(Via Hot Air Headlines) I have a problem with this.

Germany will walk out of the U.N. General Assembly if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust in a speech he will give Wednesday, and it wants other European Union countries to do the same, the foreign ministry said.

My problem with this is that intolerance to Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism should be so instinctive and reflexive that nobody would have let Ahmadinejad talk at the UN in the first place. The Canadians aren’t bothering to wait for the inevitable vileness; they’re just going to walk out (via Instapundit).  So on that curve the German response gets down graded from its original A to a B-.

Mind you, that’s a heck of a lot better than the F that we’re getting. Did somebody at the UN with a malignant sense of humor schedule this one?  The President is going to speak the same day as Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Libya’s Gadhafi and Zimbabwe’s Mugabe; you have to wonder whether Syria’s al-Assad and/or North Korea’s Il-sung Jong-Il had scheduling conflicts.  Doesn’t anybody at the White House check people’s work before they send it out?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

As part of part of Hillsdale
College’s DC-based Kirby Center for the Constitution and Citizenship
“First Principles on First Fridays” lecture series, John Bolton spoke at the Heritage Foundation today.  9/11 is of course a somber anniversary for our country, and a fitting moment to reflect on how how American foreign policy is being shaped in the post-George W. Bush era.

In Ambassador Bolton’s view, it is not a pretty picture.  He graded President Obama’s performance as ”absent.”  As Bolton pointed out in his remarks, the administration is pursuing a course of “Neo-Isolationism,” the point of which appears to be withdrawing American forces and refraining from using American influence around the world because such actions might be objectionable to the global community.  Ambassador Bolton noted that while President Obama has declared he believes in “American exceptionalism ,” the President followed up that assertion by saying he believed in it just as he suspects “that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”  By this logic all countries are exceptional in their own view–which should make everyone feel good–but the problem is that then no country is truly exceptional, including America.  This approach, Bolton surmised, has been the guiding principle that unites the President’s repeated offers to negotiate directly with Iran, enabling of the dog-and-pony show that was former President Clinton’s visit to North Korean, and eagerness to cede power to the International Criminal Court–while presiding over the evisceration of the Defense budget.  Ambassador Bolton was particularly outspoken on the current situation in Honduras, in which the administration is siding with Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro and against Honduras’ constitutional process.  He gave that situation “an F.  No question about it.  This is a disgrace.”

After the lecture, Ambassador Bolton graciously granted Redstate an exclusive interview to follow up on the formation (or lack thereof) of foreign policy by President Obama’s national security team, Hugo Chavez’ mischief-making around the globe, and the ramifications of the Obama administration’s policy towards Israel.  Click here to listen to the full podcast.

Are we beginning to see the first cracks in the idea of “universal jurisdiction,” the international busy body “law” that said that any nation can arrest the leaders of any other nation and try them for “war crimes”? Let us hope we are, at least.

Now, I’ve always contended that the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals was a mistake. Not because those Nazi scum were innocent, far from it. But, rather, because it set a bad precedent that contended that the “international community” was qualified to capture, prosecute, and punish “war criminals.” This entire concept is made to order if one wants to destroy national sovereignty but not for one much interested in the rule of law. In fact, it is a direct assault on any rule of law because it invites the capricious rule of the mob (by reflecting current world opinion) on just who is and who is not a “war criminal.” Not to mention that the assumption that a world body can make these determinations must as a matter of course preclude any power over its own people by the individual nations involved. The determination of the “world community” will and must supersede national legal rulings — unless those rulings happen to agree with that world opinion which only makes the national decision at best perfunctory and certainly pointless.

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Administration officials confirmed late last night that the U.S. will assist the United Nations in planning and executing the fourth edition of the UNESCO-sponsored “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.”

President Obama has yet to announce whether or not the U.S. will attend the conference, to be held in Geneva, Switzerland this year. Senior administration officials, including UN ambassador Susan Rice and national security council member Samantha Power, have reportedly been working to convince Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to commit the U.S. to the conference — an act which would reverse the Bush administration policy of boycotting future editions of the conference pending ironclad assurances that it would not be a repeat of the 2001 meeting which the U.S. and Israel walked out of due to the virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel tone of the proceedings and the conference’s official resolutions.

In 2001 in Durban, South Africa, the nations in attendance used the opportunity of the U.N.-sponsored conference to slander Israel and propose the adoption of United Nations resolutions declaring Zionism (the belief that a Jewish state of Israel should exist) to be the international legal equivalent of racism (in an ironic move, African countries like Nigeria and Zimbabwe, which are knee-deep in the slave trade, sought to pry a formal apology for slavery from the Caucasian West, as well).

Further, the NGO Forum held at the 2001 conference (for the purpose of “creating a worldwide anti-racism movement” and “to struggle against intolerance”) saw resolution language like the following proposed:

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