Obama seeks to restrict free speech and 'hate speech,' yet he is blind to the racism of his allies

The Obama Administration is now promoting curbs on free speech at the UN, backing a UN Human Rights Council proposal to restrict speech that is offensive to other religions or is deemed "hate speech."  Left-wing lawyers are likely to argue that such "human-rights" norms are "customary international law" that binds all nations, regardless of what the American people want, and that they create a "compelling interest" in banning such speech that trumps the First Amendment.

(The UN is quite hostile to human rights, as is its "Human Rights Council," which has included genocidal dictatorships among its members.  The UN recently declared Fidel Castro, the longtime Communist dictator of Cuba, a “World Hero.” Castro killed thousands and thousands of people during his rule, torturing some to death (including a few American citizens), and Cuba remains an oppressive dictatorship even today.)

While advocating bans on hate speech, the Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to hate speech and hate crimes by its allies and supporters.  It turned a blind eye to voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party, which is a racist, anti-semitic hate group that backed Obama and included an Obama poll-watcher and Democratic Party official in Philadelphia.  It was silent about the violent, racially-charged SEIU assault on a black conservative critic of Obama's healthcare proposals.  The Administration and its allies use the SEIU as shock troops at town hall meetings.  (The SEIU is closely linked with, and even overlaps with, the controversial group ACORN, which gave Obama his start, and whose affiliate received $800,000 from his campaign.  ACORN was recently involved in a high-profile scandal promoting underage prostitution).

The Obama Administration has sought to force Honduras's elected Congress and Supreme Court to reinstate the country's mentally unstable, antisemitic, left-wing ex-president, Mel Zelaya, who was removed from office by soldiers acting on a warrant from Honduras's Supreme Court, after he sought to make himself a dictator.

Zelaya recently claimed that he was being "subjected to high-frequency radiation" by "Israeli mercenaries."  One of Zelaya's most vocal supporters recently said, "Sometimes I ask myself if Hitler wasn't right when he wanted to finish with that race, through the famous holocaust, because if there are people that are harmful to this country, they are the Jews, the Israelites."

While turning a blind eye to hate and prejudice from the Left, the Administration has backed a bill in Congress, now virtually certain to become law, that will allow some people found innocent of hate crimes in state court to be prosecuted all over again in federal court, taking advantage of a loophole in Constitutional protections against double jeopardy.  (The bill is opposed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which has also questioned the Obama Administration's turning a blind eye to racist voter intimidation and the unconstitutional racial preferences in Obama's health-care plan).

Obama appointees like State Department chief lawyer Harold Koh are big supporters of binding the U.S. to vague international understandings known as "customary international law," which increasingly threaten both America's security and civil liberties.

For example, piracy flourished in the crucial shipping lanes off the coast of Somalia partly due to a treaty that the U.S. has not ratified yet — but which is often described as “customary international law” binding on all nations. Partly as a result of the LOST Treaty, billions of dollars worth of cargo, and human lives, have been lost due to piracy. Harold Koh argues that “customary international law” like LOST is binding on the U.S., even when it is reflected in treaties that the U.S. has refused to sign.  (European human-rights conventions and an indecisive White House also have delayed action against the pirates).  That’s just one reason U.S. policymakers should think twice before following vague “international norms.”

Left-wing lawyers claim that "customary international law" dictates a host of controversial requirements that few countries would voluntarily adopt on their own, like mandating quota-based affirmative action. For example, the CEDAW equal-rights treaty has been construed by an international committee as requiring “redistribution of wealth,” “affirmative action,” “gender studies” in academia, government-sponsored “access to rapid and easy abortion,” “comparable worth,” and “the application of quotas and numerical goals and measurable targets aimed at increasing women’s political participation.”