I joined Benjamin Dixon’s show to discuss President Donald Trump withdrawing the United States from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) over false accusations of “anti-Israel” bias.

You can watch the interview below:

I address in the interview how this action serves multiple purposes. First and foremost, it is a form of shielding US proxy Israel from any form of criticism whatsoever of its illegal activities — in the 50th year of illegal Israeli military occupation and colonization of the Palestinian territories.

Dixon and I also talk about how the strongest supporters of Israel in the US are in fact Christian Zionists, many of whom have an extremist Evangelical ideological worldview that sees the Israeli settler-colonial project in Palestine as part of a larger religious mission (and that is in fact deeply anti-Semitic).

The recent attacks on the al-Aqsa mosque in occupied Jerusalem and the far-right Temple movement are likewise key factors in this process of colonization and demonization of UNESCO.

I furthermore stress that the withdrawal from UNESCO is also part of the Trump administration’s offensive against the UN as a whole. Trump is continuing the right-wing dream of undermining international institutions and bodies that are not strictly beholden to US power and that give smaller countries throughout the world, particularly in the Global South, at least some kind of voice and representation on the global stage — even though the colonial history of the UN has created a structure that still limits their influence.

These unilateral attacks on the Palestinians and the United Nations underscore just how much of a rogue state the US is.

In May, I published an article in AlterNet’s Grayzone Project, co-written with Adam Johnson, debunking the myth that the UN has an “anti-Israel bias” — a lie propagated in a letter signed by all 100 US senators.

We wrote: