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The Post-American Presidency The Obama Administration's War on America
The Post-American Presidency The Obama Administration's War on America
- ISBN 13:
9781439190364
- ISBN 10:
1439190364
- Edition: Reprint
- Format: Paperback
- Copyright: 03/02/2013
- Publisher: Threshold Editions
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Summary
Author Biography
Read moreROBERT SPENCER is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of ten books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). Spencer is a weekly columnist for Human Events and FrontPage Magazine, and has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army's Asymmetric Warfare Group, the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the U.S. intelligence community.
John Bolton is the former National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump. He served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006. He has spent many years of his career in public service and held high-level positions in the Administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Ambassador Bolton is also an attorney, and was in private practice in Washington, DC, from 1974 to 2018, except when he was in government service. Ambassador Bolton was born in Baltimore in 1948. He graduated with a BA, summa cum laude, from Yale College and received his JD from Yale Law School. He currently lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
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Excerpts
Read moreOBAMA AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.…
—Barack Obama1
BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA ABDICATED. HE ABDICATED THAT WHICH WAS NOT HIS TO ABDICATE.
In his first months as president he showed himself ready to give up American sovereignty for the primacy of international law; regulations on climate change, gun control, and free speech (including speech on the Internet); and the replacement of the dollar as the basic international currency.
During his campaign, Obama declared his affinity for international law. “Since the founding of our nation, the United States has championed international law because we benefit from it. Promoting—and respecting—clear rules that are consistent with our values allows us to hold all nations to a high standard of behavior, and to mobilize friends and allies against those nations that break the rules. Promoting strong international norms helps us advance many interests, including nonproliferation, free and fair trade, a clean environment, and protecting our troops in wartime. Respect for international legal norms also plays a vital role in fighting terrorism. Because the administration cast aside international norms that reflect American values, such as the Geneva Conventions, we are less able to promote those values abroad.”2
It sounded great—until it became clear that promoting international norms meant compromising American sovereignty. Ambassador John Bolton warned in his book Surrender Is Not an Option of the dangers of what is known as “norming.” Norming, Bolton explained in an interview, “is a term that’s applied to international agreements that affect the behavior of individual governments.” When leftist activists fail in pushing their domestic agendas, “such as on gun issues in Congress or state legislatures, they stop fighting there and try and take the issue internationally.”3
“This approach,” Bolton explained, “often called ‘norming,’ meaning, in a neutral sense, creating international norms of behavior, could be helpful, especially if it meant raising standards in intolerable regimes. What it increasingly came to mean, however, was whipping the United States into line with leftist views of the way the world should look.”4
What would be the good of subjecting America to international norms? America has always been a light to the world.
It is essential that we understand the importance and singular greatness of America, and not give in to internationalist gobbledygook that amounts to nothing more than transnational serfdom.
In May 2009, the United States joined the notorious cabal of evildoers, the United Nations Human Rights Council—which the Bush administration had boycotted for its relentless defamation and demonization of Israel and refusal to condemn human-rights violations in Islamic countries, notably Sudan. Ironically, the United States would sit on the council with four notorious human-rights violators: China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.5 In December 2009 the watchdog group UN Watch issued a report showing that the Human Rights Council had effectively become an enabler for human-rights violators, rather than a genuine defender of human rights. Hillel Neuer, UN Watch’s executive director, remarked: “Paradoxically, as our report today shows, the U.N.’s main human rights body has turned into the world’s leading sponsor of impunity for gross human rights abuses worldwide. It’s a case of the foxes guarding the chickens, with countries like China, Russia, Pakistan, Cuba and Saudi Arabia shielding each other’s abuses. Democracies should send a signal by opposing the council’s resolutions, even if they will be outvoted.”
That was something Barack Obama was extremely unlikely to do.
Then on September 24, 2009, Obama became the first president of the United States to serve as chairman of the United Nations Security Council. Harry Truman, who oversaw the establishment of the UN, never did it. Neither did Eisenhower, the general who defeated Nazism in Europe. No other president did either—not even Ronald Reagan after he called upon Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, or George H. W. Bush with his new world order.
But Barack Hussein Obama was a new kind of American president.
The media hailed the move as signaling a “new co-operative relationship between the US and the United Nations.”6 Gone were the days when the United States would stand against the initiatives restricting free speech sponsored by the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Gone were the days when the United States would stand with Israel against the hypocritical condemnations that would rain down upon it from the communist and Islamic blocs. By chairing the Security Council session, Barack Obama was signaling that America was no longer singular in the world, no longer the lodestar of free people around the globe, no more exceptional than any other country.
Barack Obama’s America was just another country, a large and still strong country, to be sure, but not one that stood any longer against authoritarianism—no longer the leader of the free world, but now the leader of the globalist initiative to unify the world’s government and economy, and enforce a drab uniformity.
Obama’s chairing of the Security Council session only put an official stamp on a series of initiatives he had been pursuing in this direction since long before he became president. As soon as he became president, he took decisive steps to submit American sovereignty to the will of international bodies.
THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT CLAIMS JURISDICTION
In March 2009, the Obama administration dropped the term “enemy combatant” for the prisoners still being held at the GuantÁnamo Bay detention center, and instead adopted international laws of war as the basis for holding the accused jihad terrorists there. Attorney General Eric Holder explained: “As we work towards developing a new policy to govern detainees, it is essential that we operate in a manner that strengthens our national security, is consistent with our values, and is governed by law.”
Not American law, international law. Norming. The Justice Department announced proudly that its new policy “draws on the international laws of war to inform the statutory authority conferred by Congress.”7
Several months later, the Obama administration opened the door to extending the norms of international law not only to jihadists in Gitmo, but to the American troops who had put them there.
In August 2009, according to TheWall Street Journal, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “expressed ‘great regret’… that the U.S. is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC). This has fueled speculation that the Obama administration may reverse another Bush policy and sign up for what could lead to the trial of Americans for war crimes in The Hague.”8 George W. Bush had refused in May 2002 to accept the jurisdiction of the ICC—precisely because of the prospect of American troops being tried for war crimes on highly politicized grounds.9
Whether Obama signed on to the court or not, the ICC itself seemed determined to assert jurisdiction over Americans. The chief prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, claimed that he had the authority to investigate allegations of American war crimes in Afghanistan, and to prosecute American military personnel accordingly, even if the Obama administration did not agree. “I prosecute whoever is in my jurisdiction,” Ocampo insisted. “I cannot allow that we are a court just for the Third World. If the First World commits crimes, they have to investigate, if they don’t, I shall investigate. That’s the rule and we have one rule for everyone.”10 Not coincidentally, on the windowsill in Ocampo’s office is a photograph of himself with the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa.11
The idea that American troops might have committed war crimes in Afghanistan that warranted their being placed into the same category as Sudan’s Omar Bashir was one that could have occurred only to a rabid anti-American ideologue. Bashir, after all, murdered hundreds of thousands of people in a jihad-inspired genocide.
The Obama administration further opened the door to war-crimes prosecutions of American troops by praising the ICC’s work in other areas. Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, praised the court as an “important and credible instrument for trying to hold accountable the senior leadership responsible for atrocities committed in the Congo, Uganda and Darfur.” Ben Chang, spokesman for Obama’s national security advisor, General James Jones, agreed: “We support the ICC in its pursuit of those who’ve perpetrated war crimes.”12 Obama himself has said that “it is in America’s interests that these most heinous of criminals, like the perpetrators of the genocide in Darfur, are held accountable. These actions are a credit to the cause of justice and deserve full American support and cooperation.”13
The Bush administration had also praised the prosecution of Bashir, but at the same time Bush championed the American Service-members Protection Act, which expressed disapproval of the ICC.14
Would Obama likewise stand up for America and her defenders? Unlikely. The British author and columnist Gerald Warner observed correctly that joining the ICC would “flatter Obama’s ego as the conscience of the world. It would also put US servicemen at the mercy of any American-hating opportunists who might choose to arraign them on trumped-up charges before an alien court whose judges are likely to be ill-disposed towards America too.” Some of those “American-hating opportunists” would be Americans themselves: “So, vengeful Democrats could facilitate the indictment of President George W. Bush and all his senior commanders in Iraq.”15
What’s more, such war-crimes trials would be enormously popular in the Islamic world—the very region that the post-American president was so anxious to accommodate.
In pursuit of that accommodation, Obama’s internationalism also quickly manifested itself as a distaste for the freedom of speech.
THE WAR ON FREE SPEECH AND OBAMA’S INTERNATIONAL AGENDA
In a crushing blow to the freedom of speech worldwide, the United Nations Human Rights Council in March 2009 approved a resolution calling upon member states to provide legal “protection against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general.”16
Hatred, discrimination, intimidation, coercion, defamation, and incitement according to whom? In whose eyes?
To ask the question was to reveal the authoritarian nature of the resolution. It was designed to be a tool in the hands of the powerful, enabling them to silence the powerless.
While the resolution speaks of religion in general, the proposal came from Pakistan and had the backing of the powerful fifty-seven-government Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). (It also bears noting that there is no Organization of the Jewish Conference or Organization of the Christian Conference at the UN.) The OIC is the UN’s largest, most powerful, and most influential voting bloc—so it was clear that Islam was the only religion the drafters of the resolution had in mind. In fact, it was the only one specifically mentioned. This was underscored by the fact that Muslim states worked energetically to make “Islamophobia” the focus of Durban II—the UN’s second World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.
The conference “outcome document” deplored “Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianophobia and anti-Arabism manifested in particular by the derogatory stereotyping and stigmatization of persons based on their religion or belief,” and insisted that the criminalizing of speech deemed to be “religious hatred” was consistent with “freedom of opinion and expression.”17
But of course, what constituted “religious hatred” was in the eye of the beholder, and this could open the door for criminalization of any speech about Islam that the Islamic bloc disliked. Abdoulaye Wade, president of Senegal and chairman of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, commented: “I don’t think freedom of expression should mean freedom from blasphemy. There can be no freedom without limits.”18 Is reporting on Islamic jihad, gender apartheid, clitorectomies, beheadings, child marriage, polygamy, absence of women’s rights, honor killings, Islamic expansionism, and Islamic supremacism also to be considered defamation of Islam?
If the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the drafters of the Durban declaration had their way, any honest examination of how jihadists use Islamic texts and teachings to make recruits would be illegal. This would herald the death of the freedom of speech, leaving us mute and defenseless before the advancing global jihad.
The United Nations was putting itself in the position of policing Sharia rules on blasphemy. The West had accepted the Islamic narrative of victimization and intimidation to such a degree that large segments of the Western elites seemed ready to accept the proposition that it was blasphemy to criticize Islam.
Barack Obama was putting the world’s only superpower behind this outrage. The Obama administration took a decidedly friendly attitude toward this initiative. The Weekly Standard noted that “in order to please our European allies and our Third World critics, the Obama administration may be tempted to surrender one particular manifestation of American ‘dominance’: central management of key aspects of the Internet by the U.S. Department of Commerce”—and that some countries are already agitating for this. And not just countries: “If we give control of the Internet naming infrastructure to an international organization, we must expect attempts to censor the Internet. The Organization of the Islamic Conference will doubtless demand the suppression of websites that ‘insult Islam’ or ‘encourage hatred,’ and a number of European countries may well go along.”19
Meanwhile, the Obama administration moved swiftly to show a conciliatory face to the OIC. Within two weeks of taking office, Obama wrote to the secretary-general of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, seeking improved relations.20 Ihsanoglu visited Washington on June 23, 2009—the same day that the State Department announced the establishment of the Office of the United States Special Representative to Muslim Communities, as Ihsanoglu had urged.21 This office is so important that the special representative to Muslim communities reports directly to the secretary of state.22
With the OIC engaged in its all-out international effort to restrict free speech about Islam, including speech designed to alert non-Muslims to the motives and goals of the global jihad movement, Obama’s outreach to the OIC had ominous overtones—especially in light of the other indications that his administration had been giving that the defense of free speech was not exactly high on its list of priorities.
THE UNITED STATES BECOMES AN ENEMY OF FREE SPEECH
Ominous overtones became ominous reality in October 2009, when the Obama administration actually cosponsored (with Egypt, itself not a bastion of free inquiry and free expression) an anti–free speech resolution at the United Nations. Approved by the UN Human Rights Council, the resolution calls on states to condemn and criminalize “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.”23
What could be wrong with that? Everything.
There is, after all, the First Amendment, which preserves Americans’ right to free speech and freedom of the press.
“Incitement” and “hatred” are in the eye of the beholder—or more precisely, in the eye of those who make such determinations. The powerful can decide to silence the powerless by classifying their views as “hate speech.” The Founding Fathers knew that the freedom of speech was an essential safeguard against tyranny: the ability to dissent, freely and publicly and without fear of imprisonment or other reprisal, is a cornerstone of any genuine republic. If some ideas cannot be heard and are proscribed from above, the ones in control are tyrants, however benevolent they may be.
Now no less distinguished a personage than the president of the United States has given his imprimatur to this tyranny.
The resolution also condemns “negative stereotyping of religions and racial groups,” which is, of course, an oblique reference to accurate reporting about the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism—for that, not actual negative stereotyping or hateful language, is always the focus of complaints by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and allied groups. They never say anything when people like Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed issue detailed Qur’anic expositions justifying violence and hatred; but when people like Dutch politician Geert Wilders and others report about such expositions, that’s “negative stereotyping.”
Eugene Volokh explained why even the First Amendment may not be able to stand up against Obama’s assault on free speech. “If the U.S. backs a resolution that urges the suppression of some speech,” he explains, “presumably we are taking the view that all countries—including the U.S.—should adhere to this resolution. If we are constitutionally barred from adhering to it by our domestic constitution, then we’re implicitly criticizing that constitution, and committing ourselves to do what we can to change it.”24
Volokh added that in order to be consistent, “the Administration would presumably have to take what steps it can to ensure that supposed ‘hate speech’ that incites hostility will indeed be punished. It would presumably be committed to filing amicus briefs supporting changes in First Amendment law to allow such punishment, and in principle perhaps the appointment of Justices who would endorse such changes (or even the proposal of express constitutional amendments that would work such changes).”25
In 2008 the secretary-general of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, issued a warning: “We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed” regarding free speech about Islam and terrorism. And he reported success: “The official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.”26
No American president had ever taken more seriously his “responsibility” to restrict the freedom of speech and bow to Muslim demands than Barack Hussein Obama. When he said during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech that “peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely,” the irony was blistering.27
And he worked to erode American sovereignty in other ways as well.
GIVING UP AMERICAN SOVEREIGNTY AT THE G-20 LEADERS’ SUMMIT
Obama scored a major victory for his internationalist agenda in April 2009 at the G-20 Leaders’ Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy in London.
Dick Morris, the author, columnist, and former aide to Bill Clinton, explained it to Greta Van Susteren of Fox News: “Literally from April 2nd of this year, that is, today,” said Morris, “it’s a whole new world of financial regulation in which, essentially, all of the U.S. regulatory bodies and all U.S. companies are put under international regulation, international supervision. It really amounts to a global economic government.”
At the G-20 summit Obama helped establish this global economic government by signing off on the establishment of an international Financial Stability Board (FSB). The assembled world leaders agreed to “a framework of internationally agreed upon high standards. We will set up a financial stability board with a strengthened mandate to extend regulation and oversight to all systemically important financial institutions, instruments and markets to endorse and implement tough new principles on paying compensation and to support sustainable compensation schemes and the corporate social responsibility of all firms.”28
Thus American financial institutions, instruments, and markets would be subjected to international regulation and oversight, including regulation on salaries and the “corporate social responsibility” of “all” firms. Not just some of them, but all of them. “Just when Obama is accused of socialism,” Morris said, “he’s essentially creating world economic governments.” This was no exaggeration: the FSB would have authority over regulations on salaries for executives and other issues that the U.S. Federal Reserve Board could apply to major American companies. American economic life would be institutionally made subject to international supervision and control.
The G-20 leaders, according to Morris, slipped this in “under the radar, which is absolutely creating an international economic union.” He noted that Obama, oddly enough, “was the one pressing for less regulation and more spending, and he had to convince the Europeans.” But this wasn’t done out of conviction, in Morris’s opinion: “Obama himself is a socialist, I believe, and he had no problem really with this. This truly created a global economic system. From now on don’t look to Washington for the rule making, look to Brussels.… European socialists are going to be making the regulatory rules concerning compensation for all, all, systematically important US firms. All.”
A global economic system: just the thing fondly envisioned by many Marxist theorists Obama studied with and learned from.
And now he was the one poised to bring their dreams to fruition.
THE LISBON TREATY
Those same European socialists, meanwhile, had already been moving to consolidate their own power. The Lisbon Treaty significantly strengthened the power of the Brussels bureaucracy that oversees the European Union. Ireland held out against this treaty for a long while, rejecting it in June 2008 but finally voting to approve it in a second vote in early October 2009. Shortly after that, Polish president Lech Kacynski ratified the treaty, remarking: “The fact that the Irish people changed their minds meant the revival of the treaty, and there are no longer any obstacles to its ratification.” The Czech Republic remained the lone holdout.29
Obama applauded the Lisbon Treaty, saying: “I believe that a strengthened and renewed EU will be an even better transatlantic partner with the United States.”30 Not surprisingly, the treaty he was praising was one that provided for centralization, increased government control, and the weakening of democracy in Europe. The post-American president was happy to see an internationalist, socialist partner on the global horizon.
In fact, the EU could never have brought the treaty back to a vote so soon after Ireland had voted it down had it not been for the weak, globalist U.S. president.
The treaty creates the position of President of the European Union and removes member nations’ right to veto EU legislation. The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, warned Dubliners about it just before the 2008 Irish vote: “The only people you elect have a very limited role and I think this treaty will further enhance the power of institutions in Brussels without extending democratic authority to people.” He added that the treaty could also undercut NATO.31
This strengthened Brussels bureaucracy, on the verge of being given the power to override the will of majorities in EU member states, could now also gain oversight of the American economy—courtesy of Barack Hussein Obama, with the creation of the Financial Stability Board.
Internationalism and socialism run as consistent strains through Barack Obama’s associations and policies.
But Americans can’t say they hadn’t been warned. They should have noticed that the charismatic young Democratic presidential candidate had numerous socialist associations, going back to a childhood spent among internationalists. And even as recently as nine months before he was elected president, he sponsored a bill in the Senate that would compromise American sovereignty. Even if Obama and his associates would deny that they are socialists (and it is an open question as to whether or not they actually would), their commitment to the redistribution of wealth is a core socialist principle—and is abundantly documented.
SENATOR OBAMA AND THE GLOBAL POVERTY ACT
A year before he took the oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, Barack Obama, senator from Illinois, sponsored the “Global Poverty Act,” which was passed by the Foreign Relations Committee in February 2008. Ultimately the bill never came to a vote and died with the end of that session of Congress, but it is telling for what it reveals about the post-American president. According to Accuracy in Media editor Cliff Kincaid, if the bill had become law it could have meant the “imposition of a global tax on the United States.” Even worse, the Global Poverty Act made “levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations.”
Significantly, Senator and future vice president Joe Biden (D-DE), said Kincaid, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “was trying to rush Obama’s ‘Global Poverty Act’ (S. 2433) through his committee without hearings.” The costs would have been prohibitive. “The legislation,” according to Kincaid, “would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends.”32
And that spending would have been at the discretion of UN officials, not representatives accountable to the American people.
A socialist, internationalist bill subverting American sovereignty and burdening the American economy through the forced redistribution of wealth. This was not just your run-of-the-mill Marxism: this was redistribution of wealth on a global scale. Productive and wealth-producing countries would be enslaved and forced to give up their hard-earned money to impoverished nations. Most disturbingly, the chief beneficiaries of the redistribution of our wealth would be one continent and one religion: Africa and Islam.
GIVING UP AMERICAN SOVEREIGNTY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE?
Toward the end of his first year in office, Barack Hussein Obama again laid plans to sign away American sovereignty and accept international supervision of American affairs. He had initially planned to travel to Copenhagen in December 2009 for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, where he would sign the United Nations Climate Change Treaty. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, on which that treaty was based, had ominous implications for American sovereignty. It provided for the establishment of what was essentially a governmental body, which would have the power of enforcement over the states that signed the treaty.
“It is a blueprint to save the world,” wrote environmental journalist David Adam in The Guardian. “And yet it is long, confusing and contradictory.”33
But its internationalist and socialist aspects are unmistakable.
The Framework Convention document includes regulations for climate control; for “mitigation,” which is money that the developed world pays to the underdeveloped world for all the carbon and resources it has consumed, ostensibly to the detriment of the world’s poor nations; and “adaptation”—money developed countries pay to underdeveloped nations to aid in their development. A large portion of the treaty is devoted to scaling back Western development and “consumption” to a level that will supposedly enable the Third World to catch up industrially and technologically with the First—whereupon all will march together into the glorious socialist future.
It is the same socialist vision that the post-American president is pursuing domestically: the rich give to the poor, so that we can all be poor, and all just alike.
Justice! Climate justice, the new and improved Orwellian lexicon for a warming that was more chilly than warm.
The climate agreement stipulated that the nations that signed on to the treaty would meet in a conference, where they would “identify elements, including the economic development stages, response capabilities and shares of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, to be considered as criteria for changes in circumstances of the Parties.” In other words, the conference itself would examine the various factors and decide on their basis whether to change the requirements of any particular nation that was a signer of the treaty.
So in effect, the nations themselves would no longer have the power to determine their own degree of compliance with recommendations to combat global warming; instead, they would cede this right to this new supranational body. And this conference would in turn give way to a new international governing body: an “institutional arrangement and legal framework” would be established after 2012 “for the implementation, monitoring, reporting and verification of the global cooperative action.” This would “include a financial mechanism and a facilitative mechanism drawn up to facilitate the design, adoption and carrying out of public policies”—and to this mechanism, “market rules and related dynamics should be subordinate, in order to assure the full, effective and sustained implementation of the Convention.”
In other words, the free market would be subordinate to the oversight and direction of this new governing body. The new international governing body would regulate markets and trade worldwide, subordinate to the Copenhagen accords.
This new body would, quite explicitly, be a “government”—so it is termed in the document. This government would oversee the enforcement of international socialism, establishing “an international registry for the monitoring, reporting and verification of compliance of emission reduction commitments, and the transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries.”
The document envisions a government on the model of the current European Union, with nations subordinating themselves to a secretariat, and the citizens of those nations having absolutely no elective voice, nor any other monitoring or governing authority over that secretariat. This secretariat would set global standards on emissions controls, on carbon dioxide levels, on trade rates, and most likely also on currency exchange and value rates. It will, in short, determine who pays, and who receives.
This is, plainly and simply, world government.
Given the complexities of the regulations delineated in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, nothing less than world government would be necessary: only a huge international bureaucracy could monitor, implement, and enforce these regulations.
Ironically, the developing nations, the chief beneficiaries of this global government and attendant transfer of wealth, are hopelessly ill equipped to establish and maintain the giant bureaucracy and enforcement apparatus that the climate agreement would entail. So the treaty would effectively induce the West to create and enforce a huge government apparatus for the transfer of its own wealth to other countries, the emasculation of its economies, and the surrender of its political independence.
Is this the suicide of the West? Perhaps—but Western European and American leaders don’t see it that way. At first glance, the climate change treaty looks as if the West is imposing a horrible burden on itself. And certainly the new global climate change order will be prohibitively expensive, both financially and in terms of loss of sovereignty. But in exchange the West is buying the status quo. As with welfare systems in America and Europe, the new world order will pay the poor to be poor—and when the poor buy into it, they will be poor forever. By accepting payoffs instead of developing ways to earn money on their own, they exchange subsistence levels for achievement, and the fathers and mothers who buy into it simply ensure that their children will never rise above it, for they will not raise their children with the values necessary to enable them to do so.
After decades of the failed policy of throwing hard-earned American currency at despots, dictators, and bureaucrats of failed nations, what we should have been exporting was political freedom. What we should have been insisting upon was individual rights, entrepreneurship, and self-governance. And only nations that upheld such standards would qualify for the ample bounty of American largesse.
But instead, the end result of all this transfer of wealth and sovereignty will be neither climate justice nor economic equality. The West will retain its technical and technological superiority, although its further growth will be hamstrung by the new climate regulations. The developing countries will remain developing countries, because the riches they will receive via the climate treaty will do nothing to develop their economies. They will get rich by doing nothing, and as they continue to do nothing and the largesse from the West dries up, they will return to their former poverty. The developing nations are on the brink of ensuring their “developing” status for generations to come—simply by “forcing” these concessions from the West and its willing post-American leader.
It is also noteworthy that there is virtually nothing in the document forcing the developing nations to adhere to any standards of reporting or compliance or wisdom in the way the money is spent.
In reality, it is all about assuaging Western guilt and establishing a transnational socialist regime. And for the Islamic world, the climate change treaty is a sweet deal. We buy the oil from them. We burn the oil. We pay them reparations for having consumed the oil. We pay them “adaptations” for not burning their trees. At every step, they gain.
LORD MONCKTON BLOWS THE WHISTLE
Several weeks before Obama was scheduled to leave for Copenhagen, the internationalist aspect of his plans was exposed. On October 14, 2009, Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science adviser for Margaret Thatcher and noted critic of Al Gore’s climate change dogma, spoke at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, about the threat to American sovereignty that was posed by the United Nations Climate Change Treaty, which was set for Obama and others to sign at a conference in Copenhagen.
Monckton told his audience that at that conference, “a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regimes from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.” And he issued a warning: “I have read that treaty. And what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created. The word ‘government’ actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, ‘climate debt’—because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.”
While Monckton’s words were greeted with skepticism, in fact the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change backed him up completely. And Barack Obama, with all his hard-line socialist associations and policies, was hardly one to stand up in opposition to a measure that embodied so many of his core beliefs. Monckton explained the nature of the government envisioned in the climate change treaty—and it sounded like the government of Obama’s dreams. He pointed out that the words “election,” “democracy,” “vote,” and “ballot” do not appear in the treaty, and declared that this treaty would “impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.”
Monckton declared that this treaty would supersede U.S. law and eclipse American sovereignty: “And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution, and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties—And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.” He apparently based this view on Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” If “Treaties” are to be the “supreme Law of the Land,” theoretically Obama’s climate treaty could supersede U.S. laws that may contradict it.
Accordingly Monckton concluded with a warning: “In the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I’ve read the treaty. I’ve seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not.”34
As Herman Van Rompuy, the first Lisbon Treaty–era president of Europe, put it: “2009 is the first year of global governance.”35
Perhaps stung by the publicity that Monckton’s warning received, an Obama administration official announced ten days later, on October 24, that the post-American president was “leaning toward not going” to Copenhagen. He said that Obama would instead address climate change issues during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But the treaty would remain unsigned.
For the time being.
Climategate, the explosive revelations that the evidence of manmade global warming was largely fabricated, should have changed all that. But genuine science seemed to have little to do with the international environmental-global-industrial complex.
Obama, meanwhile, had made appointments in line with his overall internationalist goals.
INTERNATIONALIST ON THE SUPREME COURT
When Justice David Souter retired from the Supreme Court, Obama chose Sonia Sotomayor, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, as his replacement. Quickly approved, Sotomayor joined the high court on August 6, 2009.
An internationalist had joined the Supreme Court.
In 2007, Sotomayor contributed a foreword to a book entitled The International Judge, by Daniel Terris, Cesare P. R. Romano, and Leigh Swigart. In it, Sotomayor emphasized how important it was to consider “how much we have to learn from foreign law and the international community when interpreting our Constitution.…” She added: “We should also question how much we have to learn from international courts and from their male and female judges about the process of judging and the factors outside of the law that influence our decisions.”36
This was Sotomayor’s consistent line of thought. In April 2009, addressing the American Civil Liberties Union of Puerto Rico, Judge Sotomayor again declared in effect her support for a role for international law in deciding cases stateside: “international law and foreign law,” she said, “will be very important in the discussion of how to think about the unsettled issues in our own legal system.” Opponents of the consideration of international laws and foreign laws to decide cases in the United States were “asking American judges to close their minds to good ideas.” She referred to cases in American courts where foreign precedents were used to “help us understand what the concepts meant to other countries and… whether our understanding of our own constitutional rights fell into the mainstream of human thinking.”
Would the concepts of the freedom of speech and legal equality of women with men fall into “the mainstream of human thinking” today? Not with the rapid advance of Sharia norms in Islamic countries (as well as in the West). Not with the increase of authoritarian governments in countries all over the world. And not with the post-American president paying only the vaguest lip service to the freedom of speech, while working in all sorts of ways to undermine it.
The hazards of Sotomayor’s approach were many. TheWall Street Journal asked a pointed question in an editorial published just as Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings were about to begin: “If one judge may look to the courts of Western Europe for expansion of liberal thoughts on human rights, why may another not look to decidedly less liberal ideas? Iran allows women who appear without a hijab on the streets to be lashed 74 times. China limits families to bearing one child. Even the democracies of Western Europe have laws that differ broadly from ours. Few countries, for instance, share our rules protecting the rights of the accused, or have the U.S.’s constitutionally mandated separation of church and state.”37
Besides her internationalism, Sotomayor had something else in common with the president who appointed her: a predilection for racial grievance mongering and manipulation. While studying law at Princeton, Sotomayor’s writings demonstrated a preoccupation with racial politics: she was the author of Race in the American Classroom and Undying Injustice: American “Exceptionalism” and Permanent Bigotry. She saw the distinctive features of America, the things that made this nation powerful and free, as liabilities rather than virtues. Instead of Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill,” America in the reign of the post-American president and his post-American advisers and colleagues would become less and less exceptional, less and less distinctive, less and less different from the rest of the world.
And in so doing, it would cease to be the refuge to which those yearning to breathe free would turn. For the tired, the poor, the huddled masses would soon come to know that there was no freedom, no prosperity, no legal protection for them in the United States of America. Not anymore.
Sonia Sotomayor also showed a distaste for the Second Amendment similar to that of the president, who derided those who “cling” to their guns. In Deadly Obsession: American Gun Culture, she argued that the very idea that private citizens could own guns in the United States was based on a misunderstanding. There was, she claimed, actually no right to bear arms that was guaranteed to citizens by the Second Amendment. Rather, she said, this right pertained to militias only.38
Not surprisingly, Sotomayor was not the only Obama appointment that struck at the very principle of American sovereignty.
TRANSNATIONALISM, SHARIA, AND AMERICAN LAW
Obama seemed determined to turn over the Land of the Free to global forces with interests decidedly different from the best interests of Americans. And that included Islamic supremacists—whose attachment to Sharia was apparently just fine by Harold Koh, the internationalist lawyer whom Obama tabbed in April 2009 to become the legal adviser for the State Department.
Obama should have abandoned the climate warming hoax as soon as “the miracle” happened. But this would never happen. Global warming is a tool to “level the playing field,” to weaken America, and to burden her with crippling taxes while enriching her enemies and competitors.
Superficially, Koh had impressive enough credentials. He served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in 1981 and 1982, and then worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council (OLC) from 1983 to 1985. He became a professor at Yale Law School in 1985 and dean in 2004, and from 1998 to 2001 he was assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. He has written many books, including Transnational Legal Problems (with Harry Steiner and Detlev Vagts) and Transnational Litigation in United States Courts, as well as numerous articles and monographs, including one entitled International Law as Part of Our Law, which was published in The American Journal of International Law.
The titles reveal a substantial focus of Harold Koh’s legal scholarship—one that raised concerns among Obama’s critics that he was appointing an internationalist, someone who would not necessarily have America’s best interests at heart, to a key position at State. Koh’s own words confirm this: “As American lawyers, scholars, and activists,” he wrote in 2003, “we should make better use of transnational legal process to press our own government to avoid the most negative and damaging features of American exceptionalism.” These “negative and damaging features” include “U.S. insistence upon double standards,” including having the effrontery to think that “a different rule” should “apply to itself than applies to the rest of the world.”
Koh zeroes in on the freedom of speech, warning that “our exceptional free speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet.” What can be done to solve these “problems”? The Supreme Court “can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation.”39
In a world that generally values the freedom of speech, as well as the freedom of conscience and the legal equality of all people, far less than does the United States of America, the implications of this are clear: erasing the distinctions between American law and international law would mean an erosion of the rights and freedoms of Americans, and a concomitant deterioration of American society.
Referring to the implications of Koh’s appointment, Glenn Beck thundered: “Once we sign our rights over to international law, the Constitution is officially dead.” However, Obama’s defenders were dismissive: Pamela S. Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School, said that concern over Koh’s internationalism was “all just an attempt to whip up hysteria.” White House spokesman Reid Cherlin said it was all an invention of the right-wing attack machine out to discredit Obama by misrepresenting one of his key appointees: “You have political opponents of the president who are motivated by their opposition to his agenda who are mischaracterizing or fabricating statements by Dean Koh.”40
In reality, however, none of the genuine concerns about Harold Koh’s internationalism and slight attachment (at best) to American sovereignty were fabricated. Koh really was a committed transnationalist who believed that American law should be subject to foreign authorities and informed by foreign precedents—a fact that should make every American demand that Barack Obama fire him. But, of course, Obama will never do that: there is no indication that the post-American president’s views on transnationalism differ in any serious way from Koh’s.
Legal expert M. Edward Whelan III explains that transnationalism “challenges the traditional American understanding that (in the summary, which I slightly adapt, of Duke law professor Curtis A. Bradley) ‘international and domestic law are distinct, [the United States] determines for itself [through its political branches] when and to what extent international law is incorporated into its legal system, and the status of international law in the domestic system is determined by domestic law.’ Transnationalists aim in particular to use American courts to import international law to override the policies adopted through the processes of representative government.”
Whelan is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the former general counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, former principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice, and like Koh a former law clerk for a Supreme Court justice (in Whelan’s case, Antonin Scalia). “Harold Koh’s transnationalist legal views,” he declared before Koh’s nomination as State Department legal adviser was approved, “threaten fundamental American principles of representative government and… Koh would be particularly well positioned as State Department legal adviser to implement his views and to inflict severe and lasting damage.… Among other things, he would be advising on the legal positions that the United States should be taking in federal courts on issues arguably implicating international law and before international bodies; he would be counseling State Department officials on international negotiations, treaty interpretation, and treaty implementation; and he would be a major player in interagency disputes on all these matters.”
“What transnationalism, at bottom, is all about,” Whelan explains, “is depriving American citizens of their powers of representative government by selectively imposing on them the favored policies of Europe’s leftist elites.” In contrast, “proponents of a nationalist jurisprudence view ‘foreign legal precedents’ as ‘an impermissible imposition on the exercise of American sovereignty.’”
And Harold Koh is a “leading advocate of transnationalism. Further, on the spectrum of transnationalists, ranging from those who are more modest and Americanist in their objectives and sympathies to those who are more extreme and internationalist (or Europeanist), Koh is definitely in the latter category. He is also very smart, savvy, determined, and dogmatic.”
Whelan sees Koh’s embrace of transnationalism as essentially absolute: “If there are any limits—beyond intrusions on recognized individual constitutional rights—that Koh would place on the legitimate and desirable use of the treaty power to regulate domestic social and economic policy, I have not yet run across them in his writings.”
Resistance to this internationalism would be very difficult. Whelan explains: “The only available recourse for pesky citizens who still believe in the system of representative government that our Constitution creates will be congressional action to override the new CIL [customary international law] norms, action that would require a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress while President Obama or any Europeanist successors of his are in office. Such action will be made all the more difficult as the cultural elites clamor for Americans to show proper deference to international law and the federal judiciary.”41
Among numerous questionable and controversial statements, Koh had said that the “war on terror”—a term that the Obama administration had by then already quietly abandoned—was “obsessive.” And in a 2007 speech that became notorious when Obama nominated him, Koh opined (according to a lawyer who was in the audience, as reported in the New York Post) that “in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.”42
Asked for comment, a spokeswoman for Koh waved the incident away: “I had heard that some guy… had asked a question about sharia law, and that Dean Koh had said something about that while there are obvious differences among the many different legal systems, they also share some common legal concepts.”43 What’s more, Robin Reeves Zorthian, president of the Yale Alumni Association of Greenwich, Connecticut, said that the Post’s account was “totally fictitious and inaccurate. I was in the room with my husband and several fellow alumni, and we are all adamant that Koh never said or suggested that sharia law could be used to govern cases in US courts. The subject of his talk was Globalization and Yale Law School, so, of course, other forms of law were mentioned. But never did Koh state or suggest that other forms of law should govern or dictate the American legal system.”44
What was at issue, however, was not whether Koh had said that Sharia should “govern or dictate the American legal system.” The question was whether he said it could be used to determine the outcome of a particular case in an American courtroom. And given Koh’s demonstrable affinity for the use of international legal principles and precedents in American courts, there was no reason why he would not have said something like this, and certainly no indication that he would oppose such a practice.
Perhaps Koh had something in mind akin to what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was thinking when he made a notorious statement in 2008 that Islamic law was “unavoidable” in Britain. Williams didn’t mean that Britain would become a Sharia state, but only that Muslims could have recourse to private Sharia arbitration for marital disputes, inheritance matters, and the like. Stonings and amputations? Of course not. “Nobody in their right mind,” said Williams, “would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well.” But, he concluded, the idea that “there’s one law for everybody… I think that’s a bit of a danger.”45
Equality of treatment and equality of rights for all people? A dangerous concept!
One may have hoped that Koh wouldn’t go that far, but in saying that “in an appropriate case” Sharia legal principles could be applied in the United States, he seems to be opening the door to Sharia courts in the United States, instituted after the pattern already established in Britain.
Sharia courts are already operating there, and multiculturalists dismiss concerns about them by insisting that they’re just private, voluntary arbitration tribunals, like similar arbitration panels for Jews and Catholics. The analogy, however, is not exact. Jewish family courts and Catholic marriage tribunals claim authority only over those who accept that authority, i.e., those who believe in the tenets of those faiths. What’s more, such courts claim no authority beyond their narrow purview, such that most legal matters are beyond their scope. Islamic law, by contrast, asserts itself as the only legitimate law for all areas of human life—not just marriage and family law, and by no means just religious law, but as the sole legal foundation for every aspect of social and political life.
As such, Sharia claims jurisdiction over non-Muslims as well as Muslims. The great Pakistani Islamic theorist of the twentieth century, Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, whose writings remain internationally influential among Muslims today, wrote that non-Muslims have “absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God’s earth, nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines.” If they do, “the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.” In accord with this, there is no concept in the Qur’an, Islamic tradition, or Islamic law of non-Muslims living as equals with Muslims in an Islamic state: Muslims must be in a superior position.
And so it comes as no surprise that those private Sharia courts in Britain are already coming into conflict with British law. Recently Sharia courts in Britain have been allowed to adjudicate cases of domestic violence rather than have those cases referred to the criminal courts, even though the Qur’an directs men to beat disobedient women (4:34)—a directive likely to find the battered woman’s complaint falling on deaf ears in a Sharia court.
Sharia is a complex and comprehensive unity that traditional Muslims believe to be the unalterable law of Allah. To open the door to one aspect of it is only to open the door to the rest—which inevitably will result in the institutionalized subjugation of women and non-Muslims, and the extinguishing of freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. Consequently, all free people may have hoped that Koh would reconsider his earlier naÏve approval of the coming of Sharia to the Land of the Free.
But given Barack Obama’s warm praise for all things Islamic and thoroughgoing commitment to internationalism, nothing seemed less likely.
GIVING UP SOVEREIGNTY FOR GUN CONTROL
Obama was also actively engaged in efforts to extend the authority of United Nations gun control initiatives to the United States, using them to limit the freedoms guaranteed by the Second Amendment.
“In most cases,” according to the National Rifle Association, “agendas for the elimination of private ownership of firearms are disguised as calls for international arms control to stem the flow of illicit military weapons. These instruments are generally promoted by a small group of nations and a large number of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) working in conjunction with departmental bureaucracies in multi-national institutions such as the UN and European Union.”
While the Bush administration had opposed such initiatives, Obama reversed course, actively cooperating with the UN and the EU on the development of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which would severely restrict Second Amendment rights within the United States.46
Would the Second Amendment stop the importation of weapons restrictions laws into the United States? The question was the same as for the First Amendment and free speech: all Obama needed to circumvent the Constitutional protections was a pliant Supreme Court, aided and abetted by an ideologically driven media. He had the media, and with a few retirements would have the Supreme Court as well.
John Bolton observed that Obama might use “norming” to impose gun control laws on America. “I think it would work this way: They know, for example, that legislation restricting gun rights—infringing on the Second Amendment—would be very unpopular and very hard to get through Congress. They may want to do it to repay certain of their constituencies, but they know there would be a fight. If it comes in through the back door, where they can say, ‘Well, look, this is an international agreement,’ then it’s a lot easier to say we’re simply going along with something else that may have other benefits for the U.S.”
Bolton said that UN internationalists were just waiting for Bush to leave in order to try to force the United States to accept international protocols. “People in the U.N. system, the Non-Governmental Organizations, basically concluded they weren’t going to get anything through while Bush was president. So they’ve been waiting, they’ve been holding back, and it’s precisely what they’ve been waiting for—the right guy to get in the White House. I think they believe they have found him. And that’s why I think groups that care about Second Amendment rights—groups like the NRA and all of its members—really have to pay very close attention to what’s going on in the State Department and New York for the next four years. In a diplomatic world, a lot takes place below the radar screen. You don’t see it until it’s essentially a done deal, when it’s much harder to oppose.”
Groups lobbying at the UN for international arms control legislation restricting weapons distribution in combat zones have a “hidden agenda,” said Bolton. “In fact it’s not so hidden to many of these groups,” and it “is not weapons flowing to conflict zones. It’s imposing their domestic agenda, particularly on the United States, to get gun laws enacted here in ways they couldn’t possibly be successful in doing in Congress. They’d much rather lobby the U.N. than our own Congress.”47
Apparently, so would Barack Obama.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH INTERNATIONALISM?
As Barack Obama made significant moves during his first year in office to subject the United States to the authority of the UN and the OIC, Americans remained largely indifferent. Of course, the mainstream media did not report on these initiatives. But informed citizens knew what was at stake.
Decades before the post-American president took office, Ayn Rand saw the UN for what it was, and what every free person should have known it was—and it has only gotten worse since then: “Psychologically, the U.N. has contributed a great deal to the gray swamp of demoralization—of cynicism, bitterness, hopelessness, fear and nameless guilt—which is swallowing the Western world.”48 That, of course, was just the kind of guilt Obama and his cronies were playing upon. This guilt and demoralization was largely due to Communism in those days; now the “gray swamp” is still there, but it stems from Islam.
The similarities between Communism and Islam are many. French sociologist Jules Monnerot, in his 1949 Sociologie du communisme, which was published in English as Sociology and Psychology of Communism, concluded that “Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam.”49 And today Islam is enjoying the same success in intimidating the West and keeping it off balance that Communism once did—and in the same way, with willing help from subjugated Westerners. “The communist world,” Rand continued, in words that apply equally to the Islamic world today, “has gained a moral sanction, a stamp of civilized respectability from the Western world—it has gained the status and prestige of an equal partner, thus establishing the notion that the difference between human rights and mass slaughter is merely a difference of political opinion.”
Whether Obama thought that making such concessions to thugs would pacify them, or whether he actively favored their cause, or both, was unclear. In any case, he seemed determined to feed the beast, to the detriment of those he had sworn to protect.
And to the detriment of the free and sovereign nation he was supposed to be leading.
So the question comes to mind yet again: Who is this guy?
© 2010 Pamela Geller
