December 22, 2011 | 8:23 pm

Wiesenthal Center calls on UNESCO to cut funding for Palestinian magazine

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Speaking of anti-Semitic awareness being raised by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the organization led by Rabbi Marvin Hier is calling on UNESCO to cut all funding to the Palestinian youth magazine Zayafuna. The Wiesenthal Center says that the magazine published an article by a 10-year-old Palestinian girl describing a dream in which Hitler told the girl: “Yes.  I killed them [the Jews] so you would all know that they are a nation who spreads destruction all over the world.”

The JPost has more about the letter that the Wiesenthal Center’s Shimon Samuels sent to the Director General of UNESCO:

“Apparently, the magazine’s positive messages on coexistence and peace apply to all but Jews and Israelis,” Samuels wrote. “Through a young girl, the Holocaust is presented as an act for the benefit of humanity.”

The Palestinian Authority’s deputy minister of education and its former minister of education are both on the magazine’s advisory board, Samuels noted.

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While Samuels noted the October edition states that “opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily express UNESCO’s views,” Samuels wrote that this disclaimer was “hardly a fitting response to the discovery of the repugnant Holocaust celebration in the February issue.”

Read the rest here.

Rabbi Hier has not been happy with UNESCO’s response—“Allow me to underscore that UNESCO takes this matter extremely seriously and it cannot but strongly deplore and condemn the statements… We will bring this matter to the attention of the concerned Palestinian authorities.”—and notes that the United States is the largest funder of UNESCO (though I think that the United States is the largest funder of most international aid organizations).