by AARON KLEIN
Power helped to found a global military doctrine called Responsibility to Protect that was also devised by several controversial characters, including Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, a staunch denier of the Holocaust who long served as the deputy of late Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat.
Power once suggested investing “literally billions of dollars” in a “mammoth protection force” to intercede in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Notorious left-wing radical Tom Hayden recently wrote Power sees war as an “instrument for achieving her liberal, even radical, values.”
In his speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Monday, Obama announced the new Atrocities Prevention Board to be chaired by Power.
The inter-agency group is to meet monthly to determine methods to use in international conflict, including sanctions and civilian as well as military response-team training.
The board’s creation was the culmination of Power’s efforts that last year defined preventing atrocities as a “core national-security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” The official White House statement marked the first time the U.S. government had made such a proclamation.
‘Mammoth protection force’ for Palestinians?
In a 2002 question and answer session with the University of California-Berkeley Institute of International Studies, Power was asked how the U.S. should respond if “one party or another” were “moving toward genocide” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
She replied: “What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in sort of helping the situation. And putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import.”
Power was referring to pro-Israel groups using language some would consider anti-Semitic by implying such groups maintain inordinate power in U.S. politics.
She continued, “It may more crucially mean sacrificing – or investing, I think, more than sacrificing – literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israelis’, you know, military but actually in investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing billions of dollars it would probably take also to support, I think, what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old, you know, Srebrenica kind or the Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence.”
‘Uses war to achieve radical values’
Power was reportedly heavily influential in convincing Obama to launch NATO airstrikes in Libya last year, a key test of Power’s Responsibility to Protect doctrine.
In a posting on the bombings at the Rag Blog, a far-left website that is home to radical 1960s anti-war leaders, some with previous close ties to Obama, Hayden remarked on Power’s use of war.
Hayden was the principal organizer for the 1960s anti-war movement group Students for a Democratic Society, from which the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group splintered.
In an article about Power’s role in the international coalition that bombed Libya, Hayden writes that he had “a long conversation with Power in December 2003.”
“I was struck by the generational factor in her thinking,” relates Hayden. “If she had experienced Vietnam in her early 20s, I felt, she would have joined the radical left, suspicious always of American power.”
Continued Hayden: “But as an Irish internationalist witnessing death and destruction in the former Yugoslavia, she wondered how the United States could be neutral. She strongly favored the American intervention and air war that followed.”
Hayden contended that Power’s Balkans experience led her to become an advocate of American and NATO military intervention in humanitarian crises.
“She began to see war as an instrument for achieving her liberal, even radical, values,” he stated.
Many Rag Blog personalities were the founders of a coalition, Progressives for Obama, that campaigned for the president during the 2008 campaign.
One Rag Blog contributor is Mark Rudd, a founder of the Weather Underground terror group alongside Obama associate William Ayers. The Weathermen, co-founded by Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, sought the overthrow of the U.S. government.
Also writing at Rag Blog is Marxist activist Carl Davidson, a founder of the socialist New Party. WND previously reported evidence Obama was a New Party member.
Davidson, along with Obama associate Marilyn Katz, a Chicago extremist activist, organized a 2002 anti-war rally at Chicago’s Federal Plaza that was widely credited with propelling Obama to the national stage.
Founded globalist military doctrine
Responsibility to Protect, or Responsibility to Act, as cited by Obama, is a set of principles, now backed by the United Nations, based on the idea that sovereignty is not a privilege but a responsibility that can be revoked if a country is accused of “war crimes,” “genocide,” “crimes against humanity” or “ethnic cleansing.”
The term “war crimes” has at times been indiscriminately used by various U.N.-backed international bodies, including the International Criminal Court, or ICC, which applied it to Israeli anti-terror operations in the Gaza Strip. There has been fear the ICC could be used to prosecute U.S. troops.
The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, founded by Power, had a seat on the advisory board of the 2001 commission that original founded Responsibility to Protect.
The commission is called the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. It invented the term “responsibility to protect” while defining its guidelines.
The Carr Center is a research center concerned with human rights located at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Power was Carr’s founding executive director and headed the institute at the time it advised in the founding of Responsibility to Protect.
With Power’s center on the advisory board, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty first defined the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.
Soros funded
The Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect is the world’s leading champion of the military doctrine.
Soros’ Open Society Institute is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect.
Several of the doctrine’s main founders sit on boards with Soros.
The committee that devised the Responsibility to Protect doctrine included Arab League Secretary General Amre Moussa as well as Palestinian legislator Ashrawi.
Two of the global group’s advisory board members, Ramesh Thakur and Gareth Evans, are the original founders of the doctrine, with the duo even coining the term “responsibility to protect.”
Thakur and Evans sit on multiple boards with Soros.
The Open Society is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Government sponsors include Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Rwanda and the U.K.
Board members of the group include former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Ireland President Mary Robinson and South African activist Desmond Tutu. Robinson and Tutu have recently made solidarity visits to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as members of a group called The Elders, which includes former President Jimmy Carter.
Annan once famously stated, “State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined – not least by the forces of globalization and international co-operation. States are … instruments at the service of their peoples and not vice versa.”
Soros: Right to ‘penetrate nation-states’ borders’
Soros himself outlined the fundamentals of Responsibility to Protect in a 2004 Foreign Policy magazine article entitled “The People’s Sovereignty: How a New Twist on an Old Idea Can Protect the World’s Most Vulnerable Populations.”
In the article, Soros said “true sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments.”
“If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified,” Soros wrote. “By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states’ borders to protect the rights of citizens.
“In particular, the principle of the people’s sovereignty can help solve two modern challenges: the obstacles to delivering aid effectively to sovereign states, and the obstacles to global collective action dealing with states experiencing internal conflict.”
More Soros ties
“Responsibility” founders Evans and Thakur served as co-chair, with Gregorian on the advisory board of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which invented the term “responsibility to protect.”
In his capacity as co-chairman, Evans also played a pivotal role in initiating the fundamental shift from sovereignty as a right to “sovereignty as responsibility.”
Evans presented Responsibility to Protect at the July 23, 2009, United Nations General Assembly, which was convened to consider the principle.
Thakur is a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, which is in partnership with an economic institute founded by Soros.
Soros is on the executive board of the International Crisis Group, a “crisis management organization” for which Evans serves as president-emeritus.
The group has been petitioning for the U.S. to normalize ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, a process apparently underway with a visit last month by Brotherhood officials to the White House.
Aside from Evans and Soros, the group includes on its board Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei, as well as other personalities who champion dialogue with Hamas, a violent offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The crisis group has petitioned for the Algerian government to cease “excessive” military activities against al-Qaida-linked groups and to allow organizations seeking to create an Islamic state to participate in the Algerian government.
Soros’ own Open Society Institute has funded opposition groups across the Middle East and North Africa, including organizations involved in the current chaos.
‘One World Order’
Doctrine founder Thakur recently advocated for a “global rebalancing” and “international redistribution” to create a “New World Order.”
In a piece in March 2011 in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, “Toward a new world order,” Thakur wrote, “Westerners must change lifestyles and support international redistribution.”
He was referring to a United Nations-brokered international climate treaty in which he argued, “Developing countries must reorient growth in cleaner and greener directions.”
In the opinion piece, Thakur then discussed recent military engagements and how the financial crisis has impacted the U.S.
“The West’s bullying approach to developing nations won’t work anymore – global power is shifting to Asia,” he wrote.
“A much-needed global moral rebalancing is in train,” he added.
Thakur continued: “Westerners have lost their previous capacity to set standards and rules of behaviour for the world. Unless they recognize this reality, there is little prospect of making significant progress in deadlocked international negotiations.”
Thakur contended “the demonstration of the limits to U.S. and NATO power in Iraq and Afghanistan has left many less fearful of ‘superior’ western power.”
