The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (4 page)

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Authors: David Limbaugh

BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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“Verbally accost”? Whose side is this lady on? Kayyem bewailed that Arabs believe U.S. cable companies reject Al Jazeera because America doesn’t want to hear from the Arab world. But her entire op-ed reinforced that very view, undermining her professed concern.
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Regardless, our overarching concern should not be what kind of signals we are sending to the Arab world, but the accuracy of the news that is disseminated to the American people. As Ed Lasky wrote in the
American Thinker
, “We have enough terror apologists in the media already without an entire station devoted to obscuring the truth being beamed into America’s homes.”
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STICKING IT TO THE UNITED STATES SO THE UN DOESN’T HAVE TO
President Obama’s impulse to disparage America is intrinsic to his hard-left worldview. Consider, for example, the United States’ report to the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), which was America’s first such submission. While the document reads as an indictment of this nation’s record by the anti-American Human Rights Council itself, it’s sobering to recognize that it was produced by the Obama administration, which handed the rogue nations on this council the gift they’ve been waiting for—a validation of their ongoing denunciation of our country. The report sounds more like leftist revisionist history than an objective statement of the United States’ record and position on civil rights.
Under the section “Freedom of Political Participation,” the report boasts of efforts of “several members of Congress and other policymakers and advocates” to “establish a national mandate for universal voter registration.”
22
This is an extremely controversial proposal by Democrats ostensibly to ensure that
all
eligible citizens are registered to vote. In reality, it is a political ploy to increase voting among Democrat-leaning groups such as welfare recipients—and possibly illegal aliens and convicted felons—and a recipe for increasing voter fraud.
23
This highly charged partisan scheme should not be passed off as a corporate statement of the United States in an official report to the UN. Our reports should reflect the existing policy of the United States, not a leftist policy wish list.
Tellingly, the report reflects Obama’s view that pre-Obama America was egregiously discriminatory and that he is earnestly striving to correct our past sins. “Work remains,” the report says, “to meet our goal of ensuring equality before the law for all.” Seeing as equal opportunity and equal protection are already enshrined in our Constitution and in our statutory and common law, it’s not immediately clear to what the report is referring. But its meaning becomes clear with its repeated insinuations that our society discriminates against gays and lesbians, and that higher unemployment among African-Americans and Hispanics is due to disparities in opportunity (as opposed to, say, welfare programs that might provide a disincentive to work).
Indeed, the report editorializes extensively about America’s alleged discrimination against homosexuals. “In each era of our history,” it intones, there is “a group whose experience of discrimination illustrates the continuing debate of how we can build a more fair society. In this era, one such group is LGBT Americans.” It then discusses same-sex marriage: “Debate continues over equal rights to marriage for LGBT Americans at the federal and state levels, and several states have reformed their laws to provide for same-sex marriages, civil unions, or domestic partnerships.” This is but a thinly veiled argument that the refusal to sanctify same-sex marriage in most U.S. states—a policy ratified by the people in dozens of referenda—is tantamount to a human rights violation.
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In the report, the administration also boasts about having introduced ObamaCare, which it suggests will end our allegedly discriminatory medical system.
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The report seems anxious to confess, for example, that a disproportionate number of Asian-American men suffer from stomach cancer—as if that is the system’s fault, or worse, the result of some malicious, racist mindset. Indeed, the report employs civil rights language in impugning the present system, saying ObamaCare will help “reduce disparities and discrimination in access to care.”
The report further laments that “U.S. courts have defined our federal constitutional obligations narrowly and primarily by focusing on procedural rights to due process and equal protection of the law.” Not to worry, though, because “as a matter of public policy, our citizens have taken action through their elected representatives to help create a society in which prosperity is shared, including social benefits provided by law, so that all citizens can live what [Franklin] Roosevelt called ‘a healthy peacetime life.’” It states that ObamaCare and the administration’s other social initiatives have “reflected a popular sense that the society in which we want to live is one in which each person has the opportunity to live a full and fulfilling life.” Though it’s unclear what this happy rhetoric means, it can hardly be stated that the American public favors ObamaCare.
The report also articulates the administration’s partisan views on the War on Terror and Obama’s opposition to enhanced interrogation techniques. It details a number of executive orders he signed upon taking office, including the one reiterating his promise—still unfulfilled—to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities. It also discusses his creation of a task force to review the “appropriate disposition of each detainee held at Guantanamo.” It practically constitutes an apology from the United States for its detention and interrogation policies.
By far the most objectionable part of the report is its submission of U.S. laws and policies for UN review. Encompassing both state and federal legislation, the submission includes Arizona’s immigration law (which, incidentally, Obama officials also denounced as a form of American “racial discrimination” during a self-flagellating discussion with officials from communist China, one of the world’s worst human rights offenders.)
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In its report, the Obama administration offers an update on its attempts to block the Arizona law: “A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.”
In a blistering letter to Secretary of State Clinton expressing her “concern and indignation,” Arizona Governor Jan Brewer declared,
Simply put, it is downright offensive that the U.S. State Department included the State of Arizona and S.B. 1070 in a report to the United Nations Council on Human Rights, whose members include such renowned human rights “champions” as Cuba and Libya. Apparently, the federal government is trying to make an international human rights case out of S.B. 1070 on the heels of already filing a federal court case against the State of Arizona. The idea of our own government submitting the duly enacted laws of a State of the United States to “review” by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional. Human rights as guaranteed by the United States and Arizona Constitutions are expressly protected in S.B. 1070 and defended vigorously by my Administration.
Demanding that the administration withdraw the reference to SB 1070 from its report, Brewer warned that her state would “fight any attempt by the U.S. Department of State and the United Nations to interfere with the duly enacted laws of the State of Arizona in accordance with the U.S. Constitution.”
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The administration’s suit against Arizona is wholly indefensible. That Obama would take the issue to the UN speaks volumes about his antipathy for American sovereignty.
FUNDING THE UN: A FOOL AND HIS MONEY ARE SOON PARTED
The U.S. State Department is also paying money to the UN Development Program, which in turn funds the Inter Press Service (IPS)—an organization that purports to be “a communication channel that privileges the voices and the concerns of the poorest.” What this means, according to Michael Rubin, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, is that we are indirectly funding a group that is “shilling for Venezuela, Zimbabwe, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah.”
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It would appear, based on IPS publications, that the group is also promoting a Palestinian uprising against Israel.
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This is all unsurprising; the UN is a notoriously corrupt and dysfunctional organization that lacks accountability. UN peacekeeping troops have been implicated in “a string of sex scandals from Bosnia to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Haiti,” the
New York Times
reports. The scandals range from sex trafficking to rape to pedophilia, yet abusive UN soldiers are often simply sent home without punishment. According to the
Times
, “In April, 16 peacekeepers from Benin were sent home from Ivory Coast—more than a year after Save the Children U.K. found that the soldiers traded food for sex with poor, underage girls. More than 100 troops from Sri Lanka were sent home from Haiti in 2007 because of widespread accusations of sex with minors.”
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The Obama administration seems untroubled by the UN’s warped values and irresponsibility, and by its obvious hostility toward the United States. In fact, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in September 2010, called the UN “the single most important global institution,” adding that “we are constantly reminded of its value.”
32
Indeed, sometimes Obama defers more to UN institutions than to the legislative branch of his own government—that was clearly the case when he sought the UN’s approval to intervene in Libya but not the approval of the U.S. Congress.
Republicans such as Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen have long pressed for reforms to the UN, but the administration resists their efforts. It ignores critics who argue for America’s withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council, and who have a long list of arguments for such action:
* The majority of its forty-seven member nations are not free countries, according to democracy watchdog Freedom House. Many of these regimes are notorious human rights abusers, such as China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Russia.
* Eighteen HRC members are part of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which has leveraged its membership in the HRC to promote its “defamation of religion” campaign aimed at outlawing criticism or mockery of Islam.
* The HRC has never passed resolutions on behalf of civil rights victims of China, Cuba, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Zimbabwe.
* It has targeted Israel in six out of ten of its “special sessions” involving issues with countries and has named Israel in 70 percent of its condemnatory resolutions.
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Indeed, the unfair scapegoating of Israel was a major reason cited by the Bush administration for refusing to participate in the HRC.
* The HRC appointed as an “expert” Richard Falk, an international law professor at Princeton who has endorsed 9/11 conspiracy theories blaming the U.S. government for the attacks.
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The United States pays some 22 percent of the UN’s regular budget and 25 to 27 percent of its peacekeeping budget. Our exact donations to the UN aren’t even known, because there are so many UN-affiliated organizations that it’s difficult to accurately track our total contributions. Whatever our contributions may be, it’s clear the Obama administration has incompetently monitored them; in 2011, it was discovered that we overpaid our share of the peacekeeping budget for 2010 - 2011 by a whopping $286.7 million, more than three-quarters of the entire $377 million in “cuts” that Congress adopted in the 2011 budget negotiations.
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The nonpartisan watchdog Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) argues that the U.S. should reduce its UN contributions by one-quarter. “As the U.S. attempts to grapple with mounting deficits and debt, organizations like the U.N. should not be spared the knife when it comes to trimming budget fat,” says CAGW president Tom Schatz.
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Especially in these difficult economic times, it’s hard to justify funding the UN at all, much less making a disproportionate contribution.
THE INTERNATIONAL GREEN DREAM

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