It’s bad enough that the War on Terror has been reduced to “Overseas Contingency Operations.” Now the UN has come up with a report urging us to fight terrorists with Overseas Gender Operations.

You can read all about it in this Fox News article on “U.N. Report Demands Repeal of Counter-Terrorism Laws to Promote ‘Gender Equality.’ ” This is yet another product of the same UN Human Rights Council which in April brought us the Durban Review Conference in Geneva (with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a star speaker) and recently  adopted the Goldstone Report on conflict between Israelis and Hamas in Gaza (with a Human Rights Council resolution slamming Israel and excusing the terrorists of Hamas).

The author of this UN report, Finnish law professor Martin Scheinin, wants counter-terrorism policies replaced with gender-equality policies at all costs, such as loosening terror-financing restrictions to help organizations that promote gender equality. In Afghanistan, he wants an end to force and a new policy responsive to the concerns of  “women, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex individuals in local contexts.”

With the UN at the center of U.S. foreign policy, we may never defeat Al Qaeda, but we can go forwad with confidence that every effort is being made to ensure the ranks of terrorists worldwide include not only women, but a full complement of every gender permutation dreamt of in Martin Scheinen’s counter-terrorism philosophy. Just another case of your tax dollars, and UN diplomacy, at work.

It’s unusual enough these days to qualify as a man-bites-dog story, but in the Obama White House war on Fox News, four other MSM TV networks finally got something right. The administration tried to knock Fox out of a pool interview Thursday with White House pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. The networks closed ranks and told the administration they would refuse the interview unless Fox was included. Credit to CNN, NBC/MSNBC, ABC and CBS.

In the assault by America’s own government on America’s freedoms, that’s a skirmish won for free speech. But then we get to the story the networks were trying to cover, before the administration’s attempt to exile Fox turned the pool coverage itself into a story.  The interview was full of bad news for free markets. A Wall Street Journal editorial today sums it up: “Our New Paymasters: Wage controls are politically easier than genuine reforms.” The government bails out, regulates, and then decides who may get paid how much. The Journal correctly concludes: “Once politicians feel free to regulate executive pay for one industry, it is no great leap to do it for everyone.”

You don’t have to love Fox News to see how dangerous it is when the President of the United States gives his staff and advisers a green light to single out and denigrate by name a specific news organization. As we surely all know by now, this is what the White House has been doing to Fox.

The Sunday morning talk shows just brought us White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod opining to George Stephanopoulos, on ABC’s “This Week,” that Fox is “Really – not news — it’s pushing a point of view.” Axelrod advised that ABC and other non-Fox outlets take his cue and expunge Fox from the brethren of news services: “And the bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way.” Meanwhile, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was hammering home the same message, that Fox “is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective,” and urging “More importantly is not have [sic] the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization… .”

This would be a very good moment for all those other news organizations — CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the newspapers and the news web sites – to offer President Obama the perspective that it is utterly inappropriate for White House personnel to be opining publicly on the overall fitness of specific news outlets. The president has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That includes protecting free speech, not dispatching White House staff and advisers to hold forth publicly as media critics denouncing news outlets they don’t like.

Over at United Nations, lynchpin of America’s new Nobel-prize-winning multilateralism, it’s shaping up as the Year of Nepotism — again. Inner-City Press reports that the new president of the General Assembly, Libya’s Ali Treki, has his daughter, Amal Ali Treki, working in his UN office.

As Inner-City further notes, this follows the previous president of the UN General Assembly, Nicaragua’s Miguel d’Escoto Brockman, hiring a niece and nephew (Michael Clark, who likes the idea of a world without money) during his 2008-2009 stint presiding over the Parliament of Man.

This comes on top of the UN Development Program biting-and-nepotism ruckus earlier this year; while Inner-City’s questions about the ascent at the UN of Ban Ki-Moon’s son-in-law apparently remain lost in the labyrinth.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Mission to the UN has been promising to bring to America’s dealings with the UN — have you heard this before? — “high expectations for its performance and accountability,” including “financial accountability, transparency, ethics and internal oversight“…etc…. etc…. etc. Maybe the Obama adminstration should think smaller, and start simply by assembling, and releasing for the perusal of U.S. taxpayers, a directory of all family relationships in the UN system.

What do the Norwegian Nobel arbiters expect to collect from President Barack Obama? They have just awarded him a peace prize which Obama himself suggests was extended on credit — or so he implied in telling reporters Friday morning that he wasn’t sure he’d done enough to deserve it.

But the Nobel Norwegians express not only their hope that he will play out their fantasies, but their confidence that he is “now the world’s leading spokesman” for their preferred “international policy and attitudes.”

Who are these folks issuing Obama a prize on credit to steer America along their preferred course? The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by a committee of five Norwegians, whose members are appointed by the parliament of Norway. Ever heard of Thorbjorn Jagland? Active for decades in the Socialist International, a collectivist who navigated a long series of embarrassing moments in Norwegian politics to become current Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, Jagland now heads the Norwegian Nobel Committee. His fellow members who have just issued this Nobel IOU to a sitting American president are — are we ready for global policy guided by this crowd? – Kaci Kullman Five, Sissel Marie Ronbeck, Inger-Marie Ytterhorn and Agot Valle.

What, more specifically, might they be expecting of Obama? For starters, Norway, along with neighboring Sweden and Denmark, has been banging the drum for America to hand over to the United Nations enormous control over and constraints upon the U.S. economy, in the name of (warming/cooling/take-your-pick) climate change. Thus did Norway’s Nobel committee bestow its favors in 2007 on Al Gore and the UN’s Self-Interested Panel of Politically Corrupted Science — excuse me, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And this December the UN is convening a big climate conference in Copenhagen, with which the U.N. hopes to “seal” its growth-stunting UN-enriching climate “deal.”

Whatever Obama’s instincts to sign on wholesale, one might hope they would be balanced by the realities of the huge cost and burden this would impose on Americans. This is what hangs in the balance for the overlapping crew of U.N. and Scandinavian gurus who have carved out a profitable niche for themselves as doom-saying oracles of world weather. If Obama was in any way put off by the Olympic slap in Copenhagen last week, Norway has just handed him a feel-good consolation prize; a message that he can return to Scandinavia without losing face.

More broadly, Norway’s Nobel grandees have presented themselves in recent years as cheerleaders for some of the UN’s more grossly embarrassing performances. Recall the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the UN and its former secretary-general, Kofi Annan, in 2001 — during the period in which, with Annan at the helm, Oil-for-Food mushroomed into the most massively corrupt endeavor in the history of humanitarian relief. And of course there was the Nobel in 2006 for the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei – who, if he deserves any award, really ought to get one from Tehran for his convenient and apparently endless existential doubts over the Iranian bomb program.  

For more than 60 years, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and for that matter the rest of Western Europe, have basked in relative peace. This is not thanks to the conversational charms of select members of the Norwegian parliament. America’s system of individualism and free enterprise produced the wealth and — yes — the weapons that went into winning both World War II and the Cold War. Americans have fought and died in a series of wars to keep the totalitarian shadows at bay. Americans are at the forefront of those fighting and dying along those same front lines today, notably in Afghanistan – where Norway is part of the coalition, but among those serving, 869 Americans have died, versus 4 Norwegians (even taking into account Norway’s much smaller population, this means that, proportionally, more than three times as many Americans have sacrificed their lives in Afghanistan than have Norwegians). And this is part of a broader conflict, with flashpoints ahead that years of dialogue, U.N. resolutions and Nobel prattle have all failed so far to defuse.

America, in the course of defending its own freedoms, has long extended to the likes of Norway, Denmark and Sweden a protective umbrella. Under that shelter, too many Europols have come to believe that peace is a function of nothing more than talk and hope and dreams and …premature prizes.

Obama said on Friday morning that he will accept this award as “a call to action.” Action on whose behalf? The five Norwegians who make up the Nobel peace prize committee chose to give him this award, for their own purposes. Obama, and America, owe them nothing. The real hope is that Obama will remember he took an oath (twice) not to serve as global spokesman for the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Before his presidency is over, keeping faith with that oath may require him to do things would knock the stuffing out of the featherbed philosophy of this sanctimonious crowd of Scandinavian free-riders.

Rio beats out Chicago for the 2016 Olympics, in the first round of voting, no less – despite the hands-on, closeup and personal fly-by from President Barack Obama himself. This is the best shocker to hit the White House since Obama took office.

Why? A Drudge Report headline sums it up: “The Ego Has Landed.”

So much for Obama’s starry-eyed assumption that by flashing a smile and reaching out his hand, he can prevail in the global arena. It’s a world of often-competing interests, some far more horrendous than the prospect of the Olympics going to Rio. Iran is right now taking America and U.S. allies for an enriched-uranium ride, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has been making common cause in America’s backyard with the likes of both Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi (Here’s my Forbes.com column this week, on “Despots are happy to cooperate – with each other”), and Russia and China are getting a lot of big, bad ideas about how far they can push their own undemocratic agendas without the U.S. pushing back.

To whatever extent this Olympic decision in Copenhagen brings Obama’s thinking down to earth, and grounds much bigger matters of foreign policy in the realities of world politics, this is an Olympic win for the United States.

Like one of those cartoon characters who run right off the edge of a cliff and just keep treading air — but you know it can’t go on that way for long — the Obama administration keeps looking for ways to pretend that Iran’s nuclear bomb program is no immediate crisis.

President Obama has extended his hand to Tehran’s uranium-loving mullahcracy, wished them happy new year, brushed aside their role in arming terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, hung back when they murdered protesters in the streets of their own capital, and placed his bets on the bizarre premise that Iran can somehow be sweet-talked out of its nuclear bomb program. Until his hand was forced last week, he kept quiet for months about Iran’s additional hidden uranium enrichment facility on a military base near Qom. In deciding to make history by becoming the first American president to chair a meeting of the UN Security Council, he swept aside any specific discussion of Iran (or North Korea) and — despite a try by French president Nicolas Sarkozy to insert some reality into the session — marked it down as a triumph that all 15 members paid lip service to the utopian and currently irrelevant dream of a world without nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, Iran keeps barreling toward the bomb. If this doesn’t add up to confrontation, it’s because the U.S. keeps backing off, which gives Iran a chance to go further… and further… and we get closer and closer to the moment at which, yes indeed, they’ll have those bombs. At that point, any confrontation would no longer be about stopping Iran from getting the bomb. It would be a confrontation with a nuclear-armed armed Iran. Anyone see a problem with that?

Which brings us to a line from President Obama that I’ve been marveling over since last week. In The Wall Street Journal on Friday, in an article mentioning the talks with Iran now scheduled for Oct. 1, Obama was quoted saying that Iran will have to choose between giving up its nuclear program or continuing — here’s the line — “down a path that is going to lead to confrontation.”

Let’s look at that locution again (boldface mine). “Down a path that is going to lead to confrontation.” So… by this description, Iran need not worry about confrontation right now. Iran is not yet even on a path that already leads to confrontation. Iran is merely traveling along a path which at some point is “going to” lead to confrontation.  With lines like that rolling out of the White House, the mullahs would be mad not to keep going — right down the thruway to the bomb, while Obama is still poring over the paths on his roadmap.

There’s plenty in French politics that the world could live without — thus, in 2003, when Jacques Chirac was president of France, Americans ended up ordering “Freedom Fries.” But the pendulum swings, and these days – credit France — we find French president Nicolas Sarkozy warning President Barack Obama that a foreign policy of denial and appeasement is the way to becoming French — and American — toast.  During the past week’s meetings at the United Nations, featuring Obama’s “mutual respect” and global tyrants on parade, there came a moment at which Sarkozy opened his mouth on the big, big subject of nuclear crisis, and spoke truth to Obamaland. It got far too little coverage — so I reprise it here.

The setting was the special, summit-level Security Council meeting Thursday morning, chaired by Obama, in which the official topics were nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament for the entire world — but with no focus on any specific country. The meeting was advertised by the White House as “historic,” if for no other reason than that no U.S. President has ever before stooped to chair the often feckless and at times just plain sleazy UN Security Council — where the 15 members currently include Vietnam and Libya. For this particular occasion, Libya’s foreign minister attended (thus sparing the Council the risk of a replay of Qaddadi’s 96 minute performance the previous day on the General Assembly stage). The rest of the table was filled with presidents and prime ministers.

They began with Obama’s pre-packaged deal of unanimously adopting a “historic” resolution, which Obama said “enshrines our shared commitment to the goal of a world without nuclear weapons,” etc, etc. etc (All very nice, but what does this have to do with the real world?). Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon kicked off the ensuing round of official self-congratulatory huffing and puffing (”…a historic moment…a fresh start towards a new future”). The canned diplo-speak continued, as each member spoke in turn – Costa Rica, Croatia, Russia, Spain, Austria, Vietnam, Uganda, China … and then it was the turn of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Here’s his wakeup call, in the UN’s translation from the French (boldface mine):

“We are here to guarantee peace. We are right to talk about the future. But the present comes before the future, and the present includes two major nuclear crises. The peoples of the entire world are listening to what we are saying, including our promises, commitments and speeches. But we live in the real world, not in a virtual one.

We say that we must reduce. President Obama himself has said that he dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. Before our very eyes, two countries are doing exactly the opposite at this very moment. Since 2005, Iran has violated five Security Council Resolutions. [Ed note: Sarkozy then listed international proposals for dialogue with Iran attempted in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.] I support America’s extended hand. But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges. And last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a Member of the United Nations. What are we to do? What conclusion are we to draw? At a certain moment hard facts will force us to take decisions.

… Secondly, there is North Korea — and there it is even more striking. It has violated every Security Council decision since 1993. It pays absolutely no attention to what the international community says. Even more, it continues ballistic missile testing. How can we accept that? What conclusions should we draw? …”

You can read President Sarkozy’s entire statement here (in all its Defcon 1 relevance to the disclosures Friday of another Iranian uranium enrichment plant hidden on a military base near Qom)  –  click on this link to Security Council meetings for 2009,  then click on the link for “Meeting Record” of Sept 24th and scroll to page 12.

We all know that when Iran’s Holocaust-Denier-in-Chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes to New York to speak at the annual September opening of the United Nations, he likes to throw parties.

Ever wondered what might go on at those parties? Well, thanks to evidence introduced at a federal trial in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, we now know how it worked out for one of Ahmadinejad’s party guests — an Iranian-American businessman, Ali Amirnazmi, then living near Philadelphia. He was found guilty this past February on one count of conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran, three counts of violating sanctions, plus sundry other charges. He now awaits sentencing.

Ahmadinejad’s role in his trajectory from party-goer to convicted felon is the subject of my story out today on Fox News: “Ahmadinejad Personally Recruited Sanctions Buster During New York Trip…” One of the signal moments came when Ahmadinejad — with complete disregard for the laws of the U.S., which had allowed him entry to speak at the UN — asked his assembled guests if anyone was willing to help and do business with Iran. A number of party-goers raised their hands… 

The story linked above has links within to a number of court documents which are interesting, not least, for a chance to see the flowery greetings and titles exchanged among the culprit, the Office of the President in Iran, and the Iranian Interests Section in Washington, D.C. (housed at the Embassy of Pakistan). All had a hand in this sanctions-busting saga … “Honorable”… “Respected” .. and “Cherished.”

Ahmadinejad is arriving in New York this week for the fifth time in five years, scheduled to speak Wednesday afternoon at the UN.  And again, invitations to the parties have gone out. What now?

President Obama plans to chair a meeting of the UN Security Council this Thursday in New York. The Obama administration has been at pains to point out that this is historic — something that in the 65-year history no American President has ever done.

Unfortunately, there are good reasons why American presidents have not done this, and there are plenty of reasons why Obama should not do it now. It is both demeaning to the U.S. presidency, and dangerous to America. Obama was elected to represent and protect the interests of the United States, not to bargain away U.S. interests for a chance to personally bang the gavel at the crooked councils of the UN.

As promised in my post yesterday on Obama’s Extremely Historic Plans for the UN, here’s a link to my article today in the Philadelphia Inquirer on “A bad idea for a photo op,” explaining why Obama ought to leave the security-council chairing to his ambassador, Susan Rice.