RUTHFULLY YOURS

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Joseph A. Klein, an attorney with a Harvard Law School degree who writes for Frontpagemag.com and Canada Free Press as their United Nations correspondent. He is also a featured blogger for NewsReal Blog, where he has written extensively on the Ground Zero Mosque controversy. A guest on many radio and TV shows, including “Fox & Friends,” he is the author of the new book, Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam. ^[1]

FP: Joseph A. Klein, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Let’s begin with what inspired you to write this book.

Klein: Thank you for having me.

Have you ever remembered a United States President from either party who has traveled abroad and apologized repeatedly for America’s alleged wrong-doing? That’s what President Obama has done, including when he went to Cairo as part of his never-ending aggressive outreach to the Muslim world.  He apologized to them for America’s the West’s alleged misdeeds and promised to make amends. Add to that President Obama’s policy of unconditional engagement with the thugs of Iran without preconditions.

For the first time that I can remember under either party’s administration, I am truly nervous for our country’s future. What kind of America will our children be inheriting from us?

That’s why I felt compelled to write Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam. It is intended as a wake-up call for the American people to do everything that we can lawfully do to stop this madness.

FP: How has your experience in researching and writing about the United Nations, along with your legal background, helped you in writing this book?

Klein: I have studied the United Nations for many years and have watched it degenerate into an anti-Western echo chamber that does more harm than good. I wrote about the UN’s dangers to American sovereignty and freedoms in my previous book, Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom.” In my new book Lethal Engagement, I focus on the perfect storm revolving around the increasing Islamicization of key UN bodies – particularly the ones that produce influential international norms- and President Obama’s key priorities to improve America’s standing with the Muslim world at all costs, to elevate the United Nations (where radical Muslims exert so much influence) to a central place in his foreign policy and  to force-fit

U.S. foreign policy into the straightjacket of UN-inspired international norms. As a United Nations correspondent for FrontPage Magazine and Canada Free Press, I have been able to gain access to and ask questions of high level UN officials including Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, our UN Ambassador Susan Rice, the Israeli UN ambassador and Islamic delegates. Their answers are included in Lethal Engagement along with the results of more than a year of extensive research. My legal background, including my intensive study of constitutional law at Harvard Law School under the late Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, has helped me analyze the implications of a very disturbing trend I see in recent Supreme Court decisions that I expect will get even worse as a result of President Obama’s two nominees now sitting on the Court. The trend I am talking about are Supreme Court decisions tending to internationalize the U.S. Constitution.

FP: Your thoughts on Sharia and how it poses a threat to us?

Klein: Sharia (Islamic law) is a political-legal system that is wedded to the religion of Islam. Separation of Mosque and State is foreign to Islamic ideology.

Here are some examples of mainstream Islamic laws which, along with others, are discussed in more detail in my book Lethal Engagement. Sharia is at complee odds with the individual liberties and dignity embodied in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence:

(*) Jihad, defined as “to war against non-Muslims to establish the religion,” is the duty of every Muslim. The Koran alone has over 100 verses commanding violence against non-believers.

(*) It is a crime (punishable by death) to “defame” Islam or its prophet Muhammed.

(*) A percentage of Zakat (charity money) must go towards jihad. We have seen this part of Sharia law in play with the conviction of the Holy Land Foundation for giving donations to Hamas. Non-Muslims are not equal to Muslims under Sharia.

(*) Women are not equal to men. The testimony of a woman in court is half the value of a man, for example. Husbands are permitted to beat their wives if their wives are disrespectful.

(*) It is obligatory for a Muslim obeying Sharia law to lie if the purpose is to abide by Islam’s commandments.

FP: Expand on your view of Obama and how he has dealt with the threat we face.

Klein: Obama’s actions and speeches since being inaugurated leave little question in my mind that he is enabling radical Islamists to achieve a number of their lethal objectives at the expense of our national security and the liberties we have long taken for granted in the United States of America. The evidence that I describe and cite with extensive sources is overwhelming.

For example, in his first days in office Obama signed an Executive Order tying the hands of our interrogators trying to elicit time sensitive information from suspected Islamic terrorists.

Obama’s Department of Justice head, Attorney General Eric Holder seemed to inexplicably welcome the possibility of a civilian trial for the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in lower Manhattan. There is still no decision with respect to Khalid, but other Islamic terrorist suspects are being given full constitutional rights in a civil trial.

On November 5th, 2009 a Muslim soldier named Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 14 people at Fort Hood, Texas. The ideological source of Hasan’s Islamic-inspired massacre seemed irrelevant to the White House. The same was true about the Christmas Day bomber. To the contrary, the Obama administration refuses to use ‘Islamic’ and ‘terrorism’ in the same sentence.

At this year’s White House Ramadan dinner, where Obama made known his feelings about the Ground Zero mosque, at least two radical Islamists were invited.

I point to Obama’s speech in Cairo last year as a flashpoint for a new tone in relations between the White House and the Muslim world. In his outreach to the Muslim world in Cairo last year, for example,Obama promised to do all that he can to ensure there is nothing in our laws to impede ‘Muslim citizens practicing religion as they see fit.’ He also promised to loosen restrictions on Islamic charities, which had been put in place to protect against front organizatins funding jihad.

As I describe in detail in Lethal Engagement, our President is playing right into the Islamists’ stealth strategy to undermine American laws, financial systems and democratic values that get in the way of radical Islamic priorities. This strategy includes manipulating our own institutions against us.

FP: Share with us the meaning behind the phrase “manic multilateralism” that you use in your book to describe President Obama’s disposition to the Muslim world.

Klein: What in Lethal Engagement I call “manic multilateralism” is an uncritical deference to global norms and international consensus, irrespective of the consequences- a mania for treaties and deference to the will of international bodies like the United Nations that make our national sovereignty subservient. The pursuit of international approval, particularly approval in the Muslim world, is putting American lives and liberties at risk.

For example, President Obama has said that the U.S. has a “moral responsibility” to lead the way towards ‘a world without nuclear weapons’ even as he permits Iran to continue developing its nuclear arms capability. When he made his annual pilgrimage to the United Nations last month to address the General Assembly, he renewed his naive and dangerous calls for ‘a world without nuclear weapons’ and promised to keep the door ‘open to diplomacy’ with Iran, which is advancing its nuclear arms program every day without any real consequences.

Obama wants to engage with our enemies like Iran and Syria while coming down hard on one of our closest allies, Israel. He said that he wants to “re-engage” with the anti-Western United Nations. Indeed, he promised to address America’s “priorities” in the UN and warned that not following “the United Nation’s demands” (sic) would make “all people less safe.”

In that spirit, and as a troubling demonstration of his desired partnership with the Muslim world, President Obama has lent legitimacy to the worst body of all in the United Nations, by joining the UN Human Rights Council. Even the hopelessly liberal New York Times called the Human Rights Council “dysfunctional.”  Despite its Orwellian name, the Human Rights Council is run by the world’s worst human rights abusers, and dominated by the Islamic bloc of member states.  It was the Human Rights Council that initiated the Islamists’ infamous “defamation of religions” resolutions and then pressured the General Assembly to pass them. The Obama administration actually co-sponsored with Egypt a resolution aimed at limiting free expression of the media if what they say is regarded as religious stereotyping. The administration’s representatives on this dysfunctional UN  body have also stood by while Israel has been made its whipping boy.

Let’s call Obama’s engagement policies what they really are — lethal engagements, i.e., appeasement.

FP: In your book, you discuss the dangerous connection between the international norms produced by Islamic-dominated United Nations bodies such as the Human Rights Council and the judicial activists sitting in our federal courts who believe that foreign and international laws should be used in interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Please explain.

Klein: Our activist courts are increasingly bent on internationalizing the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law, particularly in the realm of human rights. This trend in the judiciary is an example of what the Hudson Institute Fellow John Fonte has called “transnationalism,” the global movement to merge the economic, social and legal systems of countries without regard to national sovereignty. President Obama’s two picks for the Supreme Court – Justices Sotomayor and Kagan – reinforce this trend.

The Islamists, with their anti-Western allies, have enormous sway in the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council, in which international legal norms are created and given global legitimacy. The Islamists’ power to influence those norms will lead to laws with a decidedly Sharia-friendly bias. The clearest examples are the series of resolutions passed by both UN bodies that declare ‘defamation of religions’ (in which only Islam is named) as a violation of international law that is not protected by the right of free expression. Transnational judges rely upon these very international norms to interpret our constitutional provisions in ways that best conform to international law.  As American constitutional law morphs into international law, international law morphs into Sharia law — until eventually, Sharia law may well be declared “constitutional” and our First Amendment right of free speech is thrown under the bus. After all, as President Obama said in his Cairo speech, we must not do anything to impede the Islamists “from practicing religion as they see fit.”

FP: Share with the readers the steps you recommend in Lethal Engagement to rescue our country from the dangers you have described.

Klein: In the short term, we need more mass rallies such as the Tea Party movement protests, Glenn Beck’s Restore America rally and rallies protesting the building of the Ground Zero mosque. But beyond the rallies and a vote to kick out as many progressives as we can from Congress on November 2nd, I think we need to take the offense. In Lethal Engagement, I lay out a multi-pronged strategy that includes, for example, bringing lawsuits against the ACLU challenging their tax-exempt status, and against school boards and employers for unlawfully discriminating in favor of Muslim students and employees by giving them special accommodations to the detriment of non-Muslims. We need to do this rather than always letting the ACLU and the Council on American-Islamic Relations frame the legal issues as the plaintiffs.  I also recommend a number of constitutional amendments to protect ourselves against the infiltration of Sharia, even if it means the convening of a constitutional convention to do so.

FP: Joseph A. Klein, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.