In our book Screwed!, we devote lots of space to documenting Saudi human rights abuses. Women are probably suppressed more here than in any other nation on earth… they may not legally drive cars, their use of public facilities is restricted when men are present, and they cannot travel within or outside of the country without a male relative. Daughters receive half the inheritance awarded to their brothers, and the testimony of one man is equal to that of two women in Sharia (Islamic law) courts.39 What a wonderful country to have protected with the lives of our soldiers!
Strategically located on Africa’s eastern horn, Somalia has become a center for al Qaeda terrorists second only to the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Freedom House reports that “the political process is driven largely by clan loyalty. Due to mounting civil unrest and the breakdown of the state, corruption in Somalia is rampant. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that there were 1.5 million internally displaced people… most of them living in appalling conditions.”40
This tormented nation is ruled by President Omar al-Bashir, for whom an arrest warrant was issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in March 2009, citing evidence of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur. Meanwhile, the country is torn apart by tensions and war between Islamic Sudan and Southern Sudan, a new nation carved out from Sudan to protect the black minority from Arab terror. Behind the conflict is the oil-rich region of Abyei, mostly part of the north.
Freedom House reports that “the police and security forces practice arbitrary arrest, holding people at secret locations without access to lawyers or their relatives. Torture is prevalent. It is widely accepted that the government has directed and assisted the systematic killing of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur since 2003, including through its support for militia groups that have terrorized civilians. Human rights groups have documented the widespread use of rape, the organized burning of villages, and the forced displacement of entire communities. Islamic law denies women equitable rights in marriage, inheritance, and divorce. Female genital mutilation is practiced throughout the country. The restrictions faced by women in Sudan were brought to international attention in 2009 by the case of journalist Lubna Hussein, who was arrested along with several other women for wearing trousers in public. They faced up to 40 lashes under the penal code for dressing indecently.”41
Freedom House also lists Libya and Syria as among the “worst of the worst” but conditions in both nations are too unsettled to report reliably on their futures.
This litany of human rights abuses, governmental corruption, and suppression of democracy underscores our fundamental point: The United States should not surrender its sovereignty or decision-making power to a global body where these international miscreants are given full and equal voting power.
The world we face today is neither democratic nor honest. Neither respectful of human rights nor a guardian of individual liberty. It is dominated by corrupt dictators and one-party governments that do not speak for their people and keep power only by coercion, censorship, and repression.
We dare not trust our liberties to them.
CONCLUSION
So What Do We Do About It?
The treaties on gun control and the Law of the Sea are coming up for Senate ratification by the end of the year. President Obama and Hillary hope to ram them through the lame-duck session of the Senate after the elections have been held. In theory, they say they want to consider these documents without the pressures of election-year campaigning. But, in reality, they hope that defeated Democrats and retiring Republicans will give them the votes they need for ratification.
We must stop them!
Fortunately, the decision is in our hands. Democrats control only 53 votes in the Senate and 67 are needed to ratify a treaty. While the House doesn’t get to vote on treaties, the two-thirds requirement in the Senate means that 14 of the 47 Republicans have to join with all the Democrats to get these treaties approved.
That’s where we need to work. In our chapter on the Law of the Sea Treaty, we explain who are the swing votes. The nose count on the Arms Trade Treaty has not been taken yet, but it will likely follow the same pattern. Republicans who are not already opposed to the Law of the Sea Treaty are likely the ones whom we need to persuade to oppose the Arms Trade Treaty.
Because these Republicans are very, very sensitive to the opinions of their GOP backers back home, you can make a key difference. Contact them. Call their offices. Circulate petitions in your neighborhood and send them to their Senate offices. Get your local Republican clubs and other organizations to pass resolutions opposing ratification. Turn on the pressure.
Opposing the Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities and preventing the president from signing on to the International Criminal Court will require broad public agitation. We need to publicize what these documents portend and what their implications are for the future.
We should be able to shoot down the Internet regulations. By arousing online users all over America, we can make it a dead letter even before it is signed. We need to kill it and we must!
Get to work!
In every generation, Americans have been called upon to fight to protect our liberties. Sometimes the threat came from an empire that ruled us. Then it arose from the invidious practice of slavery within our own borders. During the last century we were threatened by European and Japanese dictators who sought global domination. During the Cold War, we faced an ideological adversary who repressed human rights in the name of economic justice. In the War on Terror, we face an enemy that is determined to impose his religious and cultural values on us.
But the globalist adversary is more insidious and a greater threat to our liberty today than we face from any other source. It advances in the name of our own good, seeking to frighten us into line by dire predictions of global disaster unless we give up our sovereignty and share our wealth. Its apocalyptic predictions of environmental catastrophe come like tornado warnings on the prairie, leading us to come and huddle together in our shelters, accepting discipline and a loss of freedom during the emergency. But the emergency is fabricated and the warnings are issued just to panic us into the shelters, where we can be subjugated and tyrannized.
In his book Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, Mark Levin writes how the desire for the elusive comforts of a utopia can induce men and women to surrender their personal liberty, accepting universal regimentation to achieve what they fantasize will be a greater good.
But fear can have the same effect. And those who would impose a global governance on us count on our worry about climate change, global warming, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and shifting rainfall patterns to get us into line behind a new world order.
But we are Americans and our knees don’t bend to tyrants, however disguised.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are very grateful to Eileen’s nephew and Dick’s intern James McGann for his work in researching this book. A twenty-one-year-old with a great future! Clayton Liotta designed the cover. What great artwork! He is also the producer of our lunch alert videos and the illustrator of our Dubs books. Renaissance man!
Adam Bellow is our editor, and we love working with him and with all the people at HarperCollins. Special thanks to Kathryn Whitenight at Harper for her help.
Jim Dugan edited our manuscript and saved us from embarrassment and typo at every turn.