Jewish Political Studies Review
Jewish Political Studies Review 17:3-4 (Fall 2005)
The Failure of the United Nations
Isi Leibler on Tower of Babble:
How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos
by Dore Gold
Dore Gold's most recent scholarly but highly readable book is an
important contribution for anyone seeking to understand the role of
what is generally regarded as the most important multilateral body of
the past century. As a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations
with excellent academic qualifications, Gold is in a unique position
to evaluate the organization's effectiveness.
Gold outlines the original objectives of President Roosevelt and
the Allies, who sought to establish a global body to oversee a new
world order based on law and morality. That vision already collapsed,
however, with the onset of the Cold War when U.S.-Soviet rivalry
brought about the paralysis of the UN Security Council.
Gold concentrates on the post-Soviet era, and provides a caustic
critique of the UN's impotence and double standards in attempting
to manage most of the political issues it has become involved with.
He indicts the organization for its unwillingness - or inability -
to confront terrorism and mass murder and its failure to forestall a
series of global catastrophes in which millions of innocent civilians
were killed.
Indifference to Genocide
One such case is Rwanda in 1994, which, apart from Cambodia,
underwent the worst genocide since the Holocaust. At the time the
UN had a sizable presence in that country, but when a debate over the
issue in the Security Council was inconclusive, then-Under Secretary-
General Kofi Annan recalled the UN peacekeeping forces and in
less than a hundred days over a million Tutsis were massacred with
particular brutality. Subsequently, the Security Council approved a
French-led military intervention that ended up providing a safe haven
for the Hutu killers.
The following year, in July 1995 in Srebrenica, Bosnia, a UN
battalion in a UN-declared "free zone" handed over eight thousand
Muslim civilians to the Serbs, who slaughtered them all. The UN
failed to convene an inquiry into the atrocity; instead Annan, who
was later to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions
to the UN, made do with sanctimonious statements. Ultimately the
Yugoslav crisis, in which a quarter of a million people were killed,
was resolved only after the Americans bypassed the Security Council
and intervened directly.
The ongoing human tragedy still taking place in Darfur is yet
another example of the UN's complete failure to defend helpless people
under attack from tyrannies.
It seems, however, that little could be expected from a body
that elected Libya as chair of its Human Rights Commission, and
at one stage even approved the rotation of Saddam Hussein's
Iraq to head the UN Commission on Disarmament. Annan is
now belatedly calling for the dissolution of the existing Human
Rights Commission and its substitution by a new Human Rights
Council.
Gold also highlights the UN's use of double standards against
Israel. Even when Iraq was on the agenda, the UN continued to
spend more time annually condemning Israel than on any other
single issue. Gold describes the blurring of distinctions between
legitimate Israeli acts of self-defense and deliberate Palestinian
targeting of innocent civilians. The antagonism against Israel was
also on display at the UN-hosted conference in Durban, which
history will record as the launching pad for the new global anti-
Semitism.
A chapter is devoted to the International Criminal Court and
its biased approach to "war crimes." In this context, Gold de-
fines the Court's conduct as "institutionalized moral equivalence."
An Uncertain Future
Gold warns that mortgaging aspects of global security to the approval
of a body that is itself actually responsible for a number of international
atrocities, amounts to a prescription for disaster. He demonstrates
how the UN has become a major obstacle to the U.S. war on terror
and predicts that in future, the United States will have to address
serious threats to its security without the constraints of the global
body.
Although Gold does not go so far as to endorse the UN's dissolution,
he recommends that the United States consider creating an association
of democracies to act as a caucus within the UN. Such a group
could be effective in neutralizing the bias and double standards that
currently determine policies.
At present, Annan is seeking to divert attention from the scandals
associated with the Oil for Food imbroglio, which involved
some of his leading officials, and is proposing some minor reforms.
An increasing number of critics, however, are reaching the conclusion
that an organization dominated by dictatorships and sponsors
of state terrorism will never be able to truly improve itself from
within. There is growing support for creating a new body rather
than providing artificial life support for the present dysfunctional
one. A voluntary association of nations committed to promoting
democracy, which would pressure other organizations to reform in
order to qualify for membership, offers hope for more meaningful
implementation of the ideals that motivated the original founding
members of the UN.
By providing case studies of how the UN has betrayed its
mission to protect the world's security, even to the point of ignoring
mass murder, while emboldening terrorists, Dore Gold makes a
powerful argument that the UN has been an abject failure. His
book also exposes the claim that the UN is a "source of international
legitimacy" as having no basis in reality. Nevertheless,
in the coming months the UN will be seeking to placate its major
democratic sponsor, the United States, by introducing reforms.
Annan realizes that action is necessary to forestall America's
growing reluctance to continue propping up the corrupt international
body.
Dore Gold's book draws on earlier studies, including those of
Jewish scholars such as Irwin Cotler, Alan Dershowitz, and especially,
of late, Anne Bayefsky, who have contributed particularly to exposing
the UN's bias toward Israel. Gold, however, adds important material
and provides a fresh conceptual framework for assessing the organization's
weaknesses. Tower of Babble will undoubtedly become the prime
source for those wishing to review the operations and failures of the
United Nations.
The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect
those of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
The above book review appears in the Fall 2005 issue of the Jewish Political Studies Review, the first and only journal dedicated to the study of Jewish political institutions and behavior, Jewish political thought, and Jewish public affairs.
Published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (http://www.jcpa.org/), the JPSR appears twice a year in the form of two double issues, either of a general nature or thematic, with contributors including outstanding scholars from the United States, Israel, and abroad. The hard copy of the Spring 2005 issue will be available in the coming weeks."
From the Editors: Manfred Gerstenfeld and Shmuel Sandler
The Forgotten Narrative: Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries by Avi Beker
European Politics: Double Standards toward Israel by Manfred Gerstenfeld
Annals of Israeli-Albanian Contacts on Establishing Diplomatic Relations by Yosef Govrin
Perspectives - Jomo Kenyatta and Israel by Asher Naim
Assessing the American Jewish Institutional Response to Global Anti-Semitism by Steven Windmueller
The New Muslim Anti-Semitism: Exploring Novel Avenues of Hatred by Raphael Israeli
Arab and Muslim Anti-Semitism in Sweden by Mikael Tossavainen
Kill a Jew - Go to Heaven:
The Perception of the Jew in Palestinian Society by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
Israel in the Australian Media by Tzvi Fleischer
Barbara Tuchman's Comments on Israel by Moshe Yegar
Hidden in Plain Sight: Alexis de Tocqueville's Recognition of the Jewish Origin of the Idea of Equality by Joel Fishman
Perspectives - The Seventh-Century Christian Obsession with the Jews: A Historical Parallel for the Present?
by Rivkah Duker Fishman
Book Reviews:
Isi Leibler on Tower of Babble: How the United Nations
Has Fueled Global Chaos by Dore Gold
Shalom Freedman on Iran's Nuclear Option: Tehran's Quest
for the Atom Bomb by Al J. Venter
Shalom Freedman on Rabin and Israel's National Security
by Efraim Inbar
Freddy Eytan on The Long Journey to Asia
by Moshe Yegar
Susanne Urban on From Cooperation to Complicity:
Degussa in the Third Reich by Peter Hayes,
and The Nazi Dictatorship and the Deutsche Bank
by Harold James
Joel Fishman on The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People
under Siege by Kenneth Levin
Manfred Gerstenfeld on Rising from the Muck: The New
Anti-Semitism in Europe by Pierre-André
Taguieff
Manfred Gerstenfeld on Les territoires perdus de la
République: Antisémitisme, racisme et sexisme en milieu
scolaire by Emmanuel Brenner
Manfred Gerstenfeld on Holocaust Justice: The Battle for
Restitution in America's Courts by Michael J. Bazyler
Shalom Freedman on Double or Nothing: Jewish Families
and Mixed Marriages by Sylvia Barack Fishman
About the Contributors
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