Post-American Presidency

by Spencer, Robert; Geller, Pamela

  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?

  TWO

  THE INDOCTRINATION OF BARACK OBAMA

  HOW DID BARACK OBAMA BECOME THELEADER OF A NATION WHOSE POWER HE SEEMEDDETERMINED TO DIMINISH?

  Some assumed that he must not have known what he was doing, but was carried along by inexperience and naïveté into embracing policies that were disastrous for the nation and the world. But this view was at odds with the assessment of his political rivals and colleagues, who during the rough and tumble of the 2008 presidential campaign increasingly regarded him—according to a July 2008 New Yorker profile—as a “pure political animal”: after Obama outfoxed John McCain on the issue of campaign finance reform, “commentators abruptly stopped using the words ‘callow’ and ‘naïve.’”1

  The key to Barack Obama’s policies and activities as president lies in beliefs and assumptions that he began to absorb in his earliest upbringing—often in associations and events that he has done his best to obscure. But they must be explored. Before understanding why Obama does what he does, it’s important to review his schooling, his parents’ social mores, their political beliefs, his gurus, his mentors, his friends, and his associations. Essentially, these things are what made Obama what he is.

  The unique and singular beauty of America is that we are not a single race, creed, or color. Ours is a shared value system. Rugged individualism, property rights, intellectual property rights, freedom of speech and religion and the right to assemble—we are wet-nursed on such basic unalienable human freedoms. We assume these freedoms, like we assume the very air we breathe. No other country can say such a thing. This is what makes America exceptional, an historic anomaly, blessed and gifted. This is how America is built.

  But Barack Obama was not built this way. He did not grow up this way. Since America is not an ethnicity, but a value system, in order to be American, in order to “get” America, one has to have grown up in America, and to have soaked in the idea of living free—growing up under the righteous glow of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This is neither tribal nor collective. It is singular and individual—America is the place where one man is not at the mercy of mob rule or minority plotting.

  But Barack Hussein Obama wasn’t always Barack Hussein Obama. From 1967 to 1971, he was Barry Soetoro, an elementary school student in Jakarta, Indonesia. Barack Hussein Obama spent four of his crucial formative years, from the ages of six to ten, outside the United States, in the largest Muslim country in the world. His father was a Muslim from Kenya; his stepfather a Muslim from Indonesia. Even when he moved to the United States, he came to a place that was far from the American heartland both geographically and culturally. “Hawaii,” according to the Chicago Tribune, “had become a state only two years before Obama’s birth, and there were plenty of native Hawaiians still deeply unhappy about it.… The arc of Obama’s personal journey took him to places and situations far removed from the experience of most Americans.”2

  While in Indonesia also, Obama’s family lived “as Indonesians lived.” Much later, he recalled that the family lived what in America would have been considered a life of poverty: “We lived in a modest house on the outskirts of town, without air-conditioning, refrigeration, or flush toilets. We had no car—my stepfather rode a motorcycle, while my mother took the local jitney service every morning to the US embassy, where she worked as an English teacher. Without the money to go to the international school that most expatriate children attended, I went to local Indonesian schools and ran the streets with the children of farmers, servants, tailors and clerks.”

  The future president recalled a decidedly Indonesian childhood, saying he spent his days “chasing down chickens and running from water buffalo.”3 He recounted much later: “When I think of (Bali) and all of Indonesia, I am haunted by memories—the feel of packed mud under bare feet as I wander through paddy fields; the sight of day breaking behind volcanic peaks; the muezzin’s call at night and the smell of wood smoke; the dickering at the fruit stands alongside the road; the frenzied sound of a gamelan orchestra, the musicians’ faces lit by fire.”4
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br />   Occasionally his mother would take him to the American Club, “where I could jump in the pool and watch cartoons and sip Coca-Cola to my heart’s content.” Obama said in his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, that he knew that he and his mother were “citizens of the United States, beneficiaries of its power, safe and secure under the blanket of its protection.”5

  Yet his mother appeared dedicated to undermining that power and stripping American citizens of that safety and security. For Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a communist. She moved in communist circles and had communist friends. Her parents put her in a high school run by a self-proclaimed communist who had been hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. A high school friend described her as a “fellow traveler,” and in both high school and college she moved in the most radical circles in her area.6

  Stanley Ann Dunham met Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., in 1960, at the height of the Cold War, in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii.7 It was, no doubt, a meeting of the minds: Obama, Sr., according to journalist Andrew Walden, “left behind a published record of an embrace of communist policies.”8 And why was Obama’s mother taking Russian-language classes in 1960—the height of communist antagonism toward the West? Stanley Ann Dunham had no interest in becoming a diplomat.

  Obama recalled that when Lolo Soetoro got a job with an American oil company in Indonesia, the family’s standard of living improved considerably. They moved to a better house and bought a car, a television, and a record player. But instead of being pleased, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro’s Marxist consciousness was offended. “Looking back,” Obama writes in his first autobiography, Dreams from My Father, “I’m not sure that Lolo ever fully understood what my mother was going through during these years, why the things he was working so hard to provide for her seemed only to increase the distance between them.” As if there was something normal, right, and logical about his mother’s reaction.