The fear of divided loyalties and
"foreigners" were the reasons for Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, of
the United States Constitution . . .
Presidential Eligibility: Why It Matters
Monte Kuligowski says what we are seeing with
the way journalists are treating "Birthers" and those who doubt the
Obama narratives sort of resembles the medieval inquisitions. The
faithful have their articles of faith that all must accept. To
avoid the punishment of ridicule one must denounce his heretical beliefs
and affirm the truth. The inquisition question asked of Rep.
Michelle Bachmann was succinctly framed by George Stephanopoulos: "Can
you just state very clearly that President Obama is a Christian and he
is a citizen of the United States?"
Rather than considering, much
less investigating, why some may doubt
Obama’s birth story and/or
Christian faith, the press demands political purity from Obama’s
subjects. Our brave journalists refuse to look into the question
of why the One who promised "unprecedented transparency" is guarding
his
basic records -- hospital, medical, school, college, travel, etc. --
with unprecedented secrecy. Apparently it’s easier for so-called
journalists to read from the same page and disparage the unbelievers.
When asked by David Gregory if he has a "responsibility" to "stand
up to" the "ignorance" of those who doubt the Obama narratives, John
Boehner responded: "It’s not my job to tell the American people what to
think." That response wasn’t good enough -- Gregory demanded
uniform orthodoxy.
What’s fascinating about all of this is that
even if the heretics were to suddenly fall in line, Obama would still
have the same eligibility problem. Somehow the news media have
ill-advisedly come to focus on the question of Obama’s self-claimed "native born
citizen" status even though the U.S. Constitution requires "natural born
citizen" status for presidential eligibility.
Even if Obama were
suddenly to become transparent and release records showing a Hawaii
birth hospital and a physician of record, that would not clear up the
eligibility question. The well-kept secret is that the question of
native birth is secondary to the question of whether an individual who
was born a subject of Great Britain and a citizen of Kenya --
a fact Obama admits to -- is eligible to
serve as president of the united States and Commander-inChief.
[ ... snip ... ]
The ultimate question is whether the Supreme Court would define the
natural born clause as requiring an unbroken chain of allegiance to the
United States. That question remains unanswered because remarkably
not one congressional or judicial hearing has been held on the substance
of Obama’s constitutional eligibility. The states would do well to
define the clause in their eligibility codes; which would ensure
judicial review.
The natural born clause is no triviality; it is
a substantive requirement to prevent a person with subversive ambitions,
if not a foreign ideology, from assuming the presidency.
Ironically, the situation of Barack Hussein Obama Jr. is precisely what
the founders wished to prevent. We don’t have to wonder if Obama
was influenced by his neo-Marxist, anti-colonialist Muslim father -- he
has a book out titled, "Dreams From My Father."
Did Obama Sr.
pass on a patriotic love of the United States and her federalism system
of liberty to Junior? Of course not -- dreams from an alien from a
Third World country committed to redistributive justice were
transmitted. Sound familiar?
[ ... snip ... ]
Of the
myriad statements and actions to choose from, from his treatment of our
allies to Obama’s apologies overseas for the greatest country in the
world, let’s look at just one example for now.
During his
infamous Cairo speech, Obama made the following statement to his Muslim
audience:
"I have known Islam on three continents
before coming to the region where it was first revealed. That
experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and
Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t. And I
consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United
States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they
appear."
Rather than having a president who fights for
America’s standing in the world, we have a man who believes part of the
responsibility of a U.S. president is to fight for Islam’s image.
Constitutional eligibility is not a technicality. It really does
matter.
March 7, 2010 -- Obama does it again. The Telegraph (UK) is
reporting that Barack Obama was "too tired" to give proper
welcome to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Obama's offhand
approach to Gordon Brown's Washington visit last week came about
because he was facing exhaustion over America's economic crisis
and is unable to focus on foreign affairs, the Sunday Telegraph
has been told.
Remember
the
kick in the teeth Obama gave Britain over the Falklands in
late February, 2010. He had his Secretary of State,
Hillary Clinton, fly to Buenos Aires to give American support to
Argentine President Kirchner's call for international
negotiations over the Falklands. Amazing. What was
more amazing is that all we've heard out of Number 10 and the
Foreign Office since then is that it doesn't mean anything.
Senior aides to Barack Obama
accompanied four Uighur
prisoners as they were flown from Guantanamo Bay to the British colony
of Bermuda, without the United Kingdom (UK) being informed, it was
revealed In early June, 2009, angering the UK.
In an escalating diplomatic row
over the transfer of the former terrorist suspects, US Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton discussed the transfer with British Foreign
Secretary David Miliband in what was said to be an uneasy conversation.
Privately Whitehall officials accused America of treating Britain, with
whom it is supposed to have a "special relationship," with barely
disguised contempt.
Remember, in February, in one of his
first exchanges with the UK, Obama
sent a bust of Winston
Churchill back to Britain. Then, in March, Prime Minister Gordon
Brown
faced humiliation after he was
snubbed by Obama. During Brown's visit, the Prime Minister brought
several meaningful and valued items to give to Obama. What he got
in return was 25 CD's of classic movies, that were
incompatible with the UK
format. Then, in April, Obama gifted Queen Elizabeth II with an
iPod, a gift that was
criticized by etiquette experts.
In June,
Queen Elizabeth -- the only living head of state that participated in WW
II -- was
snubbed
and not invited to the D-Day ceremonies, described as a
"Franco-American" event.
In September, it
emerged that Barack Obama had turned down no fewer than five
requests from Downing Street to hold a bilateral meeting between
Obama and Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, at the United Nations in
New York or at the G20 summit starting in Pittsburgh on
September, 24th.
Obama has not missed a single
opportunity to insult the Brits, one of our greatest allies.
Bad Blood
The US State Department, Office of the Chief of Protocol, under the
direction of Acting Chief of Protocol Laura B. Wills, is
responsible
for avoiding these gaffes. Career bureaucrats, working out of the
White House are in place to ensure insults such as these, don't occur.
So, they must be purposeful -- but why?
Obama's
divided loyalties are at the bottom of his treatment of the UK and he
harbors a deep and abiding hostility towards the Brits because of the
treatment he believes his grandfather and father received during British
colonial rule.
During Obama's first visit to Kenya in 1988, his
grandmother Sarah told him about the resentment against white colonial
rule in Kenya, with rallies and mounting violence that would explode
into full-scale rebellion in 1952. "Most of this activity centered
on Kikuyuland," she told him. "But the Luo, too, were oppressed.
Men in our area began to join the Kikuyu"
"Granny Sarah"
told Obama that Hussein Onyango
Obama, Obama's paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan
independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer
after World War II. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two
years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was
subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing
insurgency. Sarah, said that her husband had supplied information
to the insurgents. "His job as cook to a British army officer made
him a useful informer for the secret oathing movement which would later
form the Mau Mau rebellion," she said. "At the time the insurgents
were secretly taking oaths which included promises to kill white
settlers and colonialists," Mrs. Onyango said.
"To arrest a Luo, WW II veteran,
who was a senior figure in the community, is pretty serious. They
must have had some damn good evidence," said Professor David Anderson,
director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, and
an authority on the Mau Mau rebellion.
Obama refers briefly to his
grandfather's imprisonment in his best-selling memoir, "Dreams...," but
states that his grandfather was held only for "more than six months."
Obama described his grandfather's physical state: "When he returned to
Alego he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and
his head was full of lice." For some time, he was too traumatized
to speak about his experiences.
Barack Obama Sr., Onyango's son
and Obama's father, seems to have inherited his father's attitudes
towards the colonial power. He was also arrested, for attending a
meeting in Nairobi of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the
organization spearheading the independence movement. Sarah told
Obama that his father, unlike her husband, had been held only for a
short time in the white man's prison: "Because he was not a leader in
KANU, Barack [Sr.] was released after a few days."
Onyango may
have been a victim of the fight for Kenyan independence, but his son
became a direct beneficiary of that movement. In 1959, Barack
Obama Sr. was sent, on a scholarship, to the University of Hawaii.
Obama Sr. was selected by a former
Kenyan cabinet minister, the late
Tom Mboya, who was earmarked
as the successor to
Jomo Kenyatta,
Kenya's first prime minister and leader of the terrorist
Mau Mau.
It is clear that the Obama's were close to the
leadership of the independence movement. It is also clear that
Obama's "divided loyalty" -- his anger at the white British colonists'
treatment of his grandfather and father -- is behind all of these
insults to America's greatest ally.
"Divided loyalties" was an issue during the
Constitutional Convention because of the Founders fear of foreign
influence and the possibility of incidents, such as the ones mentioned
above.
In fact, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts
wanted
to take the issue so far as to stop foreigners from becoming citizens at
all, claiming that the naturalized citizens would always have divided
loyalties both to their home land and to America. John Jay,
Superintendent of Foreign Affairs (the predecessor of today's office of
Secretary of State), claimed that it would be "wise and seasonable to
provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the
administration of our national Government; and to declare expressly that
the Command in chief of the American army shall not be given to, nor
devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen."
Pierce
Butler, an Irish-born delegate from South Carolina, developed an intense
plan that would defeat all objections arising against earlier proposals
for electing the president. However, given the doubts concerning
divided loyalties that Elbridge Gerry, John Jay, and others expressed,
Butler's proposal also included what became Article II, Section I of the
Constitution.
It is evident that the Founders had a clear reason
to fear conspiracy and divided loyalties, and it is evident that Obama,
a Kenyan and British subject, at birth, has allowed his divided loyalties influence his
judgment and behavior in regards to the UK.
This is personal and
purposeful.
And don't even get me
started on Obama's divided loyalties and Islam.
Obama’s Eligibility Problem
Judah Benjamin, an historian and former journalist, has written a
two-part series challenging the Constitutionality of Barack Obama’s
eligibility to be President. It is exhaustively researched, and
lengthy compared to most blog entries. However, I have left his
story in tact with only minor edits because of its importance.
Although Judah Benjamin addresses the possibility that Obama was born in
foreign territory, the article’s central thesis rests on the assumption
that Obama was born in the United States.
Here is my 2-sentence bottom-line summation:
Barack Obama has been a citizen of multiple nations. And even if
his citizenship outside the US was renounced, Article II of the U.S.
Constitution prohibits him from being President, for the same reason
that naturalized citizens are prohibited: divided loyalties.
The article must be read in its entirety to be fully understood and
appreciated. It will be presented in two parts. PART ONE is
the author’s legal reasoning. PART TWO is the factual basis for
the author’s conclusion that Obama has held dual citizenship and is
therefore ineligible to be POTUS.
[Please see the Author's End Note about his qualifications and request
for professional review.]
Patrick Mayoyo says Britain feared that the
election of Barrack Obama as US president could hurt London’s relations
with America because of the way Obama’s grandfather was treated by the
British, according to leaked secret diplomatic documents.
Britain feared that its so-called "special relationship" with the US
would come under strain because of Obama’s history, his relative youth,
which gave him no historical experience with World War II or the US cold
war alliance with London.
Britain was also worried about its
colonial forces' treatment of Obama’s grandfather, Hussein, who was
actually jailed before Kenya gained independence.
Britain’s
worries were contained in a cable dated February 9, 2009, which was
among more than a quarter of a million secret diplomatic documents
leaked by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks.
"The atmospherics
surrounding the relationship with the United States are always under
intense scrutiny in Britain, but UK media, pundits, and parliamentarians
have openly worried over the last several months that the Obama
administration might downplay relations with the (Gordon) Brown
Government because of a 'perfect storm' of factors," the cable said.
Among them was the Brown Government’s support for Bush
administration’s foreign policies and growing US frustration with UK
military failings in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The cable notes that
although this period of excessive UK speculation about the relationship
is more paranoid than usual, "we agree with a senior MP who told us that
ultimately, the people who really matter in all this, those who do the
serious business, know that where it matters -- over defense, security
issues, intelligence-sharing -- the relationship is deep, ongoing and
abiding.
"For many UK pundits, a break in the special
relationship will come because of Obama’s personal history.
Several commentators have explored Obama’s life story to see what it
might mean for his approach to the UK.
"His relative youth
(which gives him no historical experience of the WW II and Cold War
alliance with London), his formative years in the Pacific rather than in
Europe, and his Kenyan grandfather’s treatment at the hands of British
colonial forces in Kenya (where he was imprisoned) have led many UK
commentators to conclude Obama has no "natural" link to the UK, perhaps
even an antipathy to the UK, and this will weaken US-UK ties," the cable
indicates.
"The Times correspondent in Washington, summed up
this view: "Mr. Obama ... has no personal experience of our shared World
War II experiences and little of our Cold War alliance.
In his
memoir, ‘Dreams from My Father,’ he described his trips to drink 'tea on
the Thames' before flying away from a Europe that 'just wasn’t mine' to
discuss his Kenya roots with British passengers who displayed arrogant
attitudes to the 'Godforsaken countries of Africa'."
Daniel Hannan
says let’s review the evidence. Obama received from Gordon
Brown a pen-holder made from the timbers of a Royal Navy anti-slavery
vessel, and reciprocated with DVDs. He silkily downgraded the UK
from "our closest ally" to "one of our allies". He gave the Queen
an iPod full of his own speeches. He used the Louisiana oil spill
to attack an imaginary company called "British Petroleum" (it has been
BP for the past decade, ever since the merger with Amoco gave it as many
American as British shareholders). He sent a bust of Winston
Churchill back to the British Embassy. He managed, on his visit to
West Africa, to refer to the struggle for independence, but not to the
Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery. He has refused to
acknowledge our presence in Afghanistan in any major speech. He
has even come dangerously close to backing Peronist Argentina’s claim to
the Falkland Islands. There’s no getting away from it: Barack
Obama doesn’t much like Limeys.
What has he got against us?
The conventional answer is that he is bitter about the way his
grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was interned during the Mau Mau
rebellion in Kenya. But this explanation doesn’t fit with what
Obama himself has written. Barack never knew his grandfather, but
what he later found out repelled him. Despite his detention,
Onyango remained something of an imperialist, believing that the British
had earned their place in Kenya through superior organization. He
even used to argue that Africans were too lazy to make a success of
independence. The young Obama was horrified: "I had imagined him
to be a man of his people, opposed to white rule," he wrote in Dreams
from my Father. "What Granny [Sarah Obama, one of Onyango's wives]
had told me scrambled that image completely, causing ugly words to flash
across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House
nigger."
No, Obama’s antipathy comes not from the grandfather he
disdained, but from the father he worshipped -- albeit from a distance.
Barack Obama Senior abandoned Obama’s mother, and had almost nothing to
do with the young Barry (as he was known throughout his childhood and
adolescence). He did, however, make one journey to Hawaii that had
an enormous impact on the ten-year-old. Barry, as boys sometimes do, had
been telling tall tales about his absent father. He had implied to
his classmates that Barack Senior was a great chief, and that he would
himself one day inherit the tribal leadership. He was mortified
when his class teacher asked his father to talk to the class, fearing
that his fibs would be exposed. His anxieties vanished as the
handsome Kenyan strode into the room in African dress, and proceeded to
give a talk which was the defining moment of Barry’s childhood:
He was leaning against Miss Hefty’s thick
oak desk and describing the deep gash in the earth where mankind had
first appeared. He spoke of the wild animals that still roamed
the plains, the tribes that still required a young boy to kill a
lion to prove his manhood. He spoke of the customs of the Luo,
how elders received the utmost respect and made laws for all to
follow under great-trunked trees. And he told us of Kenya’s
struggle to be free, how the British had wanted to stay and unjustly
rule the people, just as they had in America; how many had been
enslaved only because of the color of their skin, just as they had
in America, but that Kenyans, like all of us in the room, longed to
be free and develop themselves through hard work and sacrifice.
In The Roots of Obama's Rage, the American author
Dinesh D’Souza advances the theory that Obama’s world-view is based on
his father’s anti-colonialism. The mistake that every other
analyst has made, argues D’Souza, is to try to fit Obama into America’s
racial narrative. But the battle for civil rights is only
tangentially a part of his story. Indeed, he has infuriated many
black political organizations by refusing to take up the issues that
they care about, such as the minimum wage and affirmative action.
His struggle was not that against desegregation in Mississippi but that
of Southern colonies against Northern colonists, of expropriated peoples
against those who had plundered them.
Only this explanation fits
all the facts, argues D’Souza. For example, Obama’s climate change
policies make little sense either as an attempt to slow global warming
or as a way to make the US more popular. But they make perfect
sense as a mechanism for the redistribution of wealth from rich nations
to poor. (D’Souza notes, as an instance, the way in which the
Obama administration has banned offshore drilling in the US while
sponsoring it in Brazil). The same is true of his enthusiasm for
nuclear disarmament. It seems bizarre to be pursuing the
elimination of atomic weapons in a forum that doesn’t include Iran or
North Korea. But, argues D’Souza, this isn’t really about Iran or
North Korea. It’s about making America a less warlike, less
intimidating, less -- in a word -- imperial nation.
Some will
dismiss D’Souza as an angry conservative. In fact, until now, he
has said nothing critical about Obama. He is obviously
uncomfortable with shrill attacks on Obama that alienated so many people
(including me) at the 2008 election ("he’s a Muslim, he’s a Marxist, he
pals around with terrorists, where’s his birth certificate blah blah").
An Indian immigrant himself, D’Souza has no time for those who imply,
however elliptically, that Obama is somehow un-American. Nor does
he believe that he is a socialist. Indeed, as he shows in his
book, socialism -- in the traditional sense of state control of the
economy -- is a very inexact description of Obama’s strategy.
Obamanomics is far better understood as an attempt to redistribute
wealth -- which, to the anti-colonialist mind, is simply an act of
restitution.
Stated baldly, D’Souza’s thesis sounds improbable.
But he backs his assertions with a mass of evidence from the best
possible source: Obama’s own words. Think about the title of his
book. It’s not Dreams of my Father, but Dreams from my Father.
What were those dreams? They were the dreams of a 1950s Kenyan
trade union activist. The rich got rich by taking from the poor,
the imbalance of wealth in the world is the chief ill of our times, the
system is rigged in favor of industrialized countries, etc. These
ideas, associated as they were with the father whom he idealized, became
the template of the young Barry’s thinking. They explain why, in
early adulthood, he Africanized his name. They explain, as no
other theory does, his relationship with Jeremiah Wright. American
conservatives have focused on Wright’s loopier Afrocentric theories; but
Obama plainly doesn’t share these views. What observers tend to
miss is the centrality of anti-colonialism to Wright’s sermons. We
have watched, over and over again, the passage about America’s chickens
coming home to roost. What is in many ways more representative is
the passage that came immediately before:
We took this country by terror away from the
Sioux, the Apache, the Iroquois, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the
Navajo. Terrorism. We took Africans from their country
to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear.
Terrorism. We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians,
babies, non-military personnel; we bombed the black civilian
community of Panama, with stealth bombers, and killed unarmed
teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers.
We’ve bombed Gaddafi’s home and killed his child. "Blessed are
they who bash your children’s heads against the rocks." We
bombed Iraq; we killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living.
We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back an attack on our embassy.
Killed hundreds of hard-working people, mothers and fathers who left
home to go that day, not knowing that they would never get back
home. We’ve bombed Hiroshima, we’ve bombed Nagasaki, we’ve
nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and
we never batted an eye. Kids playing in the playground,
mothers picking up children after school, civilians not soldiers,
people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported
state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans,
and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done
overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards.
Now anti-colonialism is not the same thing as
anti-Americanism. On the contrary, a measure of anti-colonialism
was encoded in the DNA of the new republic, as Obama reminded his
Inauguration Day audience ("In the year of America’s birth, in the
coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires
on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned.
The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood…")
Although the US has had some minor colonial adventures -- Guam, the
Philippines, Puerto Rico -- most Americans think of themselves, quite
sincerely, as opponents of empire. Obama does not, as his more
hysterical critics allege, "hate America." As he sees it, making
America more peaceable, more internationalist and more engaged with
global institutions is in the national interest. He may be wrong,
but I don’t doubt that, after his fashion, he loves his country.
Ours is a different matter. Britain created the greatest and most
extensive empire the world has known. For Obama, Winston Churchill
is not simply the man who defeated Nazism; he is also the man who
defeated the Mau Mau insurrection. No wonder he didn’t want to
have the bust in his office. For Obama, the Falkland Islands are
not a democratic society threatened by an autocratic aggressor, but a
colonial relic.
Of course, I might be wrong about all this.
Perhaps D’Souza’s interpretation is fanciful. Perhaps Obama
appreciates that we are the only country that can generally be relied on
to deploy troops in serious numbers alongside our American allies.
If this is the case, it would be nice to hear him say so.
This is the reason the Founders
required the Commander-in-Chief to be a "natural born" American citizen.
No foreign entanglements or loyalties.
Obama Snubs Britain (Again)
Obama told French leader Sarkozy that no
country had closer ties with America than France.
Don Mackay
says this shatters the idea that Britain still has a special
relationship with the US.
Obama said: "We don't have a stronger
friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy and the French people."
(video)
The remarks will infuriate the thousands of British troops who have
risked their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The UK has lost 349 troops
in the war against the Taliban -- seven times as many as France.
There are more than 10,000 British soldiers serving in Helmand province,
compared with just 3,850 from France.
Obama's remarks will be
seen as an embarrassing rebuff to the UK's David Cameron because no US
president in modern times has described France as America's closest
ally.
And it comes after Sarkozy made a series of cutting remarks
about Obama after he was elected in 2008. The French President was
recorded saying: "Obama has never run a ministry.
"There are a certain number of things on
which he has no position." ... "And he is not always up to standard
on decision-making and efficiency."
And at a D-Day memorial service, Sarkozy joked:
"I'm going to ask him to walk on the Channel and he'll do it, you'll
see."
Obama's remarks, made during Sarkozy's visit to the White
House, will add fuel to the fire in British diplomatic circles that the
American leader does not value the special relationship with the UK that
was first mentioned by Winston Churchill in 1946.
Tory MP Patrick
Mercer, a former commander of the Sherwood Foresters regiment, says he
is fed up with Obama's attitude to Britain.
It also follows
Gordon Brown's trip to the UN in New York in 2009 when he had several
requests for a meeting with Obama turned down.
Some commentators
say his attitude stems from the time when his grandad was jailed in
Kenya in 1949. Hussein Onyango
Obama was imprisoned for two years and allegedly tortured for
information on the movement trying to gain independence from Britain.
Obama Sells Out The British
The Telegraph (UK)
is reporting that information about every Trident missile the US
supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control
deal signed by Barack Obama.
Defense analysts claim the agreement
risks undermining Britain’s policy of refusing to confirm the exact size
of its nuclear arsenal.
The fact that Obama used British nuclear
secrets as a bargaining chip also sheds new light on the so-called
"special relationship," which is shown often to be a one-sided affair by
US diplomatic communications obtained by the WikiLeaks website.
Details of the behind-the-scenes talks are contained in more than 1,400
US embassy cables published to date by the Telegraph, including almost
800 sent from the London Embassy, which are published online today.
A series of classified messages sent to Washington by US negotiators
show how information on Britain’s nuclear capability was crucial to
securing Russia’s support for the "New START" deal.
Obama Sides With Argentina, Hugo Chavez On
Falklands
Ed Morrissey says the Obama administration
sided with Argentina in demanding that the UK open negotiations over the
status of the Falkland Islands, joining such stalwart American allies as
Nicaragua and Venezuela. The OAS declaration even uses the
Argentinian name for the islands, a particular insult, as Nile Gardiner
notes:
Obama was effusive in his praise for the Special
Relationship when he visited London recently, but his administration
continues to slap Britain in the face over the highly sensitive
Falklands issue. Washington signed on to a "draft declaration
on the question of the Malvinas Islands "passed by unanimous consent
by the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS)
at its meeting in San Salvador yesterday, an issue which had been
heavily pushed by Argentina. In doing so, the United States
sided not only with Buenos Aires, but also with a number of
anti-American regimes including Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and Daniel
Ortega’s Nicaragua. …
Washington backed a similar resolution
in June last year, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it
clear in a joint press conference with Cristina Kirchner in Buenos
Aires in March 2010 that the Obama administration fully backs
Argentina’s calls for negotiations over the Falkands, handing her
Argentine counterpart a significant propaganda coup. The State
Department has also insultingly referred to the Islands in the past
as the Malvinas, the Argentine name for them.
As far as the British are concerned, there is no
"sovereignty dispute." According to the Falklanders themselves
(from last year), there isn’t a dispute, either. The 3,000-strong
community is already proudly British -- the phone boxes are the old red
ones, the groceries are from Waitrose and many still refer to the UK as
"home".
So the people who live there want to remain part of the
UK. On what basis does the US intend to demand talks over
sovereignty? It can’t be self-determination, because if that were
the case, there would be no question that the Falklands are British, and
should stay British. Nor can it be a question of colonialism, as
the Falklands have their own home-rule government within the UK’s
sovereignty, and the people of the islands consider themselves fully
British. Moreover, the OAS declaration comes in response to a
threat of military action from Argentina, which has publicly talked
about a blockade of British shipping in the region over sovereignty
claims by Buenos Aires.
Gardiner says it is hugely disappointing that
the Obama administration has chosen once again to side not only with
the increasingly authoritarian regime in Argentina, but also with an
array of despots in Latin America against British interests.
Mrs Clinton should be reminded that 255 brave British servicemen
laid down their lives in 1982 for the freedom of the Falkland
Islanders, who are overwhelmingly British, following the brutal
Argentine invasion.
The sovereignty of the Islands is not a
matter for negotiation, and Britain will never give in to threats
from Argentina or its tyrannical allies in places such as Venezuela.
The White House recently declared that Britain remains America’s
most important ally. Now it should live up to its words by
supporting Washington’s closest friend and partner on matters of
vital British interest, including the future of British subjects
living in the South Atlantic, whose only wish is to remain free
under the protection of the Union Jack.
There seems to be no reason for the Obama
administration to back a demand for negotiations over the Falklands,
unless it’s just to curry favor with anti-American regimes by tossing
our allies under the bus as appeasement. It’s an absurd stance and
an insult to the British, as well as to the actual people on the islands
themselves.
, the American author
Dinesh D’Souza advances the theory that Obama’s world-view is based on
his father’s anti-colonialism. The mistake that every other
analyst has made, argues D’Souza, is to try to fit Obama into America’s
racial narrative. But the battle for civil rights is only
tangentially a part of his story. Indeed, he has infuriated many
black political organizations by refusing to take up the issues that
they care about, such as the minimum wage and affirmative action.
His struggle was not that against desegregation in Mississippi but that
of Southern colonies against Northern colonists, of expropriated peoples
against those who had plundered them.
