There goes UNESCO....

It looks like this horrible Egyptian candidate is going to get in...

Farouk Hosni seemed like a shoo-in to become UNESCO's next director general. Egypt's culture minister for the past two decades, Hosni, 71, was also a painter and diplomat. Most important, his candidacy was being pushed hard by President Hosni Mubarak, who enlisted world leaders in the idea that it was high time for an Arab to get the job.

But as pre-election maneuvers got underway this week at the Paris headquarters of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Hosni's chances were clouded by a chorus of charges that he is the wrong man for the job -- specifically that he is filled with unremitting hatred for Israel and has long played a key role in Egypt's stultifying censorship bureaucracy.

Hosni's candidacy and the passionate opposition it has generated have provoked another round of backbiting at an international organization that was founded in 1945 to promote peace through cultural exchange but has been roiled for years by poor management, intrigue and North-South clashes.

Moreover, the controversy has put the United States and other Western allies of Egypt in an uncomfortable position. Rejecting advice that he withdraw support from Hosni for the good of UNESCO, Mubarak has made the minister's election a point of honor for his government. Eager to stay in Mubarak's good graces and get his help for broader Middle East objectives, the allies have ended up espousing a lofty neutrality in public while elbowing behind the scenes to strip away Hosni's support.

Over his career, Hosni has accumulated a long record of opposing exchanges with Israel, repeatedly saying normalization must await resolution of the Palestinian issue and warning that opening up to Jewish culture would be dangerous for Egypt. But his most notorious sally came in May last year, when he told an Islamist member of the Egyptian parliament that he would personally burn any Israeli books found in Egyptian libraries.

Hosni apologized for the remark three months ago, as his campaign for the UNESCO post gathered speed. In a statement published in Paris, he attributed it to a hot temper and an Arabic-language metaphor that sounded worse than it was. But for his opponents, particularly Jewish activists and intellectuals, the evocative image of book-burning would not go away, and they said it disqualified him for the job.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher; Claude Lanzmann, the producer of a landmark film on the Holocaust; and Elie Wiesel, the writer and Holocaust survivor, issued a joint statement charging that Hosni's election would be a "shipwreck" for already troubled UNESCO and calling on the organization to "spare itself the shame" of choosing such a leader.

"Mr. Farouk Hosni is the opposite of a man of peace, dialogue and culture," they said. "Mr. Farouk Hosni is a dangerous man, an inciter of hearts and minds."