Is America paying attention to what Obama is doing?

Obama Sells Out on Free Speech at the UN

Written by James Heiser
John Birch Society
Tuesday, 06 October 2009

It has been pretty clear that the Obama administration does not look with particular favor on the second amendment, but it is also becoming increasingly evident that the President is not much of a ‘fan’ of the first one, either.

According to an article by Anne Bayefsky (“You Can’t Say That — At the UN, the Obama administration backs limits on free speech”),

The Obama administration has marked its first foray into the UN human rights establishment by backing calls for limits on freedom of expression. The newly-minted American policy was rolled out at the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council, which ended in Geneva on Friday. American diplomats were there for the first time as full Council members and intent on making friends.

President Obama chose to join the Council despite the fact that the Organization of the Islamic Conference holds the balance of power and human rights abusers are among its lead actors, including China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia. Islamic states quickly interpreted the president's penchant for "engagement" as meaning fundamental rights were now up for grabs. Few would have predicted, however, that the shift would begin with America's most treasured freedom.

For more than a decade, a UN resolution on the freedom of expression was shepherded through the Council, and the now defunct Commission on Human Rights which it replaced, by Canada. Over the years, Canada tried mightily to garner consensus on certain minimum standards, but the "reformed" Council changed the distribution of seats on the UN's lead human rights body. In 2008, against the backdrop of the publication of images of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, Cuba and various Islamic countries destroyed the consensus and rammed through an amendment which introduced a limit on any speech they claimed was an "abuse ... [that] constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination."

The Obama administration decided that a revamped freedom of expression resolution, extracted from Canadian hands, would be an ideal emblem for its new engagement policy. So it cosponsored a resolution on the subject with none other than Egypt — a country characterized by an absence of freedom of expression.

Privately, other Western governments were taken aback and watched the weeks of negotiations with dismay as it became clear that American negotiators wanted consensus at all costs. In introducing the resolution on Thursday, October 1 — adopted by consensus the following day — the ranking U.S. diplomat, Chargé d'Affaires Douglas Griffiths, crowed:

"The United States is very pleased to present this joint project with Egypt. This initiative is a manifestation of the Obama administration's commitment to multilateral engagement throughout the United Nations and of our genuine desire to seek and build cooperation based upon mutual interest and mutual respect in pursuit of our shared common principles of tolerance and the dignity of all human beings."

His Egyptian counterpart, Ambassador Hisham Badr, was equally pleased — for all the wrong reasons. He praised the development by telling the Council that "freedom of expression ... has been sometimes misused," insisting on limits consistent with the "true nature of this right" and demanding that the "the media must ... conduct ... itself in a professional and ethical manner."

The new resolution, championed by the Obama administration, has a number of disturbing elements. It emphasizes that "the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities ..." which include taking action against anything meeting the description of "negative racial and religious stereotyping." It also purports to "recognize ... the moral and social responsibilities of the media" and supports "the media's elaboration of voluntary codes of professional ethical conduct" in relation to "combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance."

The administration’s position should hardly be a shock because the Left almost always speaks of "rights" in terms of group identity — not the individual. Thus every right must be evaluated in terms of identity politics and class struggle (white vs. black, male vs. female, rich vs. poor, bourgeoisie vs. proletariat) and described in terms of victimization and liberation. For the Left, the individual does not have identity or rights — such things are possessions of the collective to which one belongs. Therefore, the administration’s position enunciated before the UN Human Rights Council coincides with the interests of Islamists: silencing critics of Islam by making it impossible to criticize their perverse (by Western standards) and militant worldview. Islam cannot win the war of ideas and cannot yet silence all of its critics through force of arms, so some of its adherents want to silence those who would speak the truth by means of a perversion of the law.

Bayefsky observes that,

Even the normally feeble European Union tried to salvage the American capitulation by expressing the hope that the resolution might be read a different way. Speaking on behalf of the EU following the resolution's adoption, French Ambassador Jean-Baptiste Mattéi declared that "human rights law does not, and should not, protect religions or belief systems, hence the language on stereotyping only applies to stereotyping of individuals . . . and not of ideologies, religions or abstract values. The EU rejects the concept of defamation of religions." The EU also distanced itself from the American compromise on the media, declaring that "the notion of a moral and social responsibility of the media" goes "well beyond" existing international law and "the EU cannot subscribe to this concept in such general terms."

However, while one can appreciate Bayefsky’s analysis of the perversity of the position taken by the Obama administration, regrettably she has not yet arrived at the correct response. Bayefsky is a Senior Fellow with the Hudson Institute; her website (bayefsky.com) “was designed for the purpose of enhancing the implementation of the human rights legal standards of the United Nations. Accessibility to UN human rights norms by individuals everywhere is fundamental to their successful realization. The information provided herein encompasses a range of data concerning the application of the UN human rights treaty system by its monitoring treaty bodies since their inauguration in the 1970's.” MORE