Paris, 16 November 2017

“Iran’s campaign to control the the 58 member-state UNESCO Executive Board ended abruptly today as South Korea was elected Chair, receiving 32 votes to Iran’s 25, with one abstention. Korea had entered the race following the distribution of a Wiesenthal Centre exclusive exposure,” claimed the Centre’s Director for International Relations and Permanent Representative to UNESCO, Dr. Shimon Samuels.

The Centre had revealed the so-called “UNESCO Prison” in Dezful on the Iran-Iraq border. It also documented the attack by Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, on the UNESCO 2030 Education programme, lambasting its objectives for “gender equality” and Tehran’s deliberate arrest of journalists on “UNESCO Freedom of the Press Day,” as also the detention of Turkish speaking Iranians to snub “UNESCO’s [Minority] Mother Tongue Day.”

“Clearly the vote also mirrored the growing fear among Sunni Muslim countries at Shi’a Iran’s imperialist threats to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and beyond. Its nuclear ambition – unfettered by the JCPOA agreement, its sponsorship of terror through its Hezbollah agency worldwide, its genocidal intent against Israel and its obscene design: ‘The Holocaust is a lie, let’s make it a reality!’ have all created a sulfuric tinder-box… hardly appropriate to Chair the very motor of the so-called intellectual arm of the United Nations,” concluded Samuels.