Archive

Posts Tagged ‘United Nations’
October 11th, 2018 at 7:32 am
Ramirez Cartoon: Filling Haley’s Shoes
Posted by Print

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

September 26th, 2014 at 8:21 am
From Climate Summit Charades to Scorched-Earth Judicial Politics
Posted by Print

CFIF’s Timothy Lee, Senior Vice President for Legal and Public Affairs, discusses this week’s United Nation’s summit on climate change, more inconvenient truths about global warming, and Harry Reid’s court packing efforts.

Listen to the interview here.

June 4th, 2014 at 8:02 pm
Remembering What the Taliban Stands For

By now you’ve probably heard about the scandal surrounding the Obama administration’s deal to free five Taliban officials held at Guantanamo Bay for what increasingly looks like a deserter from the U.S. Army stationed in Afghanistan.

Those in the mainstream media defending the move – including a Daily Beast columnist who tweeted, “What’s the argument that these five Taliban guys are so dangerous? Are they ninjas? Do they have superpowers?” – would do well to remember how the Taliban’s members earned their cells at Gitmo.

The five released prisoners “were top officials in the Taliban regime: a provincial governor, a deputy defense minister, a deputy intelligence minister, a top arms smuggler, and a top Taliban military commander. Two of them are wanted by the United Nations for war crimes committed against Afghanistan’s Shiites,” writes Robert Tracinski.

Tracinski then gives a sampling of what these kinds of Taliban officials do:

  • Bomb schools because they let girls play sports
  • Shoot a girl in the head because she stands up for her right to be educated
  • Mutilate women to punish them for disobedience in their roles as marital slaves
  • Drag a 7-year-old out of the yard where he is playing and hang him from a tree because his grandfather spoke out against the Taliban

America can’t right every wrong in the world, but surely it should be counted on to keep the world safe from criminals in its custody. Freeing five prisoners so they can rejoin the ranks of a known terrorist organization is a deplorable dereliction of duty. If any of these men go on to commit more crimes, those who agreed to their release will share the blame.

April 5th, 2013 at 3:32 pm
UN Treaty Opens Door for Foreign Regulation of U.S. Guns

Question: What happens when a majority of countries at the United Nations support a treaty, but delegations representing half the world’s population do not?

Answer: An agreement that won’t be enforced fairly across the globe.

It gets worse.  The dissenting half is made up of the governments most likely to violate the treaty.

The document in question is the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the vehicle of international gun control advocates to monitor and limit weapons transfers between countries.  But while the United States, considered the country with the best such system in place, is now a signatory, serial violators such as Syria, North Korea, and Iran, as well as major arms dealing countries such as Russia and China, are not.

So, what we have here is a treaty that will bind only the governments that already take arms transfer seriously, while having no effect on the governments most likely to violate its terms.

As an added bonus, there’s enough loose language in the treaty to leave room for an enterprising UN bureaucrat or two to create a global firearms registry applicable to every signatory, potentially putting American gun owners’ Second Amendment rights at the mercy of foreign gun control interests.

Not a banner week for the U.S. diplomatic mission to the U.N.

November 28th, 2012 at 4:56 pm
Susan Rice Seems Cooked

Another day of congressional testimony for Susan Rice comes with more indications the Ambassador to the United Nations will not become the next Secretary of State.

But do pity Ms. Rice, at least a smidge.  With the finger-pointing circus around the Benghazi, Libya fiasco, it’s hard to keep the story straight on what exactly happened and who was responsible for hiding that information from the American people.

To clarify things, The Blaze website (quoting Buzzfeed) lists at least five official versions of the truth from the Obama Administration:

  1. References were removed to not tip off al-Qaeda and were substituted with “extremists,” according to David Petraeus.
  2. The links to al-Qaeda were too “tenuous” to make public by the Directorate of National Intelligence because the source wasn’t trusted.
  3. “The talking points were debated and edited by a collective of experts from around the intelligence community,” not just DNI, according to a DNI spokesman.
  4. The CIA told Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte the FBI removed references to al-Qaeda from the talking points “to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.”
  5. The CIA later called Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte back, saying they had misspoken to them and that they – not the FBI – had edited the talking points.

On the bright side for Ambassador Rice, so far none of the misrepresentations have implicated her or her office as the source of the misinformation.  At most (so far), we’ve got diplomatic (Rice and Hillary Clinton) personnel parroting information from the intelligence community whose job it is to resource diplomats.

As I understand it, it’s the DNI, CIA, etc.’s job to gather, interpret, and communicate information so that the diplomatic arm of the federal government can use it.  Sure, more and better questions seemingly should have been asked by Clinton and Rice, but ultimate responsibility for knowing and articulating what happened in Benghazi rests somewhere in the alphabet soup of the intelligence community.  Those lines of responsibility won’t change if Rice replaces Clinton at State.

Cold comfort, though, since it looks like scuttling Rice’s nomination will be the only chance the Administration’s critics get to actualize their displeasure.  Welcome to Washington.

November 8th, 2012 at 8:32 pm
UN Gun Controllers Renew Push After Obama Reelection

This summer’s UN gun control treaty collapsed once the United States decided to reject text that would have opened the door to global restrictions on the right to bear arms.

But now that Barack Obama survived his reelection bid, gun control advocates at the UN are hoping he’s more flexible if given another chance to vote on the treaty.

…the U.N. General Assembly’s disarmament committee moved quickly after Obama’s win to approve a resolution calling for a new round of talks March 18-28. It passed with 157 votes in favor, none against and 18 abstentions.

Heaven help us.

H/T: Reuters

September 25th, 2012 at 3:18 pm
Obama Continues Foreign Policy by Apology at the U.N.
Posted by Print

In my column last week, I noted how preposterous it was that the Obama Administration continued to bend over backwards to distance itself from the video (falsely) claimed to have ignited the recent round of violence in the Middle East:

Speaking shortly after the attacks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pronounced, “that the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message… to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.”

Let’s assume for a moment that Clinton is right and that the film was made for the express purpose of working global Islam into a lather. Even taking that as a given, should the apology come from the nation of 300 million where one man produced some two-bit agritprop or from the part of the world where thousands took to the streets in violence because of a bit of inert satire tamer (and, remarkably, less coherent) than the average “Saturday Night Live” episode?

Speaking earlier today at the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama prolonged the inanity:

That [violence and intolerance] is what we saw play out the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well – for as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and religion. We are home to Muslims who worship across our country. We not only respect the freedom of religion – we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. We understand why people take offense to this video because millions of our citizens are among them.

I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. The answer is enshrined in our laws: our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.

Contra the president, this video doesn’t demonstrate “intolerance.” Stupidity? Yes. Bad filmmaking? Yes. Garden variety prejudice? Maybe. But being critical of the beliefs of others, even to the point of gratuitious rabble-rousing, is not the same thing as “intolerance.” The filmmakers were tolerating Islam; they weren’t advocating that anyone be silenced or harmed. By contrast, Islamists who engaged in violence to the point of cold-blooded murder ostensibly because of a YouTube video were the intolerant ones.

The cherry on top of this whole debacle was the President’s statement on the video to the ladies(?) of The View. As reported by the Weekly Standard:

In the age of the Internet, and you know, the way that any knucklehead who says something can post it up and suddenly it travels all around the world, you know, every country has to recognize that, you know, the best way to marginalize that kind of speech is to ignore it.

Not a terrible idea. And you know what’s a great way to begin implementing this strategy? Not devoting paragraphs to this film at the U.N. when we know that it wasn’t the catalyst for the recent blood lust.

September 4th, 2012 at 7:24 pm
With ATT Dead, UN Starts New Round of Gun Control Negotiations

Even though the United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty negotiations broke down in July, gun control advocates are already promoting a new vehicle to infringe on civilian ownership of firearms.

The new document being discussed at U.N. headquarters is called a “Programme of Action to Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects” (or PoA for short).

As Ted Bromund of the Heritage Foundation reports, so far the PoA isn’t doing much better than the ATT:

The normal approach is to try to walk before you run. At the U.N., though, the response to the PoA’s inability to walk is to recommend running. IANSA wants the PoA to expand to cover ammunition. Parker wants a PoA that would provide a broader framework for the ATT. And McLay believes it should consider further “normative development”—i.e., in future years it should discuss “the issues of civilian possession.” Indeed, on Tuesday at the review conference, IANSA acknowledged that the PoA has served as the basis for “gun control” in many nations and encouraged others to follow along.

IANSA stands for The International Action Network on Small Arms, and as Bromund notes, it is “the leading small-arms-control NGO…”

For some reason, the United States is still involved in negotiations with groups like IANSA.

It’s not often that regulators are so transparent about their ultimate goals.  With the IANSA on record as using the PoA as a basis for gun control, it’s past time for conservatives in Congress to demand that the U.S. pull out of negotiations immediately.  Safeguarding the Second Amendment requires nothing less.

July 27th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
UN Gun Treaty Treats Dictatorships and Democracies Equally

Last week my column discussed the disastrous legal consequences likely to emerge from the ongoing negotiations to create the Arms Transfer Treaty at the United Nations.

Fox News reports that with the conference coming to a close, a draft text has been released that has everyone not working for a dictatorial regime hopping mad:

While critics say U.S. gun owners and interests would be left exposed by the draft, it has drawn criticism on other fronts. Activists on the political left say it is a gift to illicit gunrunners around the world, and the only group that seems to like it is the rogue states leading talks, say critics.

“The talks … are now being dominated by skeptical governments including Iran, Syria and Cuba, intent on having a weak treaty, or no treaty at all,” Control Arms, a global movement that says illicit gunrunning is fueling conflict, poverty and serious human rights violations worldwide, said in a statement. Other activists named North Korea, Egypt and Algeria as additional spoilers of the UN’s stated aims for the treaty: to keep conventional weapons out of the hands of rogue regimes, terrorists and criminals.

Heritage expert Ted Bromund says it’s no surprise why the draft text of the ATT treaty is benefiting bad actors while stymieing liberals’ good intentions:

Any conceivable ATT, simply because it is being negotiated through the U.N., will be based on recognizing that all members of the U.N. are equal and sovereign states and thus have equal rights. The inevitable result of this, in the context of the ATT, will be a treaty stating that Iran and Venezuela have the same rights to buy, sell, and transfer weapons as do the U.S. and Japan. The U.N. already contains far too many dictatorships; negotiating a treaty that enshrines their equality of status in the realm of arms transfers is inherently a bad and dangerous idea.

As I noted in my column, the push for the ATT at the UN arose because gun control groups could not get legislation they favored passed in the United States Congress.  But instead of getting the hint that the political marketplace was unreceptive to their ideas, gun controllers threw in their lot with a body that treats every government the same, even those willing to turn a gun control treaty into a mechanism that oppresses citizens at home and abroad.

It will be a form of perverse justice that when the ATT becomes an international law protecting Iran and Venezuela’s ability to kill their own people and arm other dictatorships like Syria that the constituency most responsible for enshrining those rights will be gun control groups.

July 19th, 2012 at 5:55 pm
Obama Administration Aiding and Abetting Future UN Gun Grab

In my column this week I explain the threat the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty poses to every Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

So, what’s the Obama Administration’s official position?

On the surface, the State Department has issued a series of “redlines” that claim to protect American Second Amendment rights to individual gun ownership, including the claim that “There will be no restrictions on civilian possession or trade of firearms otherwise permitted by law or protected by the U.S. Constitution.”

There are at least three reasons to suspect the Obama Administration’s motives.

First, the Obama Administration fought tooth-and-nail against interpreting the Second Amendment to guarantee the right of an individual to own a gun.  Only by a 5-4 decision from the United States Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago did the justices uphold the traditional understanding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, and not a collective right to self-defense provided by the government.

The gun control groups pushing the ATT side with the Obama Administration in seeing the right to self-defense as a collective rather than as an individual right.  After fighting a losing battle for years in Congress, gun controllers opted in 2001 to make their cause global and found willing partners in dictatorial regimes like Syria, Iran and Russia looking for any way to disarm dissident groups while preserving their right to buy and sell guns for national security (i.e. repressing dissidents).

Second, the Fast and Furious scandal where federal agents allowed 2,000 guns to “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels – without the Mexican government’s knowledge – raises a serious question about the Obama Administration’s credibility on gun rights.  Already, one Department of Justice official has been caught in an email speculating how to use F&F as evidence to argue for stronger gun control laws.  Common sense says he wasn’t the only one.

Finally, there’s the Obama Administration’s presence at the ATT convention.

During the George W. Bush years the United States refused to participate in any discussions about an international arms treaty for fear it would lead to a step-by-step move to gut Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

In 2009, the Obama Administration reversed course and announced its support for the ATT.  That buy-in caused negotiations at the UN to accelerate, culminating in the month-long convention in New York this month.

Observers of the ATT convention expect the treaty’s final text to be filled with vague assertions and unattainable aspirations.  But as I point out in my column, the very existence of the ATT poses a serious long-term threat to Americans’ Second Amendment rights because future interpretations of its text can be molded to fit the gun controllers’ policy outcomes.

I suspect the Obama Administration knows this, and is aiding and abetting that very outcome by participating in the negotiations.

July 18th, 2012 at 4:56 pm
Palestinians Inching Towards United Nations Recognition

Following on Troy’s post earlier, it looks like the Israel-Palestine peace process is still DOA.

Two weeks ago, foreign policy expert Ted R. Bromund of the Heritage Foundation blogged about a controversial decision by the United Nations to allow Palestine a seat at the table during the ongoing Arms Trade Treaty (more on that in my column this week).  The move was brokered by Egypt’s new government, and had the unfortunate – and no doubt intended – effect of belittling the Vatican in the process.

Here’s Bromund’s take:

With much shuffling of place cards, all the national delegations moved over two places, and—accompanied by huge knot of delegates and much picture taking—the delegations from the Holy See and Palestine moved from the back of the room (where, as observers of different types, they normally sit behind the alphabetically arranged national member-state dlegations) to the front, ahead of the A-nations like Afghanistan and Albania.

…the outlines of the deal became clear: Both the Holy See and the Palestinians had gotten better seats, but neither of them was going to be recognized as full conference participants. The difference was that the Palestinians had evidently agreed to keep quiet and treat this as a victory, whereas the Holy See had not.

Its delegate made an angry speech, arguing that it had expected to participate as a full member in the conference, that it was not being allowed to do so, that this was an “egregious” failure that had seriously damaged its intention to become a state party to the ATT, and that it demanded to be a full participant in future conferences, where its participation as a mere observer at the ATT conference would not be a precedent.

Placing the Holy See and the Palestinians on the same level at the conference is a coup for the Palestinians.  Currently the UN recognizes the Holy See is a “non-member state” observer, while the Palestinians are an observer “entity.” The critical difference is that the Holy See is a recognized sovereign state even though it is not a UN member state, while the Palestinians are not. The Palestinians have hinted that, should their bid for full UN member state status fail, they would seek non-member state observer status. While this change would be mostly symbolic in terms of the privileges the Palestinians enjoy in Turtle Bay, it would undeniably represent General Assembly recognition of their claims of statehood and make it far easier for the Palestinians to gain membership in the UN specialized agencies.

For its part, the U.S. delegation chose not to walk out of the conference so it could retain maximum leverage over what promises to be a very bad treaty for citizens oppressed by dictatorial governments around the world.

Still, success at the United Nations depends on playing the long game; inching towards a resolution with half-measures like symbolically getting a seat at the table, even when it’s a seat that can’t vote.

With their symbolic move to the head of the table, right now, the Palestinians are winning.

July 17th, 2012 at 1:22 pm
Conservative Senators Kill Law of the Sea Treaty
Posted by Print

This is a big win for those who don’t want to see the United Nations’ grow in both power and resources. From the Daily Caller:

With 34 Republican senators now opposing a United Nations effort to regulate international waters, the Law of the Sea treaty effectively has no way forward in the U.S. Senate.

Republican Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Rob Portman of Ohio, Mike Johanns of Nebraska and Johnny Isakson of Georgia joined 30 other GOP members in agreeing to vote against the U.N. treaty.

For guidance as to why this was the right decision, one need look no further than an op-ed penned by former Attorney General Edwin Meese earlier this year in the Los Angeles Times:

President Reagan so strongly opposed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that he didn’t just not sign the treaty. He very publicly refused to sign it. He also dismissed the State Department staff that helped negotiate it. And in case anyone didn’t get the message, he sent special envoy Donald Rumsfeld on a globe-trotting mission to explain his opposition and urge other nations to follow suit.

In a 1978 radio address titled “Ocean Mining,” he asserted that “no nat[ional] interest of ours could justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the Earth’s surface over to the Third World.” He added: “No one has ruled out the idea of a [Law of the Sea] treaty — one which makes sense — but after long years of fruitless negotiating, it became apparent that the underdeveloped nations who now control the General Assembly were looking for a free ride at our expense, again.”

This was exactly what was at stake here. Passage of the Law of the Sea Treaty would have given United Nations bureaucrats a veto over American deep-sea mining efforts, redistributed royalties from American energy development to other nations, and even created the potential for back-door international carbon regulation through the treaty’s requirements for mandatory dispute resolution.

Senate Republicans did the responsible thing — they won one for the Gipper.

April 11th, 2012 at 12:50 pm
UN Human Rights Chief Inserts Herself into Trayvon Martin Case
Posted by Print

Last month, I posted here on the blog about the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s risible-if-it-wasn’t-so-deplorable failure to deal with the enormous human rights violations occurring in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. But be not worried — if those fearless defenders of human rights can’t bring justice to Damascus, they’ll be happy to settle for the Orlando suburbs. From Breitbart:

UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay has called for an “immediate investigation” into the death of Trayvon Martin.

Leaving aside the matter of the despicable record of the UN on human rights, what kind of record does Pillay herself have on human rights, and does she have any moral leg to stand on when interfering in the domestic affaris of the United States?  According to Freedom House, between September 2008, when she became the Human Rights Chief, and June 2010, Pillay made no comment whatsoever on the victims in 34 countries rated “Not Free.”  Some of the countries not criticized were: Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Vietnam.

Your United Nations, ladies and gentleman. Cost to American taxpayers: approximately $3 billion a year.

The Trayvon Martin case remains an ambiguous tragedy. Certainly someone was in the wrong, but the available facts give us no clarity as to who. At the moment, only one thing is certain: justice will be less likely with the UN involved.

March 8th, 2012 at 4:03 pm
The UN: Feckless on Syria
Posted by Print

In my new column this week, I profile President Obama’s manifest weakness in responding to Syria and Iran — a weakness that belies the reputation for hawkishness that he seems to have been cultivating in the press for the last week.

If the president is in the market for a foil to make him look like a saber-rattler by comparison, he couldn’t do much better than the United Nations, as the Washington Post reports today:

A UNESCO panel on Thursday avoided tackling the issue of whether Syria should be ousted from a committee that deals with human rights.

Instead, the commission of the executive board of the U.N. cultural agency voted 35-8 Thursday to condemn the crackdown on civilians in the Arab state.

The U.S. and several other countries want to unseat Syria from the Committee on Conventions and Recommendations, which has a strong human rights component. But there apparently is no precedent to remove a nation from a UNESCO committee.

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s crackdown on an opposition movement has left thousands dead in the past year.

So beware, Syria, the UN is unsheathing its weapon of choice: parchment.

The depths of intellectual and moral dishonesty in the United Nations would be funny if the subject matters to which they are applied weren’t so gravely serious. The body can’t oust Syria from a human rights committee? This is the nation where the Assad regime stacks political prisoners in shipping containers and dumps them at sea.

It’s a good thing the UN is intrinsically powerless. Otherwise it’d be an accessory to murder.

October 28th, 2011 at 10:11 am
Video – The United Nations: 66 Years of Bilking the American Taxpayer
Posted by Print

United Nations Day was earlier this week.  In honor of the occasion, CFIF’s Renee Giachino looks back on the world body’s 66-year history and highlights how a dream of an institution to protect the goals of world peace has, in reality, been a forum for some of the world’s worst despots, funded with U.S. taxpayer money.

 

October 4th, 2011 at 1:27 pm
EPA Stacked the Deck on Endangerment Finding

Don’t bother me with the facts; we’re trying to save the world here!

That’s essentially what Patrick Michaels of the CATO Institute says the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did when it decided that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger the environment and must be regulated.

The problem for EPA is that its own Inspector General recently stated that the process EPA used to justify its decision violated both federal law and scientific integrity.  According to Michaels, federal law requires any endangerment finding that is “highly influential” to be rigorously peer-reviewed to ensure that economy-altering regulations are based on the best science available.

EPA violated that standard when it based its endangerment finding on a facially biased United Nations report favorably reviewed by at least one federal climatologist who worked for EPA – a clear conflict of interest.

The stakes are high.  EPA’s endangerment finding is the legal basis for the agency to dictate energy regulations down to the kind of light bulb Americans can use in their homes.  By cooking the books that authority rests on, EPA has destroyed any credibility it may have had.

Let the legal challenges begin (again).

September 23rd, 2011 at 3:21 pm
Top 10 Craziest UN Speeches

Foreign Policy offers a Top 10 list of the “craziest things ever said during a United Nations speech,” to help give context to today’s request for statehood recognition by the Palestinian Authority.

Among the leaders contributing to the list are Russia’s Nikita Khruschev (shoe banging and epithet); Palestine’s Yassir Arafat leading a “Zionism = racism” movement; Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez comparing President George W. Bush to Satan; and Iran’s Mahmoud  Ahmadinejad blaming the South Ossetia war on Israel.

Of the top ten, three include racist criticisms of Israel.  If Palestine gets statehood status and speaking privileges, expect that number to rise.

July 7th, 2011 at 11:06 pm
Senior UN Official Caught Peddling Anti-Semitic Cartoon
Posted by Print

It should come as no surprise given the United Nations’ disgusting Goldstone Report (blaming Israel for war crimes during the Gaza war) and the body’s seeming rush to recognize Palestinian statehood, but it seems that the UN’s envoy for human rights in the Palestinian territories has been freelancing in just the kind of anti-semitism that is the trademark of Turtle Bay. Alana Goodman at Commentary’s Contentions blog has the story (our more sensitive readers should note that the linked cartoon will be deeply offensive to most decent sensibilities):

The controversy began when Richard Falk, the UN envoy for human rights in the Palestinian territories, posted a cartoon of a yarmulke-wearing dog chewing on a bloody skeleton and urinating on Lady Justice on his personal blog last month.

 After he was confronted about the cartoon’s anti-Semitic connotations, he initially denied posting it. “It is a complete lie,” he reportedly wrote on his blog. “I know nothing about such a cartoon, and would never publish such a thing, ever.” A few minutes later, Falk backtracked, removing the post from his blog and explaining he “didn’t realize that it could be viewed as anti-Semitic, and still do not realize.”

And now Falk has finally issued an “apology,” clarifying that he opposes any denigration of individuals “based on ethnicity, race, religion, stage of development.”

“My intention has never been to demean in any way Jews as a people despite my strong criticisms of Israeli policies, and some versions of Zionist support,” said Falk.

There can be little question that Falk is profoundly stupid. But one wonders if — just maybe — the institutional culture at the UN is such that passing around this kind of filth falls within the range of acceptable (or at least tolerable) behavior.

It’s good that the cartoon is no longer on his blog. It would be better if the ideas that inspired it were no longer in the United Nations.

March 22nd, 2011 at 8:28 am
Ramirez Cartoon – Obama on Libya: “Uh… What the U.N. Said”
Posted by Print

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

March 10th, 2011 at 7:51 pm
Obama, Clinton Dither While Cameron, Sarkozy Act

Somebody better tell Team Obama that world crises abhor leadership vacuums.  With Secretary of State Hillary Clinton incapable of acting without a UN permission slip, American allies are taking matters into their own hands.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is pressing for a no-fly zone.  French President Nicolas Sarkozy granted diplomatic recognition to Libya’s opposition, and will open an embassy in the rebel capitol of Benghazi.

It’s clear Britain and France aren’t waiting for Belize and Lichtenstein to approve sensible responses to the Libyan crisis.  Is President Barack Obama so contemptuous of America’s superpower status that he’s willing to cede its leadership role to countries whose foreign policy significance ended with the demise of their colonial empires?