The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America - Softcover

Geller, Pamela

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1439190364 ISBN 13: 9781439190364

Publisher: Threshold Editions, 2013

Synopsis

Popular conservative blogger Pamela Geller and New York Times bestselling author Robert Spencer sound a wake-up call for Americans to stop the Obama administration from limiting our hard-won freedoms, silencing our democratic voices, and harming America for generations to come—now available in paperback.

America is being tested in a way that she has never been tested before. Since taking the oath of office in January 2009, President Barack Obama has cheered our enemies and demoralized our allies. He is hard at work “remaking” America by destroying the free-market system and nationalizing major segments of our economy, demonizing dissent and restricting freedom of speech, turning against our longtime friends, and above all, subjecting us to the determinations of foreign authorities. In this timely and urgent battle cry, Pamela Geller, founder of the widely popular website AtlasShrugs.com, and bestselling author Robert Spencer team up to expose the Obama administration’s destructive agenda—largely ignored by the mainstream media—and rally Americans to protect the sovereignty of a country that is under siege. Geller and Spencer critically examine the Obama administration’s ominous and revealing moves against our basic freedoms, particularly as he seizes control of the three engines of the American economy: health care, energy, and education. The Post-American Presidency is a vital guide to helping conservatives prepare for the tough battles ahead.

About this title

About the Author

PAMELA GELLER is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs Web site and is former associate publisher of the New York Observer. Her Op-Eds have appeared in The Washington Times, Newsmax, Human Events, Big Government, WorldNetDaily, the American Thinker, Israel National News, and other publications. She is the author (with Robert Spencer) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster).

ROBERT 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 was recently named National Security Adviser by Donald Trump. He was appointed by President George W. Bush as United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations in 2005, and served until his appointment expired in December 2006. He was nominated for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for playing a major role in exposing Iran's secret plans to develop nuclear weapons. An attorney who has spent many years in public service and held high-level positions in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Bolton has been a Senior Fellow at American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a commentator for Fox News Channel. He lives outside of Baltimore, Maryland, with his wife and daughter.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

OBAMA 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 a...

About this edition

• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1439190364
• ISBN 13: 9781439190364
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400