Under the guise of battling “violent extremists” generally and the Islamic State in particular — a terror group that top U.S. officials said was largely armed, trained, and funded by Obama’s “anti-ISIS” coalition — the United Nations and the Obama administration unveiled a plan this week to wage a global war on “ideologies.” That war will include planetary efforts to stamp out all “anti-Muslim bigotry,” anti-immigrant sentiments, and much more, the UN and Obama explained. It was not immediately clear how a war on anti-Muslim bigotry would stop ISIS. However, based on the outlines of the extremism scheme released so far, there will be no serious efforts to address the growing extremism of the UN and its largely autocratic member regimes. Instead, the extremism plan will serve as a pretext to impose a broad range of extremist policies at the national and international level.
Changing people’s views around the world and attacking their ideologies will be crucial to the agenda, the UN and Obama declared in various statements and press releases. Among the planetary programs to be implemented to supposedly battle ISIS and extremists generally are engaging “all of society” with tax-funded propaganda in favor of “international law” and the UN’s dangerous, anti-American vision of “human rights.” And while ISIS and violent extremism may be the justification for the internationalist scheming now, there should be little doubt that the agenda will eventually expand, as the Obama administration and other governments have made abundantly clear amid various extremism initiatives peddled in recent years. Even mainstream Christians have been declared “religious extremists” by the Obama administration.
Some world rulers have already called for a global war on “non-violent extremism,” too. And previous calls by governments for a UN-led war on non-violent extremism — theories on terror attacks that differ from the government narrative, religious prophecies about the end times, and more — appear to have strongly influenced the latest “violent extremism” plan. “We must be clear: to defeat the ideology of extremism we need to deal with all forms of extremism — not just violent extremism,” said U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron at the UN last year, acknowledging that the machinations would not be entirely “compatible” with free speech and intellectual inquiry. “We shouldn’t stand by and just allow any form of non-violent extremism.” Governments and the UN must take action, he said.
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The latest iteration of the far-reaching global plan for a UN-led battle against “extremism” was laid out this week at the so-called “Leaders’ Summit on Countering Violent Extremism.” Hosted by Obama on the sidelines of this year’s UN General Assembly meeting in New York, the summit was attended by representatives of more than 100 governments and dictators, over 20 “multilateral” outfits, and various tax-funded “civil society groups” and private sector “partners,” according to a UN press release. A widely ridiculed “youth summit” on extremism was also held. Both meetings followed a previous summit hosted by Obama earlier this year on countering “extremism” at which the White House touted all sorts of anti-Constitution and Big Government extremism — much of it to be imposed at the international level, all of it under the guise of fighting nebulous notions of non-Islamic extremism. It also came after a UN Security Council session hosted by Obama to undermine long-standing protections and further empower the UN on “extremism.”
Speaking at the summit this week, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made clear that the global outfit he leads, often ridiculed as the “dictators club” by critics, would spearhead and coordinate the worldwide war on ideologies that the UN and governments consider extreme. “Addressing this challenge goes to the heart of the mission of the United Nations, and it requires a unified response,” argued the UN chief, an advocate for what he called a “New World Order” at a meeting of Third World regimes last year demanding global wealth redistribution and other schemes. “Our objective must be to go beyond countering violent extremism to preventing it in the first place.” The UN boss also reportedly plans to present a “comprehensive Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism” early next year to the tyrant-dominated UN General Assembly.
Ban, whose extreme statements on various issues have sparked alarm around the world, outlined five “key priorities” in the emerging UN plan to wage war on ideologies. Those priorities, he said, include “the need to engage all of society; the need to make a special effort to reach young people; to build truly accountable institutions; respect for international law and human rights; and the importance of not being ruled by fear — or provoked by those who strive to exploit it.” The irony of exploiting fear to promote various UN agendas — a global-warming regime, a global war on extremism, planetary governance and central planning for “sustainable development,” and more — apparently escaped the secretary-general.
His comments were still revealing about the nature of the extremism war to be waged with pro-“human rights” and pro-“international law” propaganda. The UN’s vision of “human rights,” of course, is diametrically opposed to American constitutional tradition of unalienable, God-given rights. While America’s Founders viewed as self-evident that government exists for the purpose of protecting the rights endowed upon each individual by their Creator, the UN claims its version of “rights” come from governments and international treaties, and can be regulated or abolished under virtually any pretext. Article 29 of the UN Declaration of (pseudo)-Human Rights even makes the vision explicit, saying the government-granted privileges outlined therein may “in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”
But Ban indicated that the UN and its extremist view of “human rights” — for more perspective on the UN’s extremism, just consider the myriad mass-murdering dictators proudly sitting on the UN “Human Rights Council” — will be at the center of the global war on ideologies. “We have a major challenge before us — one that will not disappear overnight — but one that we can address concretely by forging societies of inclusion, ensuring lives of dignity, and pursuing this essential endeavor inspired at all times by the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the UN boss explained. Already, the UN’s vision of “human rights” has been repeatedly used by UN officials to attack the fundamental, constitutionally protected rights of Americans.
Obama, though, who chaired the UN summit this week, echoed Ban’s rhetoric about the looming global jihad against ideologies, saying it was not enough to defeat ISIS on the battlefield and that a planetary propaganda campaign was essential. “We have to prevent it from radicalizing, recruiting and inspiring others to violence in the first place,” Obama declared as various “moderate” rebels his administration armed and trained then joined al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups. “And this means defeating their ideology. Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they’re defeated by better ideas — a more attractive and compelling vision.”
In the interest of defeating extreme ideologies with “better ideas,” Obama touted some of his administration’s policies at the summit. Among others, he pointed to “efforts to discredit ISIL’s propaganda, especially online,” an apparent reference to his recently unveiled “Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications” led by Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamist Rashad Hussain. Obama, styling himself an expert on Islam, also boasted that the White House was “working to lift up the voices of Muslim scholars, clerics and others” who allegedly “stand up to ISIL and its warped interpretations of Islam.” Using tax funds and government to promote certain theological views on Islam while “discrediting” others would appear to be a brazen violation of the First Amendment. But the war on extremism, as the U.K.’s Cameron openly explained, will require some fundamental shifts away from Western traditions of freedom and limited government.
Also needed to defeat extremism is much bigger government, as Obama and his top officials have explained repeatedly. At the UN summit this week, Obama claimed that the United States had “recognized the need” to “confront the economic and political grievances” — not enough jobs, not enough welfare, and more — that are supposedly exploited by extremists. “The real path to lasting stability and progress is not less democracy; I believe it is more democracy in terms of free speech, and freedom of religion, rule of law, strong civil societies,” Obama said before demanding an end to anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment. “All that has to play a part in countering violent extremism.”
Obama also made clear that the global campaign against extremism would need to involve everyone. “This cannot just be the work of government,” he said. “It is up to all of us. We have to commit ourselves to build diverse, tolerant, inclusive societies that reject anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry that creates the divisions, the fear and the resentments upon which extremists can prey.” It was not clear whether Obama believed ISIS would become less extreme if anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry were quashed. As Vice President Joe Biden explained publicly, though, ISIS is essentially the creation of Obama’s “anti-ISIS” coalition, with its extreme views largely shared by a number of the White House’s “anti-ISIS” allies among Sunni-Arab regimes.
In a “fact sheet” published by the White House about its efforts, the administration outlined a dizzying array of taxpayer-funded programs allegedly aimed at extremism. Unsurprisingly, much of it involved more government extremism. “In order to enhance training for federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement, DHS and DOJ work cooperatively with its federal partners to update [Countering Violent Extremism] CVE-relevant training programs based on current threat assessments through programs such as the Uniformed Police Training Program, Criminal Investigator Training Program, Land Management Police Training Program, and the Rural Police Officer Training,” the White House said, suggesting that further nationalizing of law-enforcement would be needed.
Not everyone was pleased, however. In a scathing attack on the CVE machinations, CATO Institute policy analyst Patrick Eddington, a former advisor for Democrat ex-Congressman Rush Holt (Cumulative Freedom Index Score: 27 percent), mostly blamed U.S. foreign policy for the rise of extremism. “Mindless American interventionism has been one of the greatest recruiting tools for Salafist groups like ISIS,” he said, adding that all of the terror war-inspired mass-surveillance gimmicks have largely failed to detect terror attacks, and that state-level “fusion centers” have instead been “targeting civil liberties groups that question their utility and the constitutionality of their operational methods.”
Eddington, however, apparently relying on discredited propaganda from the ultra-leftist Southern Poverty Law Center equating statist extremists such as National Socialists (neo-Nazis) with peaceful liberty-oriented groups, also suggested the extremism scheming should focus more on “right-wing American political extremists.” However, as the Obama administration has made abundantly clear, “right-wing” forces have been in the crosshairs all along, with multiple official reports purporting to link terrorism and extremism to the views of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of mainstream Americans: returning veterans, liberty lovers, pro-life activists, states’ rights proponents, constitutionalists, libertarians, Ron Paul supporters, and more. Meanwhile, “ISIS” supposedly produced a highly suspicious video advocating Austrian economics, sound money, and more, potentially putting opponents of the debt-backed fiat-currency regime in the “extremism” crosshairs as well. Even Catholics, evangelical Christians, and orthodox Jews were listed as “religious extremists” alongside al-Qaeda and Hamas in a U.S. Defense Department training scheme for U.S. troops.
What the extremism plan means for the dueling “anti-ISIS” coalitions in Syria — the one led by Obama, which has been funding and arming ISIS, and the new one announced recently by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin — was not immediately clear. What is becoming perfectly clear, though, is that the globalist war on extremism is more about justifying extreme government and UN policies than dealing with actual extremism. If the UN and Obama were interested in truly addressing extremism, they might start among the UN’s member regimes — communist and Islamist dictators, genocidal maniacs, and more. UN extremism would be a good place to start, too, as would Obama’s support for jihadists in Syria. Unfortunately for humanity, though, that sort of extremism, which actually poses a genuine threat to people everywhere, will continue marching onward unless and until the American people demand an end to it.
Photo of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and President Barack Obama at the Extremism Summit: AP Images
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected].
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