This comment by a poster called Zamalek on the CiF website which the Guardian moderators deleted garnered at least seven recommendations before it was removed on 2 November from the Guardian’s Comment is Free site. It is hard to understand in what way the comment violated CiF’s guidelines. Perhaps it contained too many uncomfortable truths.

“It is quite obvious that the Palestinians wanted membership of UNESCO to further their political and cultural war against Israel.

“Since the 1990s, Arafat engaged in a campaign of deligitimisation against Israel, denying the Jewish connection with Palestine, pretending that a Jewish temple never existed in Jerusalem, digging priceless artefacts out from Temple Mount and appropriating Jewish holy sites as Muslim. Thus Rachel’s tomb in Hebron was renamed the Bilal-al Raba mosque after some minor figure in the Koran.

“The Arabs have been waging this revisionist campaign to erase the Jewish character of holy sites, not just in Palestine but in Iraq, for instance. An Iraqi journalist recently pointed out that the Jewish shrine of Ezra the Scribe near Basra had been turned into a mosque although it had never been considered holy to Muslims when he was a child. The Shia Wakf would dearly love to turn the Jewish shrine of Ezekiel, with its ancient Hebrew inscriptions, into a mosque.

” Jews from Egypt have been denied access to their communal records and a Jew was recently barred from entering a synagogue in Libya on the grounds that it was a national archeological site. Synagogues and holy sites all over the Muslim world have been seized, allowed to fall into rack and ruin or converted into mosques. ”And where has UNESCO been all this time while the Jews’ priceless cultural and historical heritage is being destroyed? It is just a willing player in the Arabs’ cynical political game.”

No wonder they welcomed the PA with open arms.

Read the rest here http://cifwatch.com/2011/11/03/facts-about-unescos-silence-regarding-ara...