Divider-in-Chief (21 page)

After a country is designated a CPC, the president of that country is required by law to implement policies that respond to violations. The 2012 CPCs are: Burma, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, the People's Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

A majority of these countries are run by Muslim governments that routinely violate the rights of their religious minorities. As Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom and a USCIRF commissioner, has written:

The primary effect of Muslim attacks on religious freedom is that the number of Christians in the Middle East is plummeting. In recent decades, the share of Christians in the Middle East has fallen from 20 percent of the population to less than 5 percent. By one estimate their share of the population may drop more than 50 percent, to 6 million, by the year 2020.
¹³
An estimated half of Iraq's 1.4 million Christians have left in the last decade.
¹⁴

To be sure, Christians are leaving the region for many reasons, including dwindling economic opportunities. But the most important factor is the ascendance of political Islam. According to a 2010 Vatican document, relations between Christians and Muslims in the Middle East are often difficult “principally because Muslims make no distinction between religion and politics, thereby relegating Christians to the precarious position of being considered noncitizens, despite the fact that they were citizens of their countries long before the rise of Islam.”
¹⁵

President Obama does the millions of Christians in the Middle East a profound injustice by referring to that region as “the Muslim world,” which only serves to reinforce the Islamists' contention that Christians do not belong there.

President Obama signaled early that, despite his professed personal religious fervor, religious freedom for others would not be a priority for his administration. In a profound public demonstration of that, he allowed the position of Ambassador for International Religious Freedom to remain unfilled for more than two years before appointing Susan Johnson Cook late in 2010.

Obama rarely mentions the plight of persecuted Christians. In the rare cases when he is asked to comment, he equivocates, often presenting the slaughter of Christians as “sectarian violence” between two sides of equal strength.

In 2011, when twenty-seven Christian protestors were killed and hundreds injured during a peaceful demonstration against the burning of a Coptic Church in Cairo, Obama urged “restraint on all sides.”
¹⁶

In 2010, Leonard Leo, chairman of the USCIRF, noted, “Presidential references to religious freedom have become rare, often replaced at most with references to freedom of worship. The same holds true for many of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speeches.”
¹⁷

Thomas Farr, director of the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University, has been an outspoken critic of the president's record on religious freedom issues. He says that the USCIRF has made many policy recommendations to the State Department that have gone unheeded. In a 2010 op-ed, Farr, who served as the original director of the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom, wrote, “The Obama administration seems to have decided that other policy initiatives—outreach to Muslim governments, obtaining China's cooperation, advancing gay rights—would be compromised by vigorous advocacy for religious freedom. In fact, such a decision would harm the victims of religious persecution, hamstring key Obama initiatives and undermine U.S. national interests.”
¹⁸

When the Democrat-controlled Senate waited until the last minute to reauthorize funding for the USCIRF in late 2011, Farr said that the Senate had made it “reasonably clear to the persecutors . . . that advancing religious freedom is not a priority for the United States.”
¹⁹

Farr has argued that Ambassador Johnson Cook has not received the resources she needs to succeed in addressing religious freedom issues, and that American diplomats are not adequately trained in religious freedom issues.

In 2012, the State Department purged any mention of religious freedom in its annual report on human rights. The country reports typically include
sections on religious freedom, but the 2012 reports, which cover 2011, do not provide details on the status of religious minorities in countries involved in the Arab Spring uprising, in which Islamist movements played a key role.

Besides the basic human rights issues involved, promoting religious freedom is in the United States' interests because freer countries tend to be more pro-American countries, and there is a strong correlation between religious freedom and economic growth, women's rights, and education levels.

But instead of standing up for beleaguered religious minorities, Obama and Hillary Clinton's State Department have focused on outreach to Muslims and gays. Promoting Islam is, of course, at odds with securing rights for gays; the only apparent unifying principle is hostility to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and of course winning the votes of Muslims and gays in America.

Late in 2011, the Obama administration made a major announcement: it would use all the tools of American diplomacy, including foreign aid, to promote gay rights around the world.

In a memorandum called “International Initiatives to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Persons,” Obama said the effort to “end discrimination” against homosexuals is “central to the United States' commitment to promoting human rights.”
²⁰

“Under my Administration, agencies engaged abroad have already begun taking action to promote the fundamental human rights of LGBT persons everywhere,” stated Obama. “Our deep commitment to advancing the human rights of all people is strengthened when we as the United States bring our tools to bear to vigorously advance this goal.”
²¹

The first directive called on embassy officials “to strengthen existing efforts to effectively combat the criminalization by foreign governments of
LGBT status or conduct” and to expand efforts to combat “discrimination, homophobia, and intolerance on the basis of LGBT status or conduct.”
²²

Obama also said the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security would “ensure appropriate training is in place” for federal government employees to provide special accommodation for gay and lesbian individuals seeking expedited resettlement.
²³

Obama added that the government will work to raise the profile of gay rights activists in international groups, through efforts such as lobbying government representatives and promoting gay rights activists in various forums. The document calls for all U.S. agencies abroad to prepare a report each year to detail progress implementing the gay rights changes.
²⁴

In the official roll-out of the new policy at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, Hillary Clinton said, “Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct, but in fact they are one and the same.”
²⁵
She also said:

The Obama administration's promotion of abortion and gay rights is ironic given that, as journalist George Neumayr has noted, “An administration that came to power calling George W. Bush a bully who sought to impose Western ideology on foreign countries feels entitled to behave imperialistically on [the gay agenda].”
²⁷
It's also ironic because the Obama administration's
promotion of gay rights clashes with another of its diplomatic priorities: the appeasement of radical Islam.

It is the height of cynicism and divisiveness for Obama to use American foreign policy to implement the demands of a tiny and radical constituency. It is also a stark double standard to aggressively promote a gay agenda while ignoring the plight of millions of Christians being persecuted around the world. But to the divider-in-chief, gays and Muslims are constituencies to be indulged while the rights of Christians are to be forfeited.

B
arack Obama is ambivalent about America. Most American presidents—indeed, most Americans—love their country unconditionally. It's not that they think America is perfect or are delusional about the wrongs America has committed. But most Americans are convinced that their country, despite its flaws, is still the primary force for good in the world, a bulwark against tyranny, a “shining city upon a hill.” This is one notion upon which Americans, aside from a radical minority, are united: America is good.

But Obama has said America needs a “fundamental transformation.” He wants to root out what he sees as our smug satisfaction as a nation. As America's first “post-American” president, Obama has tried to divide the nation against its most fundamental beliefs about itself. Obama has sought to separate the nation from its founding values, and by doing so to redefine what the great American experiment in liberty means.

In his famous, or infamous, response to a reporter's question about whether he believes in American exceptionalism, Obama said: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British
exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
¹
The short answer was: Not really. When Mitt Romney made an issue of this, Obama responded the way he often does: by talking about himself. He said that his career is “testimony to American exceptionalism.”
²

That sounded a lot like what Michelle Obama said on the 2008 campaign trail when she told an audience of admirers that her husband's political rise meant that “for the first time in my adult life I'm really proud of my country.”
³

It also squared with the disgust Obama expressed when he told
Rolling Stone
magazine in 2007 that as a black man he “feels very deeply that this country's exercise of its great inherited wealth and power has been grossly unjust.” He added, “I'm somebody who believes in this country and its institutions, but I often think they're broken.”
⁴

The roots of Obama's ambivalence about America go back to his childhood. In
Dreams from My Father
, he complains that America is a “racial caste system” where “color and money” determine what happens to you in life.

He grumbled that Hawaii, where he grew up, was the result of “ugly conquest of the native Hawaiians . . . crippling disease brought by missionaries... the indenturing system that kept Japanese, Chinese and Filipino immigrants stooped sunup to sunset in [the fields].”

He complained that Kansas, where his mother and grandparents lived, was the “landlocked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty.”

Obama feels America has acted with too much bravado abroad, so he reaches out to tyrants and bows to monarchs in an effort to express our national humility. Obama's domestic policies diminish much of what makes America distinct—individual initiative and responsibility, faith in God, the role of civil society.

Obama is perhaps most ambivalent about America's free market economy. Obama's policy agenda seeks to subdue that American free market,
to “reform” a system that is inherently broken in its structure. As Michael Gledhill, reviewing
Dreams from My Father
, wrote in National Review Online
:

As a candidate for president, Obama presented himself as “a citizen of the world.” As president it seems as if he feels more at home outside America. This was evident when Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, at a point when his public approval ratings began to sag and he was having a hard time working with Congress to pass his agenda.