As a candidate for the U.S. presidency, Barack Obama touted himself to foreign audiences as a "citizen of the world." As President, Mr. Obama is determined to make sure we are such citizens, too.
The President's serial apologies, bowing and pandering to various unsavory international leaders has gained the most notoriety for his policy approach - giving rise to this column's characterization of the "Obama Doctrine" as: "Emboldening our enemies; undermining our friends; and diminishing our country."
More worrisome are myriad other steps largely being taken out of the public eye. Particularly when such actions are taken together, they will have the effect of institutionalizing the core notion behind Mr. Obama's brand of what his top international lawyer (and prospective future Supreme Court nominee), State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh, calls "transnationalism": A new world order in which the United States is simply one nation among many, subject to a higher - if utterly unaccountable - authority.
Many of these changes involve the secular strain of this phenomenon and its holy of holies, the United Nations. Team Obama has made a point of building up the UN at American expense by: legitimating the organization at every turn; deferring to one lowest-common-denominator consensus after another - no matter how inconsistent they might be with U.S. positions and interests; and joining discredited entities like UNESCO and the Human Rights Council.
For example, as the indispensable investigative reporter Claudia Rosett noted in her Forbes.com column last week, the Obama administration has seen fit to submit "its own special selection of domestic policies and laws for review by the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose 47 members include such tyrannies as Saudi Arabia, Libya, Cuba and China."
Under the quintessential "transie" rubric of creating "a more perfect union" in "a more perfect world," this 29-page report is meant to demonstrate the United States' exemplary role in building transnationalism. Specifically, Mr. Obama's team evidently hopes the virulently anti-American UN council will weigh in during its scheduled November 5 review of the American human rights record on an internal constitutional matter: Whether the State of Arizona violated such rights by trying to enforce federal immigration law - a step the report notes with barely implied criticism has "generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world."
As Ms. Rosett points out, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer wrote Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a sharply worded rebuke, correctly declaring that: "The idea of our own American 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."
Actually, Gov. Brewer, it is quintessential transnationalism. As a UN official once put it in connection with the need to regulate small arms - another transie agenda item now endorsed by Team Obama - "Americans are citizens of the world just like everybody else," adding that they better get used to it by getting with the program.
There is another strain of transnationalism that is, if anything, even more worrisome than the secular brand so fancied by the UN bureaucrats and their admirers: the global supremacist program cloaked as a religion and known as shariah. Its adherents have in mind a new world order, too, only theirs will be ruled not by liberal elites and their institutional handmaidens in such garden spots as Turtle Bay, Geneva, Vienna, Brussels and The Hague. Rather, their goal is a Caliphate, which will govern according to shariah, the law of Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Particularly insidious is the conjoining of these two forces against their common foe: sovereign, free nations led by the United States. Under the growing influence of the shariah team's voting power and corrupting wealth wielded by the 56-nation (plus the Palestinian Authority) Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Human Rights Council last September voted in favor of an OIC-drafted resolution calling on all UN members to prohibit and criminalize speech that would offend Muslims.
The Obama administration co-sponsored that OIC resolution - putting transnationalism squarely ahead of the constitutional protections of the First Amendment.
We can anticipate that the assorted transnationalists will be even more aggressively working to subject our human rights to the caprice and dictates of their agenda now that 80-year-old George Soros has announced that he is going to "endow organizations I really believe in," starting with a $100 million challenge grant to Human Rights Watch. In an interview on Tuesday with National Public Radio, Soros was at pains to emphasize the anti-American thrust of his largesse as he repeatedly declared that the United States had "lost the moral high ground" as a result of "the many human rights violations committed by Americans."
Claudia Rosett called to mind in her column the sage words of one of this country's most formidable UN ambassadors, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who understood that, "At the best of times, the U.N. is ‘a dangerous place.'" Today, it and the world are being made considerably more so for freedom-loving peoples by transnationalists of various kinds and their fellow "citizens of the world," like Barack Hussein Obama.
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