September 7, 2010

Obama's War on Arizona

By Pamela Geller

The Obama administration has included the Arizona state immigration law in a report of human rights abuses to the United Nations, that collective negation of humanity and home to the worst human rights abusers in the world.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer struck back Friday, demanding that the reference to Arizona's immigration law be taken out of the State Department's report to the U.N.'s human rights commissioner. Brewer wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton saying that the inclusion of Arizona in the U.N. report was "downright offensive." Brewer said -- and she was right -- 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."

First, Barack Obama attacked America by suing Arizona for passing a law that merely reflected federal immigration law. And now this.

Decades before the post-American president took office, Ayn Rand saw the U.N. 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." That, of course, is just the kind of guilt Obama and his cronies play 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.

Barack Obama is an internationalist, and this has more ominous implications for American sovereignty. As soon as he became president, he took decisive steps to submit American sovereignty to the will of international bodies.

Legal expert M. Edward Whelan III has spelled out the implications of this. He explains that transnationalists, among whom Obama and many of his appointees must clearly be numbered, "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 and the former general counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. "What transnationalism, at bottom, is all about," he explains, "is depriving American citizens of their powers of representative government by selectively imposing on them the favored policies of Europe's leftist elites."

Whelan wrote this before Obama reported Arizona to the U.N., and the Arizona case bears him out fully. Obama's latest attack on America may shock Americans, but readers of my book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America nod their heads in recognition. It's all in the book: the relinquishing of American sovereignty and Obama's internationalism. Americans can't say they weren't 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: the Global Poverty Act.

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.

America is under attack from within at the highest levels of power. Barack Hussein Obama's policies are bringing America to her knees. Domestically, Barack Obama is contemptuous of capitalism and rugged individualism. Internationally, he is enabling Iran's Islamic bomb, is inveterately hostile to Israel, and generally appears intent on turning America's historical enemies into friends and friends into enemies.

His dream seems to be to turn America into something like the Indonesia of his youth or the Pakistan he visited as a college student: at best, just another country, unexceptional in any way, and at worst, a third-world nation lagging far behind other global economic and cultural leaders.

With a consistency that can come only from deeply held conviction, Barack Hussein Obama is damaging the office of the presidency and compromising American sovereignty.

The Internationalist-In-Chief, single-minded in his focus upon relinquishing American sovereignty to international law (the U.N.), is essentially at war not just with Arizona, but with America itself.

Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author of The Post-American Presidency, just published.