- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Crown Forum (Nov 9 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1400054753
- ISBN-13: 978-1400054756
- Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 16 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 522 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,106,276 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Far from fulfilling its founding mandate to stop aggression and protect human rights, the U.N. "makes matters worse," argues Gold (Hatred’s Kingdom), Israel’s U.N. ambassador from 1997 to 1999. In this vigorous if one-sided polemic, Gold contends that the U.N. has proved unable to forestall or resolve international conflicts: its peacekeeping forces allowed genocide to proceed in Rwanda and Bosnia; it has failed to curb terrorism and nuclear proliferation; and it has allowed the General Assembly to become a forum for the anti-Western demagoguery of authoritarian regimes. The U.N.’s rigid stance of "impartiality" leads it to accord "moral equivalence" to every party, no matter how stark the contrast between aggressors and victims—a lack of "moral clarity" that Gold finds particularly galling when the U.N. has criticized or obstructed Israel or the U.S. Gold covers many of the salient international crises, from the U.N.’s founding to the current war in Iraq, paying special attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict. His indictment is sometimes telling and sometimes tendentious. His criticism of the U.N. inspection programs and sanctions against Iraq, for example, obscures the fact that they succeeded in disarming Saddam. And his assumption that moral clarity alone should be sufficient to unite the world’s democracies behind American leadership will strike some as willfully naïve. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Bound to be one of the most controversial critiques in the public debate on the UN.” —Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State
“An exceptionally valuable and timely book . . . Shocking . . . Gold brings us face to face with the reality that, even with the passing of the Soviet Union, the UN’s moral failings have not much diminished.” —Commentary
“Most conservatives, of course, realize by now that abolishing, or withdrawing from, the United Nations is never going to happen. Instead, they’re seeking to bring it to heel. The strategy is outlined by former Israeli ambassador to the UN Dore Gold in his book Tower of Babble.” —Los Angeles Times
“Dore Gold’s excellent book Tower of Babble documents the UN’s shortcomings.” —New York Sun
From the Trade Paperback edition.
“An exceptionally valuable and timely book . . . Shocking . . . Gold brings us face to face with the reality that, even with the passing of the Soviet Union, the UN’s moral failings have not much diminished.” —Commentary
“Most conservatives, of course, realize by now that abolishing, or withdrawing from, the United Nations is never going to happen. Instead, they’re seeking to bring it to heel. The strategy is outlined by former Israeli ambassador to the UN Dore Gold in his book Tower of Babble.” —Los Angeles Times
“Dore Gold’s excellent book Tower of Babble documents the UN’s shortcomings.” —New York Sun
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
A silly book,
By
This review is from: Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos (Paperback)
Gold's book simply lists many of the world's problems joined with vague and unsubstantiated claims that they are the UN's fault. It is a silly book, not worth the energy to read it.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Talkshop for dictators,
By
This review is from: Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos (Paperback)
In the introduction, the author shows that at least once in its existence the United Nations served the purpose it was created for. That was in 1990 when the Security Council took a stand against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Unfortunately, in every other instance it has failed, mostly spectacularly and often with tragic consequences. There were for example the peacekeeping disasters of Somalia 1993, Rwanda 1994, Srebrenica (Bosnia) 1995, Kosovo and Congo/Zaire. The last two crises flowed from the Bosnia and Rwanda disasters respectively. The refusal to confront evil is the major flaw of the UN. This refusal eventually morphed into collusion with evil, as the Oil For Food scandal demonstrates.In chapter 2: Failure Foreshadowed, Gold discusses the birth of Israel in 1948 when there were no UN forces to withstand the Arab aggression. Likewise during The Kashmir War of the same year between India and Pakistan. Already the organization was betraying the vision of its founders by not acting against the aggressor. And from there it went downhill: Tibet followed in 1950, India annexed Goa in 1962 and many similar acts followed. Chapter 3: Cold War Freeze, looks at the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950, the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The next chapter deals with the Six Day War of 1967 and Resolution 242. The UN remained passive and actually enabled the outbreak of war. During the Iran-Iraq War that started in 1980, the UN again refused to condemn the aggressor and it did nothing about Saddam's 1987 chemical attacks on the Kurds. After the Gulf War, it again ignored genocide, this time against the Shia Muslims of Iraq. In chapter 6: Impartial To Genocide, the disturbing and heartbreaking events of the Rwandan genocide are recalled. General Romeo Dallaire warned the Dept of Peacekeeping Operations - then under Kofi Annan - of the impending horror, but the warning was ignored. In some instances, UN forces colluded with the mass murderers. The UN's inaction ultimately led to a regional war in Central Africa. The next chapter deals with the tragedy of Srebrenica and the other supposed "safe havens" in Bosnia and shows the duplicity of the UN and certain European governments. Chapter 8 discusses the international criminal court, a highly politicised concept from the beginning, and one that cannot be expected to be objective. Chapter 9 provides proof of how the UN backs terrorists, with particular reference to the terrorist organization Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon and the many instances of collusion between it and the UN's UNIFIL force. The author concludes that the major cause of these failures is the international body's moral equivalence. It does not distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil or victim and aggressor. Although he was responsible for the failure in Rwanda, Kofi Annan nevertheless became Secretary-General. The Oil For Food scandal and the underreported child sex abuse scandals have completely undermined the organization's legitimacy. It adopts numerous Anti-Israel resolutions every year but has for years ignored the genocide in Darfur. In fact the perpetrator Sudan was elected to its Human Rights Commission in 2004. The 2001 UN Conference Against Racism in Durban was an openly Antisemitic hate fest. Unlike the EU or Africa, Israel is isolated in that it does not form part of a larger bloc, and it is always up against the Arabic and Islamic states. Although it has failed utterly to halt aggression and bring about a peaceful world order, the UN is still protected by the ideology of political correctness. Some of its agencies still perform good work, but overall the spiral is further downhill as documented in the Afterword with further revelations on Darfur, sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers, oil for food monies that went to terrorists and UN agencies infiltrated by terror groups. An example of the latter is UNRWA and its ties to Hamas. The Appendix: The Paper Trail, provides evidence on various failures like Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Oil For Food and UNRWA's ties to Hamas, mostly from the United Nations' own documents. There are extensive notes, acknowledgements and an index. The book includes maps of the Kashmir Dispute, Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Six-Day war, Rwanda, and its Neighbours, the Bosnian Conflict and Lebanon and Israel. There are also 17 black and white photographs of personalities and tragic evidence of the UN's failures. In addition to this valuable and informative book, I recommend The UN Gang by Pedro Sanjuan, Global Deception by Joseph Klein, The UN Exposed by Eric Shawn and Inside The Asylum by Jed Babbin.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.9 out of 5 stars (16 customer reviews) 47 of 51 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Unequivocal condemnation,
By N. Tsafos - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos (Hardcover)
"The UN is protected by a very high wall of political correctness," writes Dore Gold, "that makes criticism of it tantamount to an attack on all of mankind. But it is high time to recognize that it has utterly failed to achieve its founders' goals: to halt aggression and assure world order." This is the conclusion that Mr. Gold, author of "Hatred's Kingdom" and Israeli Ambassador the UN from 1997 to 1999, reaches after examining the UN's record.Mr. Gold's grand narrative of failure begins in the beginning and ends in the end. His indictment of the United Nations comes even before the Cold War supposedly paralyzed it (the initial tests, writes Mr. Gold, were the first Arab-Israeli War and the first war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir) and lasts until the UN's failure to deal with Saddam Hussein, terrorism and WMD. In between are failures to deal with aggression, either across states or within them. What is refreshing is that Mr. Gold has refrained from simply barraging the UN with its failures. Rather, he has identified certain trends that explain why the UN fails either when expressing the collective will of its members or when acting with its own mind. For Mr. Gold, the primary failure of the UN is its lost moral clarity; the UN founding fathers set up a system where evil existed and ought to be resisted. From the beginning, however, this clarity subsided-there are no aggressors and victims for the UN, writes Mr. Gold, just "warring parties"; and there is no cause and effect, just a "cycles of violence." This happens to avoid compromising the UN's most cherished ideal: impartiality. Even if it means standing idle to aggression, standing by evil. In extremis, this lost moral clarity leads to moral equivalence-refusing to acknowledge that some party to a war might be more at fault than others, refraining from condemning outright violence, and seeking nonsensical explanations to justify armed struggle and even terrorism. This is tied to the proliferation of UN states that do not share the Western respect for democracy and human rights. As long as the UN reflects the aggregate of so many dictatorships, it is inevitable that it will lack either the political will or the political clout to punish those states with deviant behavior; "ultimately," writes Mr. Gold, "the UN's biggest problem is that it no longer establishes any firm standards of behavior for UN member states." The result, to name the most extreme example, is countries like Libya and Sudan being on the Human Rights Commission. If this is the failure of the UN as a collective body, then unaccountability is the failure of the UN as an organization. That Kofi Annan, head of UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations during Rwanda and Srebrenica, was promoted to Secretary-General is only the most obvious evidence of an organization unwilling to punish its staff. This evidence, Mr. Gold continues, runs off to the accusations made against UN peacekeepers in Cambodia, East Timor, Mozambique, Bosnia, Ethiopia and Eritrea for their unethical and often egregious behavior, to say nothing of the oil-for-food program that the UN administered in Iraq. Mr. Gold's summation is reflected in Sweden's Per Ahlmark remark that the UN has become "an institution in which no shortcoming, it seems, goes unrewarded." In all, Mr. Gold's unequivocal condemnation is a welcome break from the constant adulation and non-critical glorification that the UN receives in many countries across the world. At the same time, it not clear how and whether Mr. Gold's alternative, a community of democracies that is united by values and purpose, would operate. His coalition to fight terrorism, for example, would include Turkey, a notorious human rights abuser. And it is not clear for how long this democratic alliance would sustain converging views on who is the aggressor and who is the victim without resorting to the instinctive reaction of trying to mend fences rather than point fingers of blame. All the same, if there is a case to be made against the United Nations as it exists today, then that case is well contained in the "Tower of Babble." 100 of 116 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
United Nations: Shifting Ideology, Misplaced Power,
By David Honaker "InfoIsrael.net" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos (Hardcover)
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 documents evidencing and establishing the "paper trail" of moral zigzags and 180 degree turns effected by the UN to accommodate and justify its partnership with terror and despotism. The original "Charter," the UN's deviation and eventual bastardization of its mission, its overt support of terrorist groups and regimes, its penalization of victims and reward system for aggressors are laid-out in an easily understood manner to the reader. What needs to take place to bring the UN back to its original mandate is likewise considered. Those who are unaware that the current Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, feels that sovereign states must receive UN approval before defending their own citizens and interest should read this book to more clearly see how each country in the world remains threatened by the dark underbelly of the UN. Those who are aware of the manner in which terrorist organizations and terror-supporting states have hijacked the UN should read this book to deepen their understanding of the mechanisms at work against individual liberty, dignity even individual right to life. Those who desire a better understanding of the dangerous course the UN is pursuing, as well as an understanding of what can be done to bring the UN back from the brink of world chaos, owe it to themselves - and future generations of humankind - to read this insightful treatise on how the protector of freedom and individual rights has become, instead, the enabler of tyranny, defender of genocide, and global affront to all that is valued as decent and good. 31 of 35 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
All that you ever did not want to know about the U.N.,
By Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos (Hardcover)
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 majority guarantees a difficult future for those who care about human liberty . He too indicates that the powers of China,and Russia in the Security Council guarantee that major free- world initiatives will always be stifled. This book is very clearly written but in a sense it is difficult to read. This is because its message is so harsh and troublesome. Mankind's major organization in political terms works against the best interests, the freedom, the human dignity of mankind as a whole. I nonetheless would highly recommend it as providing a real understanding of this organization's role in the world. |
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