As we all konw, one of the principle components of Obama “new tone” foreign policy has been outreach to various of America’s, well you wouldn’t want to call them enemies, would you? That sounds so hostile. “Strategic Competitors” makes it sound more like the Olympics. Isn’t that nice?
So how’s that working out for him? Well, if our joining the U.N. Human Rights Council is any indicator, things are going about as well as Obama “outreach” to the American voter last election:
U.N. Gives Obama a New ‘Shellacking’ — Over Human Rights!
By Anne BayefskyPublished November 05, 2010
| FoxNews.comThe Obama administration got a new “shellacking” this morning, this one entirely voluntary. In the name of improving America’s image abroad, it sent three top officials from the State Department to Geneva’s U.N. Human Rights Council to be questioned about America’s human rights record by the likes of Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.
This was the first so-called “universal periodic review” of human rights in the U.S. by the Council, which the Obama administration decided to join in 2009.
The move represents a striking departure from prior American foreign policy, which has been to ratify selected human rights treaties after due consideration and submit American policy-makers to recommendations based on well-conceived standards accepted by the United States.
But in the three-hour inquisition which took place this morning, Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor responded with “thanks to very many of the delegations for thoughtful comments and suggestions” shortly after Cuba said the U.S. blockade of Cuba was a “crime of genocide,” Iran “condemned and expressed its deep concern over the situation of human rights” in the United States, and North Korea said it was “concerned by systematic widespread violations committed by the United States at home and abroad.”
Good work, Obama! Cuba, Iran, and North Korea are getting to make their views on America known in a venue that generates a lot of respect in the Third World and among the credentialed elite, if not among the Rubes of Flyover Counrty. How was he expecting it to turn out? Like I always say, I think Obama is a smart man. I think he is getting basically what he expects and wants from things like this. You didn’t have to be a foreign policy expert educated at Harvard to see how this was going to go.
What this basically boiled down to was an oppertunity for our foreign enemies to grandstand for and connect with our domestic enemies. The complaints of places likke Libya, Cuba, and Iran don’t sound too different from those of the Democrat Party. For example, Libya complained about U.S. “racism, racial discrimination and intolerance.” That sounds little different forom the NAACP on any given day of the Bush Administration. If they’d thrown in a gratituous slap at the “Tea Baggers”, they could have passed as a press release from said organization during the last campaign.
Cuba was also ethnic, complaining about offenses to “migrants and mentally ill persons” and saying that we needed to do more to “ensure the right to food and health.” “Human Rights” not civil rights are one of the last refuges of the scoudrel. As if we have people starving or denied health care. I guess I should note that ObamaCare wasn’t far Left enough for Cuba, just as it failed in that regard for much of Obama’s base.
The best, though, is the Islamic Republic of Iran that complained that America needed to “effectively to combat violence against women.” This is a campaign ad for Obama’s current efforts in this regard from that notorious respector of women’s right to wear a chador, and to be stoned to death for adultery. Lovely.
It goes on, of course. In total, fifty-six nations registered their grievances against the Great Satan. This was nothing but a propoganda operation against America, pure and simple, for the consumption of the Third World and the Credentialed Elites here at home. No doubt they are feeling thay got their money’s worth when they supported Obama. Would that the rest of us, whether we supported him or not, could say that we were getting the same from him as the Leader of the Free World.
A Kuwaiti report Thursday said that a mysterious explosion in a Hizbullah weapons warehouse six weeks ago involved chemical weapons, adding to the mounting evidence that the terrorist organization is preparing for chemical warfare against Israel.
