OUTRAGEOUS - AT 8:15 A.M. ET:  Why not start the week with another outrage committed by the Obamans, in their desire to "engage" the world?  If this "engagement" goes much further, we'll be signing a surrender document on someone else's battleship Missouri.

The great Anne Bayefsky, distinguished teacher, outstanding UN reporter, and mother of a newly named Rhodes scholar, exposes a disgraceful maneuver by the United States that should embarrass every one of us.  From the Weekly Standard:

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.

Thrilled already?

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...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.

That's enough.  Read the piece.  It is pathetic.  We threw Canada under the bus, just as we've betrayed just about every other ally.  The reason, of course, is that Obama, a severe leftist, does not consider countries like Canada as allies, but merely as inconvenient other nations.  He seems to feel a greater affinity for the Islamic countries, democratic or not.

Five or six years ago I was speaking with a distinguished civil liberties lawyer, one of the few genuine articles remaining, who worried that we would lose our freedoms because of what was happening on college campuses - speech codes, intimidation of anyone who dissented from the multicultural party line, fear of being graded down by partisan professors.  The Obama administration is filled with people whose main influence has been the American college campus.  I'm afraid we're seeing the result.

Anne's reported that "other Western governments were taken aback" is instructive.  They may whine in public about "American power," but privately they know that it protects them and their civilization.  Now they see that power either eroded, or turned against the fundamental principles of the West.  And they're starting to get scared.

October 5, 2009