The US has quit UNESCO, the UN agency that protects world heritage sites and teaches poor children to read

[Israel_B]

@doctorow

UNESCO is about as good as it gets in the world of UN Specialized Agencies, responsible for designating and protecting world heritage sites, running literacy for the poorest people on Earth, supporting potable water programs, protecting fragile and endangered ecosystems, running disaster preparedness plans for all to use, protecting indigenous knowledge, protecting the free press, and digitizing the world’s libraries.

Unfortunately for UNESCO the first of that list has nothing to do with the rest of that list. That first one has been used as a political football by a number of nations and would be nations.

@doctorow

Today, the US resigned from UNESCO, citing “anti-Israel bias.” UNESCO has designated the old city of Hebron a Palestinian World Heritage Site.

Not the first time they’ve been captured by Arab interests either. There’s been a good number of cases especially around parts of Jerusalem & the Temple Mount where UNESCO has dirty hands.

@doctorow its well known that your personal politics are anti-Zionist but there is more at play than one specific incident here. Facts do matter.

As far as heritage goes, Hebron is known to be the oldest Jewish community in the world.

[Israel_B]

@Mark_H_Sherwin

No other faith has a single major site, and they don’t even have full access to it,

@Medievalist

That is a very strange and counterfactual claim.

Sorry @Medievalist but it is a very factual claim. We Jews don’t have full legal access to the Temple Mount.

@Medievalist

there is, for example, the Cave of the Patriarchs.

Which is in Hebron, which is part of what this UNESCO fiasco is about. Allow me to quote from Wikipedia

Jews are not permitted to visit the Cenotaphs of Isaac or Rebecca, which lie entirely within the southeastern section, except for 10 days a year that hold special significance in Judaism.

and

On February 21, 2010, Israel announced that it would include the site in a national heritage site protection and rehabilitation plan. The announcement sparked protests from the UN, Arab governments and the United States.[32][33] A subsequent UNESCO vote in October aimed to affirm that the “al-Haram al-Ibrahimi/Tomb of the Patriarchs in al-Khalil/Hebron” was “an integral part of the occupied Palestinian Territories.”[34]

(Wow, this totally pre-dates Trump, too bad for so many commenters here)

Point being however that your comment of “counterfactual claim” is incorrect and while the Cave of the Patriarchs is important to us, it is no where near on the level of the Temple mount. For us, nothing can compare to the former location of the Holy of Holies

@Medievalist

for example consider the Bahá’í pilgrimage sites, both of which have been purposely seized by hostile nations.

Both? Wiki cites multiple pilgrimage locations

Baháʼí pilgrimage

Those located in Israel are part of a standard visa for people of Bahá’í faith.

[Medievalist]

@Israel_B

Sorry @Medievalist but it is a very factual claim.

Well, I was referring to the claim that Judaism has one major holy site, when it has more than one, and the claim that only Jews are denied access to their primary holy site, which also isn’t true. I’ve provided concrete examples to illustrate the falsity of both claims (@Wanderfound provided another, too).

To paraphrase somebody who asked me not to quote her, “the victim olympics is the game everybody loses.”

The deal with the Baha’i Pilgrimage is in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Baha’i are Abrahamic, people of the book). You can read an English translation of the Tablet of Pilgrimage here. The Kitáb-i-Aqdas say if you can’t get to the Holiest Site, the House of the Bahá’u’lláh in Baghdad (presumably because it was seized in 1922 and mysteriously destroyed in 2013) you can go to the House of the Bab in Shiraz (except you can’t because the Iranian government razed it and paved over the site as part of their ongoing campaign to extirpate Baha’ism).

Lesser, alternative sites (in Israel, as you noted; Israel took Acre in 1948) are thus currently the target of the religiously mandated pilgrimage. This is conditionally permitted because of a pragmatic caveat in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas acknowledging that oppressed religious traditions like the Baha’i faith sometimes just have to make do the best they can. I think you might be sympathetic; I certainly am!

Israel, to the credit of the Israeli government, is notably more tolerant of the Baha’i faith than other Middle Eastern states. Adherents are permitted pilgrimage to the sites associated with the Bahá’u’lláh’s imprisonment and torture in Acre, and as far as I know Israel has not interfered in the building of the Arc or the operations of the Universal House of Justice in Haifa. This may or may not be related to the fact that Baha’i are not permitted to proselytize in Israel, or the fact that several Arab states opposed to the government of Israel consider Baha’ism to be an abominable perversion deserving of death. Personally, I don’t care so much about the reasons as the actions, and while I’m certainly no fan of the Israeli regime as currently constituted, here Israel seems to have acted admirably and honorably. Kudos are deserved!

None of this has a great lot to do with the UN or UNESCO, of course. My apologies to everyone for the derail. I was just correcting what looked to me like errors of fact.