Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos

Dore Gold has boldly stated what many people have quietly discussed for years. Tower of Babble is impossible to put down and will be impossible to forget. Most frightening is coming to the realization that we are all pawns in political games of interest and that human lives are truly worth very little to the UN. I will never be able to view conflicts in the world without wondering what covert deals are influencing its course and how many thousands upon thousands of lives are lost as a result of the UN's "neutral stance." Dore Gold demonstrates so clearly that the UN has been repeatedly negligent at best and destructive at its worst. The UN will never be able to live up to its founding platform after WWII to never again allow for the mass destruction of people and its time we stopped believing in them at all.

In 1990-1995, Liberia forced more than 800,000 people into exile. The UN did not exercise its influence and power stopping the injustice. The UN did not bring justice to the Khmer Rouge leaders. In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge murdered millions of Cambodians and the UN did not authorize a forceful stop to the murder. The UN was late in response to the 1994 Rwanda War. In 1998, five African countries invaded Congo and by 2001, 2.5 million people were killed and it was not until 2003 that the UN dispatched French forces to establish law and order, a year latter. The UN is letting special interests dictate policy and these economic and social incentives prevent action. The UN policies and actions are seemingly covert; the UN does not want an informed public. The UN is dysfunctional and this ineptiness increases the chance of crimes against humanity. The UN has no deterent capacity. The UN is not a legal body operating to some objective legal criteria. The UN can maintain diplomatic neutralism in the face of genocidal murders and this is immoral. The UN is taking the side of evil not to fight against evil. The maximum too resist not evil seems to apply to the powerless because the powerless should not provoke greater anger and bring destruction upon them by acting. "The ability to confront evil means the willingness to act boldly and ruthlessly and without consensus". The UN cannot act without consensus and if it's members can reframe from voting then they in essence have prevented healthy action. The ability or refusal, to recognize evil and boldly confront evil is the UN's salient flaw. The UN has had an unusual amount of authority within the Middle East. The UN affirms the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to resist Israeli occupation. The UN has not deterred the terrorist threat in the Middle East nor has the UN, the supposed protector of international peace and security and improved peace in the world. Instead the UN has gerrymandered itself to many totalitarian regimes giving them voice in shaping world affairs. The UN ideology is weak; the UN remains silent on the peoples right too a representative government; the UN ideology has caved from a position of morality too one of relative morality. The UN did not create Israel. The UN did not owe its existence to a UN parition plan or UN resolution. The Arab leaque refused to accept the Jewish state. The Arabs did not disguise their aggression towards Israel and made the following statement "this will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and crusades." The Arabs represented a group of states against Israel. The UN declared for the first time they would react too the threat with armed intervention. The UN did not react and the failure to act would result in serious injury to the prestige of the UN. The UN called for an Arab cease fire even as the old city of David was falling; 57 synaguoges

On one particular issue I for many years knew of the negative role of the U.N. that is in its one-sided anti- Israel bias- and its use of UNRWA to exacerbate the Palestinian Arab refugee problem instead of working to reasonably solve it. But this book provides a deep and thorough understanding of how the U.N. which was founded at a moment of international ' moral clarity' has degenerated into a major source of conflict and problem on the world- scene. Gold writes of how the Allies after the Second World War thought to found an organization which would help promote world- peace. Originally the only members allowed to join were those who had contributed to the war- effort against Nazi Germany and Japan. Churchill even wanted the organization to be called ' The Allied Nations' but the name United Nations was chosen. The organization almost from the outset failed in its peace- keeping tasks both in the Arab states invasion of Israel and the India- Pakistan War. Gold shows how this pattern of failure has persisted . And even more troublingly he shows how the U.N. has contributed to mass murder, including that of eight-hundred thousand Tutsis in Ruanda, and in the enclave of Sbrenica. UN peacekeepers insisted on their 'neutrality' and in fact sided with aggressors in these instances. Aside from the case studies Gold outlines the fundamental moral and ideological failings of the organization. He shows how it tends to side with aggressors, with anti- democratic regimes, with totalitarian tyrannies. He shows how the US has repeatedly been forced to bypass the UN in order to forward its own efforts at democracy. The exception to this was the first Gulf War when President Bush did forge a UN backed coalition against Saddam. But in the Second Gulf War this option was no longer possible, and George Bush Jr. had to go it with his own limited coalition. Gold also writes about the UN failure to prevent nuclear proliferation. Pakistan and North Korea have become nuclear powers in part because of the negligence of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. At present Iran seems to be on the same path of duping the UN agency , though there is far more publicity around the Iranian case than there was around the Pakistani and North Korean. The UN is presently under fire for the ' oil for food ' kickback scandal in which major UN officials have been implicated. Gold however says that the conclusive proof in regard to the guilt of specific individuals in this particular affair has not yet been conclusively given. As he understands it Gold holds little hope that the UN will contribute to world- peace in the near- future. He does not however advocate the US withdrawing from the organization as he believes that would only cause a backlash against the U.S. He believes an alternative organization of allied powers might however be able to bypass the UN on critical issues. The UN he shows to be a corrupt organization ruled by anti- democratic forces whose large ma

This book was written by a former UN ambassador. But even though the words are diplomatic, it strongly criticizes the UN. As Gold explains, The UN was originally the idea of Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1944 pictured a foursome of the US, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union policing the world. The idea then grew to include all other nations, both out of a proper sense of universality and a desire to avoid repeating the errors of the League of Nations. And the UN started out with a unity of purpose and a sense of moral clarity. It even passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights! But the UN's membership soon expanded to become dominated by authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. And the author clearly shows that the UN now makes global chaos even worse by siding with aggressors. Gold shows where this trend began. In 1948, the UN was given two tests: to protect India from a Pakistani invasion of Kashmir and to protect Israel from an Arab invasion. It failed both tests, and it rewarded the aggressors. And that set a precedent. China invaded Tibet. North Korea invaded South Korea (this did trigger a UN response, but only when the Soviets refused to use their veto). The UN failed in the Congo, in Nigeria, North Borneo, Timor, and Hungary. In 1962, the failures became clear when even India learned its lesson, and decided to resolve its dispute with Goa by military force. And the author also tells about Arafat being allowed to come to the UN in 1974 and being applauded there. I think this was a key moment, and that the UN has supported terror ever since. The author supplies some details about more recent UN misadventures, such as doing nothing to stop the murder of 800,000 Rwandans and allowing 7000 Bosnians to be murdered in UN "safe havens." And he explicitly lists the names of 46 terrorists who were students at UNRWA schools. Gold makes some interesting points about the International Criminal Court. I hadn't realized that if a dictator were to slaughter minorities in his own nation, the ICC would have no jurisdiction, because the problem was national, not international. The ICC would have no authority to act against the dictator even if the US sent in troops. But it would have the authority to put the American troops and American leaders on trial for interfering! The author demonstrates that we actually saw something just as arbitrary when Belgian courts threatened to put Ariel Sharon on trial for allowing Arabs to be murdered at Sabra and Shatilla, even though Israeli troops did not do the killing and even though Sharon did not find out about the killings until they were over. Meanwhile, Belgian troops serving as peacekeepers in Rwanda knew all about the Rwandan slaughters, which lasted for a hundred days, but no authority suggested putting any of them on trial. Well, what does Gold advise us to do now? He suggests forming a coalition of democracies committed to common values and strategic purpose. And

The "Tower of Babbel" delineates the history of the United Nations from its inception to present day (latter half of 2004). The Author, Mr. Dore Gold, served as an ambassador to the United Nations (UN) representing the State of Israel from 1997 through 1999. This professional association has allowed Mr. Gold to be an eyewitness to the flaws and failures of the UN, which are at once eroding and challenging the original concept of human dignity and freedom from oppression, upon which the UN was founded. From the ashes of the League of Nations which failed to maintain peace and deter tyrants, as evidenced with the horrors of the Nazi regime; the ennobling concept of the UN was envisioned. Established at the conclusion of World War II, the mandate of the UN was to prevent despotism, maintain individual human rights, and strive for universal peace. The "four policemen" of the world: the USA, China, Russia, and Great Britain, were to be the backbone of the UN. In time, as other nations were admitted, the erosion of moral clarity in the UN became prevalent. The "Tower of Babbel" demonstrates through historical record how the UN repeatedly failed to liberate the oppressed. As despotic regimes were admitted, the emphasis on the rights of the individual over the state subtly shifted to the rights of the state over the individual. An organization created to prevent oppression devolved into a defender of oppressive groups and countries, almost from its infancy. The first two major tests of the moral authority of the UN proved abject failures when the UN refused to do anything to prevent the outbreak of the first Arab-Israeli war, as well as a conflict between India and Pakistan around the same time. This was to be just the beginning of an astonishingly long record of not only failure to stop wars of aggression, but even to become an ally to the aggressor. Where clear moral behavior was to be the standard, the UN avoids taking a stance insisting instead on "objectivity." The very organization founded on the need for moral clarity in the world prefers to place the criminal on the same level as the victim. Indeed, the UN has so often demanded "moral neutrality" of itself that this mantra has written the death certificate of countless humans, even nations. The book identifies UN objectivity and neutrality as nothing less than pure immorality. It is precisely this `objectivity' that has ensured the genocide of the Darfur region of the Sudan, the creation of Palestinian refugees in the first Arab-Israeli war (not to mention 570,000 Jewish refugees from hostile Arab states), horror in Kashmir, the subjugation of Tibet, and the use of brute force to fuse new states in the Third World. The official - and even encouraged - seating of terror states, such as Syria, on the UN's Security Council marries the formal and official approval of state-sponsored terrorism to the denigration of humanity. Included in the appendix of Mr. Gold's book are numerous do