Free Republic

Facebook struck back at ISIS this week, taking down pages the terrorist army's middlemen were using to try to sell plundered treasure and artifacts from Syria and Iraq. The black-clad jihadist army has earned as much as $100 million selling smuggled artifacts from more than 4,500 archaeological sites throughout Syria and Iraq, many of them named UNESCO World Heritage sites, according to Iraqi intelligence sources.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years since the Industrial Revolution.” For the U.N., it does not matter that the report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change shows that human activity is not causing climate change. Climate change is actually about changing capitalism.

Common Core is not a benign set of federals standards meant to make your children smarter, warns an educator who says it looks more like an indoctrination program to push students toward “green” jobs for a “green economy.” Alex Newman, coauthor of “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children,” pointed to speeches by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “He gave one to UNESCO in 2012, for example, and he bragged that he was using these standards and our government schools to create green citizens to take their place in the green world order with...

The number of students graduating with STEM degrees already far exceeds the number of STEM jobs available but powerful interests in the business community are pushing Congress to allow more foreign skilled workers into the country. Congress is considering new immigration laws that would flood the U.S. with “guest workers” from the Middle East and Asia, a plan some are calling an open invitation for jihadists to walk right through America’s front door. Critics say lawmakers – including top Republican leaders – are playing with fire and could jeopardize national security with the proposals to double or even triple...

The decision of Germany’s largest gun club to disbar a title-winner over his Muslim religion—hastily withdrawn last August after an anti-discrimination uproar—came back to bite members after their bid for UNESCO cultural heritage status was suspended. Last July, 33-year-old Mithat Gedik was crowned Schützenkönig (marksman king) by his local club in Werl, North Rhine-Westphalia—only to have his title withheld because the organization’s ancient statute meant that non-Christians were ineligible to claim the crown. The Bund der Historischen Deutschen Schützenbruderschaften (BHDS—Federation of Historic German Marksmanship Brotherhoods) club then granted him the prize as an “exception” after the case was taken up...

The Interior Committee discussed a bill presented by MK David Azulai (Shas) on Tuesday, which addressed the “continuous harassment of Jews visiting Kever Rachel,” the tomb of the Jewish matriarch Rachel from the Torah. During the course of the discussion, which was moderated by MK Zevulun Kalfa (Jewish Home), Azulai explained he had raised the issue due to the increase in the frequency of terrorist attacks around Kever Rachel. He noted the 1993 Oslo Accords guaranteed Jews prayer access to the site, adding, “if this is what the agreements look like, we need to be very concerned.” Massive Arab mobs...

Whether intentional or not, says a UNESCO body, the boycott of Israeli academics bears a similarity to the practice of German doctors, who were leaders in the Nazi party, of segregating out their Jewish colleagues Of all the surprising opponents of the boycott of Israeli academic institutions by the American Studies Association, perhaps the most surprising is one that has not yet received any attention. A small but official organization of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) came out with an unabashedly strong criticism of the ASA boycott in one of the very first waves of condemnations....

Israel and the US lost their voting rights at UNESCO over the Palestinians. The two stopped paying their dues after the Paris-based organization accepted Palestine as a member. See Jerusalem Post coverage. US national security advisor Susan Rice took to Twitter to blame Congress, while the Washington Post explains what the voting loss means for American soft power. According to the NY Times, the US had provided 22 percent of UNESCO’s budget.

The United Nations’ cultural body has cancelled a Jewish exhibit following Arab pressure, the European Jewish Press (EJP) reported on Friday. The exhibition, entitled “People, Book, Land—The 3,500 Year Relationship of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel”, was co-organized by UNESCO, the UN body for education, science and culture, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The exhibit was scheduled to open next Tuesday at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. It was pulled after a group of Arab states, as well as the Palestinian Authority (PA), said they found it “deeply disturbing,” reported The Jewish Chronicle. UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova...

SAN ANTONIO — U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro is seeking support of an appropriation by mid-January to resume payment of dues to a United Nations agency, in order to protect a World Heritage Site nomination for San Antonio's five Spanish colonial missions. In a letter last week to leaders of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Castro said he fears that nonpayment of dues since 2011 to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, could harm the nomination of the missions and other proposed U.S. sites. The United States lost its vote last month on the 21-member World...

PRETORIA, South Africa – King Tut’s sister is missing and Egypt has issued an international alert for her return. UNESCO and Interpol are working with Egyptian authorities to recover the priceless artifact, a limestone figurine of the young pharaoh’s sister from the 14th century BC. The young girl holds a piece of fruit and her hair flows loosely on one side–a symbol of her youth–but her head is held high, a decidedly regal look on her face. “This constitutes irreversible damage to the history and identity of the Egyptian people,” said Irina Bokova, the Director-General of UNESCO. The statuette, “A...

In a possible development that would have Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Travis rolling in their graves, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is considering designating the Alamo a World Heritage Site. Such a designation brings along a myriad of restrictions, and although proponents of the designation, such as San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, insist that the State of Texas would still have authority over the site, many serious concerns of the people of Texas are not being addressed.

American influence in culture, science and education around the world is facing a high-profile blow Friday as the U.S. is stripped of its voting rights at the world's cultural agency, UNESCO. And it would cost the U.S. hundreds of millions of dollars to win this voice back. The U.S. hasn’t paid its dues to the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in three years, in protest over the decision by world governments to make Palestine a UNESCO member in 2011. … The UNESCO tension has prompted new criticism of U.S. laws that force an automatic funding cutoff for any...

Drought-stricken Kenya is sitting on 250-trillion liters of groundwater With the world as thoroughly mapped and monitored as it is, it's easy to forget the Earth still harbors its fair share of secrets. Case in point: yesterday, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization announced that Kenya's drought-striken Turkana County sits, rather ironically, atop a staggeringly huge reserve of subterranean water. Following an extensive groundwater mapping project that incorporated satellite observations, seismic information and remote sensing, five vast aquifers have been identified hiding beneath the country's arid northern region. Preliminary estimates put the aquifers' contents at roughly 250-trillion liters...

At a ceremony in Havana last week, UNESCO (U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) honored Che Guevara by enshrining his writings in its hallowed “Memory of the World Register.” The ceremony included several members of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s family. “UNESCO’s work is part of our support for freedom of expression as an inalienable human right set down in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” declares the UN’s mission statement. But not far from where this UNESCO/Guevara ceremony took place Cubans were being starved and beaten in pestiferous torture chambers for the crime of quoting the UN Declaration...

Jewish worshipers who arrived at the Cave of Patriarchs in Hevron after Muslim prayers on Friday were horrified to find that the site had been vandalized. The Cave (known as Me’arat HaMakhpela in Hebrew) is usually split between Jewish and Muslim worshipers, but this past Friday it was open exclusively to Muslim worshipers in honor of Ramadan. But when the Jewish section of the site was reopened, worshipers were horrified to find widespread desecration. Two mezuzot—cases containing Jewish holy scriptures affixed to the doorpost—had been torn off and stolen, and a third was damaged. Muslim worshipers had also thrown mud...

Why doesn’t the Israeli government stand up for the rights of Jews to holy sites? Not only is the Temple Mount no longer “in our hands”, but its easier substitute, the Western Wall, has also been conceded by Israel’s government to a group of femminists and cultural extremists. Judaism’s holiest place on earth today is the site of the most severe religious persecution of the Jews. Israeli governments have failed to stand up to wanton Palestinian acts of desecration. It’s the greatest crime of all—a religious and cultural crime of historic proportions. Under pressure from Europe’s multiculturalists, United States, political...

Do you remember the most Homeric of world trade negotiations, called the Uruguay round, which took place between 1986 and 1994? I was a teenager then and I remember that round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) vividly. I had taken to reading the austere Le Monde every day and remember the uncouth Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association in Hollywood, who particularly despised European film directors for pleading with their governments to exclude cinema, and the arts in general, from the negotiations. Valenti roared back: "Culture is like chewing-gum, a product like any other."...

The Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry slammed Israel on Thursday for having called off a United Nations investigative mission to Jerusalem's Old City, calling it an act of "contempt of international law and institutions," according to AFP. The ministry said it "condemns in the strongest possible terms the decision of Israel, the occupying power, to prevent the technical mission of UNESCO from carrying its monitoring mission in the Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls." The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was scheduled earlier this month to assess the state of the Old City of Jerusalem, the first...

SASEBO NAVAL BASE, Japan — The Navy minesweeper that got stuck on a reef off the coast of the Philippines will have to be dismantled and removed in sections, a process that is expected to take over a month, Navy officials said Wednesday. The salvage plan is still under review by the Philippine Coast Guard, but it likely means the end for the 23-year-old USS Guardian. “Our naval architecture and salvage experts have reviewed all possible alternatives, and our only supportable option is to dismantle the damaged ship and remove it in sections,” Pacific Fleet spokesman Lt. Anthony Falvo wrote...