At a Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday, June 5, President Obama announced his nomination of Samantha Power (shown) to replace Susan Rice as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. At the same event, the president tapped Rice to be his new national security advisor.
Within hours of the announcement, opposition to Power’s nomination began to surface.
Constitutionally consistent Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released the following statement on his Senate website:
The nomination of Samantha Power is deeply troubling. No nation has spilled more blood or sacrificed more for the freedom of others than ours, and yet Ms. Power has publicly embraced the need for America to continue apologizing to the world for perceived transgressions, going so far as to explicitly urge “instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa.” She is yet another Obama nominee who has been sharply critical of our nation’s strong support of Israel. She’s an aggressive interventionist, supporting sending our men and women into harm’s way for “humanitarian” causes. And she has strongly supported the expansion of international institutions and international law — including the International Criminal Court, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Kyoto Protocol — at the expense of U.S. sovereignty. Indeed, Ms. Power has publicly stated, “We have to believe in international law and binding ourselves to international standards in the interest of getting others bound to those standards.” America needs a UN Ambassador to be an advocate for our own interests at the UN — not an advocate of elevating UN interests over U.S. sovereignty and the rights of the American people.
While Cruz makes several good points in his criticism of Power’s unconstitutional policy positions, the senator misses the mark with regard to the need for an advocate for the United States at the United Nations.
As The New American and The John Birch Society have chronicled for decades, the only way to protect U.S. sovereignty from the globalist government-in-waiting and to advance America’s best interests is to get the U.S. out of the UN and the UN out of the U.S.
Given Power’s professed preference for using the U.S. military as the UN’s armed force in global conflicts, it is little wonder that the Senate’s chief warmonger, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), has come out in support of her nomination. McCain wrote, “I support President Obama’s nomination of Samantha Power to become the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. I believe she is well-qualified for this important position and hope the Senate will move forward on her nomination as soon as possible.”
Some critics see things a little differently. Many members of the Jewish community point to comments made by Power in 2002 as evidence of a desire to use military force to intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The story as told by Fox News:
Critics point to a 2002 interview where Power seemed to suggest the possibility of military intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
During the interview with Harry Kreisler, host of Conversations with History, a program produced by the University of California Berkeley Institute of International Studies, Power said America needs “a willingness to actually put something on the line in sort of helping the situation.
“Not of the old, you know, Srebrenica kind or the Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence, because it seems to me at this stage — and this is true of actual genocides as well and not just, you know, major human rights abuses, which we’re seeing there. But — is that you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line,” she said.
Although Power reportedly later described those comments as “weird,” an examination of her participation in the creation of a UN doctrine calling for military intervention reveals that those comments are consistent with her philosophy — a philosophy that, if her nomination to head the U.S. delegation to the UN is confirmed, she will undeniably bring to the ambassadorial position at UN headquarters.
Samantha Power rose to prominence in government circles as part of her campaign to promote a doctrine known as the Responsibility to Protect. Notably, this philosophy was also espoused by Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian lawmaker who has publicly questioned the reality of the Holocaust and who was a dedicated lictor of the late leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization — Yasser Arafat.
Responsibility to Protect (also known as Responsibility to Act) is a doctrine advanced by the United Nations and is predicated on the proposition that sovereignty is a privilege, not a right, and that if any regime in any nation violates the prevailing precepts of acceptable governance, then the international community is morally obligated to revoke that nation’s sovereignty and assume command and control of the offending country.
The three pillars of the United Nations’-backed Responsibility to Protect are:
A state has a responsibility to protect its population from mass atrocities.
The international community has a responsibility to assist the state if it is unable to protect its population on its own.
If the state fails to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures have failed, the international community has the responsibility to intervene through coercive measures such as economic sanctions.
Military intervention is considered the last resort.
Records indicate that the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, of which Samantha Power is a co-founder, participated in the advisory board of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty that was established by the Canadian government in September 2000 to address the growing problem of “mass atrocities.”
It was this “independent” commission that coined the term “responsibility to protect.”
Also of significance to the current examination of Samantha Power is the fact that the she is the founding executive director and the head of the Carr Center at the precise time it was helping to hammer out the details of the implementation of the Responsibility to Protect.
There are other more ominous threads in the tapestry depicting the relationship that exists among President Obama, Samantha Power, the Atrocities Prevention Board that she currently heads, the United Nations, and America’s official sponsorship of the Responsibility to Protect.
The worldwide leader in the promotion of this sovereignty-stealing doctrine that Samantha Power worked to develop is the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P).
As published on its website, the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect’s mission is:
to help transform the principle of the responsibility to protect into a practical guide for action in the face of mass atrocities. The GCR2P was founded by leading figures in government and academia, as well as by International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, Refugees International, and WFM-Institute for Global Policy. The GCR2P engages in advocacy around specific crises; conducts research designed to further understanding of R2P; recommends and supports strategies to consolidate the norm and help states build capacity; and works closely with NGOs, governments and regional bodies which are seeking to operationalize the responsibility to protect.
One of the biggest financial supporters of the GCR2P is the Open Society Institute which itself is a branch of the Open Society Foundation, an organization created by leftist financier and Rothschild benefactor George Soros.
A quick perusal of the GCR2P website reveals that Soros’ group is one of a very small cadre of sponsors not affiliated with any government. The other two sponsors are the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (a substantial funder of National Public Radio) and Scott and Elena Lawlor.
Apart from providing financial backing to the Responsibility to Protect, Soros personally believes in and promotes the philosophy. In an article published by Foreign Policy in 2004 entitled “The People’s Sovereignty: How a New Twist on an Old Idea Can Protect the World’s Most Vulnerable Populations,” Soros presented his take on the principles that undergird the Responsibility to Protect.
“True sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments,” Soros wrote.
And:
If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified. By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states’ borders to protect the rights of citizens.
In particular, the principle of the people’s sovereignty can help solve two modern challenges: the obstacles to delivering aid effectively to sovereign states, and the obstacles to global collective action dealing with states experiencing internal conflict.
So deep are Soros’ roots in the Responsibility to Protect family tree that Ramesh Thakur, one of the men credited with first uttering the term “responsibility to protect,” sits with Soros on several boards and is a former distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, which participates in international efforts with another institute founded by Soros.
The picture is darker still. Thakur, the co-author of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine that is so dear to Atrocities Board leader Samantha Power, was quoted in a Canadian newspaper article published in March 2011 pushing for a “global rebalancing” and “international redistribution” of power that would usher in a “new world order.”
Seems that President Obama and those of his progressive ilk are not content with the forced redistribution of wealth, but insist on wresting control of all the governments of the world and assigning sovereignty to those who will commit to following the orders and heeding the policy directives of the United Nations, the Responsibility to Protect crowd, and George Soros.
With the nomination of Samantha Power to be the U.S. ambassador to the UN, President Barack Obama has now officially given Responsibility to Protect the imprimatur of the United States of America.
Let us hope that our own national government is not being purposefully mismanaged in such a way as to invite either a revocation of our sovereignty by the United Nations under the authority of the Responsibility to Protect or a domestic demonstration of what Samantha Power describes as a “meaningful military presence” that she believes is appropriate when a nation’s sovereignty must be redistributed to those who share her worldview.
Photo of Samantha Power: AP Images
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at [email protected]
