Imagine a classroom full of children standing at attention beside their desks. With hands over their hearts, they begin the Pledge of Allegiance. However, it is not the Stars and Stripes prominently displayed in front of them. Hanging before the attentive children is a blue flag — that of the United Nations.
This scenario is not nearly as preposterous as one might think. The United Nations is steadily increasing its global authority and is even now preparing to open a new office in Washington, D.C., called a “regional hub.” It will operate under the direction of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). While the stated goals for the new hub may seem honorable enough, as is always the case with the United Nations, a closer look is in order.
Among other goals, the OHCHR plans to continue to lobby against the death penalty, and the new Washington office will focus on North America and parts of the Caribbean. In the United States, where states can choose whether or not to impose the death penalty, the country has been lumped into a group with countries where widespread abuse of human rights is common, such as Uganda and Iraq. The OHCHR will lobby at the federal level for the government to overrule states’ laws, regardless of the protections under the U.S. Constitution.
With a four-year term that began in September of 2014, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein of Jordan is taking full advantage of the warm welcome currently offered by President Obama to the UN. With an election season in the United States and the uncertainty of such an open-door policy continuing in the future, the UN is taking advantage of the opportunity to become firmly rooted in Washington, D.C. in the near future, bringing it that much closer to lobbyists, lawmakers, and finances (the United States contributes 22 percent of the UN’s 2015 budget).
Lobbying against the death penalty in the United States is not the only way the UN is attempting to influence U.S. law. It wants the U.S. government to pass its arms trade treaty, which would prohibit most gun ownership. Constitutional lawyer Joe Wolverton noted about the treaty: “Article 2 of the treaty defines the scope of the treaty’s prohibitions. The right to own, buy, sell, trade, or transfer all means of armed resistance, including handguns, is denied to civilians by this section of the Arms Trade Treaty.” And the treaty gets worse from there. Many Americans are concerned, knowing that the treaty is an attempt by a burgeoning world government to impact their rights.
For any treaty to have an effect on U.S. law, it must be ratified by a two-thirds majority of the Senate. So far the arms treaty has not received the support needed to be ratified. However, the United Nations is opening the new office in our nation’s capital for a reason: It is the best place to have a dramatic impact on U.S. law.
The UN is relying on the fact that the U.S. Constitution is ignored more and more each day and that power is becoming increasingly centralized at the same time. The 10th Amendment to the Constitution says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Increasingly, rights left to “the people” and the states are being transferred to the federal government. Though strong state power was clearly the intention of the Founders, states’ rights have been a hot-button issue from the very founding of our country. It was a major factor in the Civil War; when Ronald Reagan signed the bill to nationalize public education; with the passage of the Patriot Act; and many other times throughout the history of the United States.
Though laws such as the death penalty may be rationally debated, the fact remains that it is a states’ rights issue. Now, as the UN begins to reach an arm directly into our nation’s capital, the question is, “To what end?“ The end appears to be not only the further loss of states’ rights, but the very erosion of national rights.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called the United Nations a “Parliament of Humanity” and a “beacon for all humanity.” But many have come to realize that the goals of the secretary-general and many of the others in high office at the UN are not as innocuous as they would have the masses believe. Lord Christopher Monckton, former science advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is one such person. In 2009, on having read the proposed UN climate treaty, he declared:
I read that treaty. And what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries…. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement. Not just any government, mind you. They are about to impose a communist … government on the world.
The fact that human rights are not really what the UN is about is abundantly clear. One cannot take at face value the UN’s stated objectives of protecting “human rights” while knowing about the widespead and abhorrent human rights violations by the UN’s own “peacekeeping” forces, which the UN covers up. Such is the continuing effort by top UN officials. Recently Anders Kompass, of the UN Field Operations and Technical Cooperation Division, was escorted from his office under armed guard for passing classified information to French authorities regarding the systematic rape and abuse of women and children in Africa by UN troops. Though Kompass was attempting to bring about an immediate end to the sexual abuse, his actions were dealt with swiftly and he was forced to resign.
While the “Parliament of Humanity” and “beacon for all humanity” conveniently overlooks documented rape and torture being visited upon innocent people across the globe by their very own “peacekeepers,” the UN Human Rights Committee has managed to find the time to look down its nose at the United States. In March 2014 an Observation Report by the OHCHR, the very committee opening a new “regional hub” in Washington, D.C., sharply attacked United States on a number of fronts, including law enforcement and the Border Patrol.
The major issue remains this: Should already significantly eroded states’ rights give way even further — not to the federal government, but rather to a bloated and expanding world government?
Earlier this year, Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) introduced a bill to restore U.S. sovereignty and withdraw from the United Nations — the American Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2015 (H.R.1205). On March 2 it was assigned to a congressional committee for further review.
Concerned citizens must urge their congressmen to push for this important bill to come to floor as soon as possible for a vote. While H.R. 1205 may not have made the evening news, it should have.
