The administration of President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that it would withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a global body most commonly known for keeping a catalogue of the world’s most culturally significant places.
UNESCO describes itself as a platform that “promotes cooperation in education, science, culture and communication to foster peace worldwide.” While its World Heritage program is the most prominent initiative, UNESCO has steadily increased its political activism in the past half-decade, becoming a platform for authoritarian world leaders seeking to silence dissent online.
Of particular note is an event in early 2023 – months before former President Joe Biden undid Trump’s first exit from the agency – called the “Internet for Trust Conference,” in which UNESCO propaganda compared internet users sharing political opinions it disapproved of to “insects” and called for the repression of “hate speech, misogyny, suppression of free speech, doxxing and conspiracy theories.”
The State Department listed among its reasons for withdrawing from UNESCO on Tuesday its proclivity for helping “advance divisive social and cultural causes” as well as its strident anti-Israel stances, similar to those of many fellow U.N. bodies.
English zoologist, primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall and friend speaks at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris, France on October 19, 2024. (Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“UNESCO works to advance divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy,” the State Department explained. “UNESCO’s decision to admit the ‘State of Palestine’ as a Member State is highly problematic, contrary to U.S. policy, and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.”
The Trump administration declared being part of UNESCO “not in the national interest of the United States.” The exit will be completed on December 31, 2026, as per the terms of membership in the body. Trump previously withdrew from UNESCO during his first term in 2019 for similar reasons, but Biden announced that he would return to the body in 2023, after the “Internet for Trust Conference.” The decision cost the United States about $600 million in funding that Trump refused to pay when he departed UNESCO, in addition to the costs of a lavish celebration then-First Lady Jill Biden organized for the occasion.
The director-general of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay, lamented America’s exit from her organization on Tuesday, complaining that it “contradicts the fundamental principles of multilateralism” and undermines the work that UNESCO is allegedly doing to help American groups in academia and cultural restoration. Azoulay touted the work that her agency is allegedly doing to help educational initiatives and promote global legal standards on technology.
UNESCO, she noted. “adopted the first and only global standard-setting instrument on the ethics of artificial intelligence; and it has developed major programmes to support culture and education in conflict settings, whether in Ukraine, Lebanon or Yemen.”
“UNESCO’s purpose is to welcome all the nations of the world, and the United States of America is and will always be welcome,” Azoulay stated.
Absent from her statement is the work UNESCO has undertaken to undermine freedom of speech around the world and its alliances with authoritarian leaders, including socialist Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and genocidal Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Azoulay herself made a friendly visit to Beijing in September 2023 in which she met with Xi and applauded his work to bolster “heritage protection” – while his government systematically endeavored to erase the Uyghur people of East Turkistan not just through genocide, but through the destruction of critical cultural sites. Azoulay, according to Chinese state media, described herself as “satisfied” with China’s cultural heritage protection and expressed enthusiasm about “cooperation with China further in the fields of cultural heritage protection, science, culture and technology.”
China is currently engaging in a genocide of the Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic communities of occupied East Turkistan. The genocide has taken the form of the mass forced sterilizations of members of the group and the imprisonment and enslavement of millions of people in East Turkistan. It has also involved actions directly within the purview of what UNESCO is tasked with opposing, namely the destruction of cultural heritage. A 2020 Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) report found that the Chinese Communist Party had destroyed or materially damaged at least 16,000 mosques in East Turkistan.
“A further 30 percent of important Islamic sacred sites (shrines, cemeteries and pilgrimage routes, including many protected under Chinese law) have been demolished across Xinjiang [East Turkistan],” the report narrated, “mostly since 2017, and an additional 28 percent have been damaged or altered in some way.”
In one particularly egregious example, the Communist Party erected a public toilet over the site of a demolished mosque in Atush, East Turkistan. Azoulay did not publicly address this crisis during her time in Beijing, nor has UNESCO taken a stance against the cultural destruction of the Uyghur people since.
The U.N. agency took a major step towards expanding its control over global speech in February 2023 with the notorious “Internet for Trust” conference. In a promotional video, social media users using the internet without global legal restrictions were described as “insects thriving in the dark.”
The guest of honor of that event was Brazilian President Lula, who has made silencing conservative voices in his country through the brutal use of law enforcement a priority of his third term in office. At press time, his government is attempting to silence his predecessor, former President Jair Bolsonaro, through a series of spurious legal cases and measures including banning him from social media, forcing him to wear an ankle monitor, stripping him of his passport, and banning him from running for public office.
Lula made clear during the UNESCO conference that global censorship of political dissent was a priority for his legacy.
“On the one hand, it is necessary to guarantee the exercise of individual freedom of expression, a fundamental human right,” Lula declared. “On the other hand, we need to ensure a collective right: the right of society to have access to trustworthy information, and not lies and disinformation.”
Azoulay also used the platform to state that individual countries taking measures to suppress free speech, as Lula has, was not enough.
“If these regulatory initiatives are developed in isolation, with each country working in their own corner, they are doomed to fail,” she asserted. “Information disruption is by definition a global problem, so our reflections must take place at the global scale.”
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