While many of the acts of the United Nations are accurately described as laughable, their latest idea is literally comical.
With only four years until the 2015 deadline for achieving its notorious Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the UN has taken up the challenge of making children “fully aware of them” and “of the important role they can play in achieving them.”
To that end, the discerning minds at that Manhattan morass have enlisted the aid of world famous soccer players to shill for the global shadow government. Claiming that sports figures “often act as role models” (all that planning for the obliteration of national sovereignty must not leave a lot of time to read the news), the UN insists that they are perfect vehicles for “disseminating key messages and values” to the youth of the world.
The proselyting professional athletes will carry a colorful tract targeted specifically at kids. Score the Goals: Teaming Up to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals” is a 32-page “educational” (read: indoctrinating) comic book chronicling the adventures of 10 soccer players (all of whom have been previously recruited as “UN Goodwill Ambassadors”) who “become shipwrecked on an island on their way to playing an ‘all-star’ charity football [soccer] game. Whilst on the island, the team has to tackle the eight MDGs along their journey towards being rescued.”
This is not a joke. Well, it’s not intended as a joke.
As previously reported in The New American, the eight Millennium Development Goals are:
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
- Participants, volunteers and coaches acquire transferable life skills which increase their employability
- Vulnerable individuals are connected to community services and supports through sport-based outreach programs
- Sport programs and sport equipment production provide jobs and skills development
- Sport can help prevent diseases that impede people from working and impose health care costs on individuals and communities
- Sport can help reduce stigma and increase self-esteem, self-confidence and social skills, leading to increased employability
2. Achieve universal primary education
- School sport programs motivate children to enroll in and attend school and can help improve academic achievement
- Sport-based community education programs provide alternative education opportunities for children who cannot attend school
- Sport can help erode stigma preventing children with disabilities from attending school
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
- Sport helps improve female physical and mental health and offers opportunities for social interaction and friendship
- Sport participation leads to increased self-esteem, self-confidence, and enhanced sense of control over one’s body
- Girls and women access leadership opportunities and experience
- Sport can cause positive shifts in gender norms that afford girls and women greater safety and control over their lives
- Women and girls with disabilities are empowered by sport-based opportunities to acquire health information, skills, social networks, and leadership experience
4. Reduce child mortality
- Sport can be used to educate and deliver health information to young mothers, resulting in healthier children
- Increased physical fitness improves children’s resistance to some diseases
- Sport can help reduce the rate of higher-risk adolescent pregnancies
- Sport-based vaccination and prevention campaigns help reduce child deaths and disability from measles, malaria and polio
- Inclusive sport programs help lower the likelihood of infanticide by promoting greater acceptance of children with disabilities
5. Improve maternal health
- Sport for health programs offer girls and women greater access to reproductive health information and services
- Increased fitness levels help speed post-natal recovery
6. Combat HIV and AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
- Sport programs can be used to reduce stigma and increase social and economic integration of people living with HIV and AIDS
- Sport programs are associated with lower rates of health risk behaviour that contributes to HIV infection
- Programs providing HIV prevention education and empowerment can further reduce HIV infection rates
- Sport can be used to increase measles, polio and other vaccination rates
- Involvement of celebrity athletes and use of mass sport events can increase reach and impact of malaria, tuberculosis and other education and prevention campaigns
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
- Sport-based public education campaigns can raise awareness of importance of environmental protection and sustainability
- Sport-based social mobilization initiatives can enhance participation in community action to improve local environment
8. Develop a global partnership for development
- Sport for Development and Peace efforts catalyze global partnerships and increase networking among governments, donors, NGOs and sport organizations worldwide.
Given the relative popularity of soccer in the United States, the names of the castaway soccer stars are likely unfamiliar to the target demographic in this country. The roster includes: Emmanuel Adebayor, Roberto Baggio, Michael Ballack, Iker Casillas, Didier Drogba, Luis Figo, Raúl, Ronaldo, Patrick Vieira, and Zinédine Zidane (yes, the Zinedine Zidane who viciously head butted an Italian player in the chest during the 2006 World Cup).
In the words of the publisher, “The comic book is primarily aimed at 8-14 year old children and provides a fun interactive way to help them understand, familiarise [sic] and reflect about the eight MDGs as well as inviting them to take action through several activities provided in the adjoining educational guide.”
In supporting the MDGs in general and the use of a sport as part of a “broad, holistic approach to addressing the MDGs,” former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan perversely paraphrases an otherwise faith-promoting aphorism, declaring: “A community that plays together, stays together.”
Anyone interested in reading this inked and painted pean to globalism, may find it here.
After that experience, the reader should turn his attention to the very serious and scary plans set forth by the U.N. in the Millennium Goals themselves. Do so here and here.
