose. "If UNESCO is attacked on the grounds that it is helping to prepare the world's peoples for world government, then it is an error to burst forth with apologetic statements and denials," declared a 1952 pro-UNESCO editorial in The Saturday Review. "Let us face it: the job of UNESCO is to help create and promote the elements of world citizenship. When faced with such a 'charge,' let us by all means affirm it from the housetops."

While they avoid counterproductive candor about UNESCO's function as a megaphone for world government, Ottaway and Koven unabashedly tout the organization's role as a propaganda organ. They insist that September 11th "demonstrated that ... the extremist offensive against American cultural values must be answered through school curriculums, working for tolerance and rationalism and the correcting of cultural misperceptions in foreign publics." This assumes, of course, that UNESCO would take an active role in dictating classroom content within the school systems of its constituent nations -- our own included.