The UNtouchables
Shawn, Eric
BOOKS IN REVIEW Given the inability of science thus far to explain the profound question of life's origins, some theists have identified the appearance of RNA and DNA as a possible opportunity...
...Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 38,128 Total No...
...Kofi Annan's term expires at the end of this year, and he is working feverishly to divorce his legacy from the Oil for Food scandal and re-create it by other means...
...On the other, it's hard to write anything about the UN that hasn't been written before or to give life to the tiresome anti-Americanism that is the daily staple Reviewed by Jed of the UN's General Assembly, the Secretariat, and the French comic opera improperly named the "Security Council:' In overcoming these and many other obstacles, Fox News UN correspondent Eric Shawn has produced a most valuable book on an unsavory subject...
...of Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 38,000 No...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Given the inability of science thus far to explain the profound question of life's origins, some theists have identified the appearance of RNA and DNA as a possible opportunity for divine creative action...
...There is so much else to report about the UN, and Shawn provides as much as anyone can in a book that has to consist of news old enough to allow for the publishing process...
...Shawn didn't have to know higher mathematics to break this code, but break it he did...
...We don't have Churchill to kick Kofi's keister, but Shawn does quite well enough, exposing how the secretary general's cloistered life-in his multimillion dollar Sutton Place townhouse, in his palatial UN offices, and everywhere else he goes-consistently isolates him from real-world realities...
...Collins cannot consistently employ design logic in physics and cosmology and then say that such logic is invalid in the biological realm...
...STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION Publication Title: The American Spectator Publication Number: 0148-8414 Filing Date: 9-5-06 Issue Frequency: Ten per year Number of Issues Published Annually: 10 Annual Subscription Price: $39 (New) $49 (Renewal) Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: 1611 N. Kent St., #901, Arlington, VA 22209 Complete Mailing Address Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: The Amencan Spectator Foundation inc., 1611 N. Kent St., #901, Arlington, VA 22209 Publisher: Alfred S. Regnery, 1611 N. Kent St., #901, Arlington, VA 22209 Editor: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., 1611 N. Kent St., #901, Arlington, VA 22209 Known Boldholders, Mortgages, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding I Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None The Purpose, Function and Nonprofit Status of this Organization and the Exempt Status for Federal Income Tax Purposes: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months Issue Date for Circulation Provided: September 2006 Average No...
...ally, France became an antagonist...
...Even those who work for the UN...
...Where once the French had used their unjustified UN prominence (France remains one of the five permanent veto-holding members of the Security CounciD to simply be French, it now became the protector of terrorist states on the Security Council...
...The UN Exposed is the sort of book that can only have been written by a reporter with a strong sense of his b e a t - The UN Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America's Security and Fails the World by Eric Shawn (SENTINEL, 336 PAGES, $23.95) Babbin Jed Babbin is a TAS contributing editor and author (with Edward Timperlake) of the new book Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States (Regnery...
...Wide open...
...For instance, ID theorist Stephen Meyer--employing the same IBE logic as Collins-recently contended in a peer-reviewed biology journal that intelligence is the best explanation for the information embedded in the DNA molecule...
...Shawn shows this, too, but understanding the role France plays on the UN stage is a key to understanding the entire raison d'Stre of 21st-century France...
...DNA exhibits informational properties...
...Meyer's argument is based upon knowledge of what it takes to engineer information-rich systems, not upon a lack of knowledge...
...On one hand, there's just too much to write about...
...But this is hardly the ID argument...
...They have been there so long and believe in the [UN] system so much that they consider themselves international civil servants just merely reporting on the UN...
...Not that the UN is in any rush to do anything about terrorism, 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW but France makes doing nothing both easy and inevitable...
...After that France's relations with the United States began to decay quickly, and France reversed its UN role...
...What Shawn sees first is a press corps-members of the "UN Correspondents' Association" or UNCA-so dedicated to ignoring the UN's scandals and failures that investigation and critical analysis are simply nonexistent...
...It's a considerable addition to the history of the UN, and will serve-alongside my book Inside the Asylum and other works--as the history that Kofi Annan can't rewrite...
...Copies Distributed: 38,108 Percent Paid and/or Requested Circulation: 94 percent Statement of Ownership will be Published: October 2006 Alfred S. Regnery, Publisher 9-5-06 OCTOBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77...
...What's good for the goose is good for the gander...
...Unlike Churchill, Annan can't expect history to be kind to him, because he won't get to write it...
...One shouldn't even wonder that the UNCA's journalism prizes are partly underwritten by Ted Turner's UN Foundation and George Soros's Open Society Institute...
...But that is true today, and it may not be true tomorrow...
...The facts are what they are, and we're all stuck with them...
...A word of caution is needed when inserting specific divine action by God in this or any other area where scientific understanding is currently lacking...
...Shawn's insights bring to light things even those of us who have studied the UN only suspected and never proved...
...From unreliable U.S...
...Indeed, everything at the UN is devoid of reality, Shawn reports from his lonely vantage point...
...These are the dedicated servants of truth who still talk about an "alleged" Oil for Food scandal, hacks whom one of Shawn's sources characterized as "enamored of the Secretary General and the whole UN system...
...If only that were the worst of it...
...The UNtouchables T HE UNITED NATIONS is an author's nightmare...
...and in our uniform experience, whenever we see such properties and can discover their origin, they always turn out to have been the product of intelligence...
...In biology, Collins should have retained the sound logic and high standards of critical judgment he used to skewer the cosmological prophets of scientific materialism...
...Rather, ID maintains that certain aspects of nature exhibitpositive signs of intelligence...
...Faith that places God in the gaps of current understanding about the natural world may be headed for crisis if advances in science subsequently fill those gaps...
...As does the UN bureaucracy itself...
...This place brings out the worst in people," one of Shawn's sources said...
...They are positive reasons, based on knowledge, rather than default assumptions based on (a temporary) lack of knowledge:' (Emphasis added...
...Some of the UN reporters are in the pay of the UN itself, not all the time but on special projects...
...In the best of many good chapters-this one entitled, "The French Connection"-Shawn lays bare the simple fact that France had been a good NATO ally, one that participated at least sometimes in the pursuit of peace, before Jacques Chirac was elected in 1995...
...All this, among a bureaucracy that i s - b y UN rule-the highest-paid in the world...
...There are "good reasons" to infer an intelligence behind nature, Collins writes, "including the existence of mathematical principles and order in creation...
...Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown was even more revealing: "This place is like revolutionary France, where the backstabbing and betrayal would make Shakespeare wince" (Brown should know: It is he who last spring scolded British PM Tony Blair for involving Britain in the Iraq war and said Blair thus shouldn't be involved in brokering a Middle Eastern peace...
...France may seem a mere nuisance, but Shawn shows how France has almost single-handedly made the UN useless in the global war against the terrorist nations...
...Enough, of course, to ensure that when they aren't, they still write favorably about the UN's activities...
...It's almost impossible to keep up with the latest diplomatic and financial chicanery that are the daily products of the General Assembly, the Security Council, a n d - o f c o u r s e - t h e secretary general...
...Collins allows as much for his arguments but not for others...
...They are part of the culture...
...Without it, France would be neither seen nor heard, its pomposity and perfidious dealings with dictators and despots revealed only in the occasional war in which its products are discovered in the wrong hands, as they were in Iraq...
...OCTOBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75 BOOKS IN REVIEW seeing, hearing, and above all smelling the rot that is the UN every day of the week...
...It's impossible for anyone covering the UN (well, anyone not associated with the BBC, at least) not to conclude that France is the nation that most benefits from the UN...
...Consequently, Meyer argues, we are justified in inferring an intelligent cause for genetic information...
...One could try to counter this argument with evidence, but it accomplishes little to mischaracterize it as an argument from ignorance...
...Moreover, scientists have failed to show how information in DNA can be generated by a mindless cause...
...Such as the poisonous rivalries among the highest-level staffs...
...This could be an appealing hypothesis, given that no serious scientist would currently claim that a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life is at hand...
Vol. 39 • October 2006 • No. 8
