From Barry Secrest, Conservative Refocus News
The Jesse Helms Center
By Robert Wilkie, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and Counsel to Senator Jesse Helms, and John Dodd, President of the Jesse Helms Center
Jesse Helms was right about many things. For 30 years, he warned of the dangers to American independence and individual liberty made manifest in the utopian schemes of the United Nations.
Jesse thundered that the United States must resist all attempts to manacle her freedoms and erode her sovereignty through the machinations of the United Nations and their most recent contrivance, the International Criminal Court – a body Margaret Thatcher called “… the single silliest idea yet dreamed up by our New Left internationalist masters.”
Giving credence to Jesse’s prophecies, we have recently been treated to one Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein. Never heard of him? Well, the Prince is the self-proclaimed heir to the long defunct thrones of Iraq and Syria. For a prince out of a job, one place to seek notoriety is within the bureaucracy of the United Nations. Prince Zeid is the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights charged with upholding “the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights” and is ably assisted by his fellow commissioners from Cuba, China, Russia and Venezuela.
The Prince spends most of his time berating the United States and investigating Israel; a country of seven million, representing 1/1000th of the world’s population and the only country on the Commission’s permanent agenda. This passes for fair and balanced at the U.N.
Not satisfied with his Israeli punching bag, the Prince, echoing the U.N. Secretary General, stood before the world press calling for the prosecution before the International Criminal Court of those American officials named in the U.S. Senate report on post-9/11 interrogations and those in law enforcement involved in the incident at Ferguson, Mo. Only a U.N. commission that gives aid and comfort to Hamas, Hezbollah and the ayatollahs could self-satisfyingly co-join the two.
During the Clinton Administration, Jesse Helms wielded his power as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to block American accession to the Rome Treaty creating The International Criminal Court. This treaty purports to hold American citizens under its criminal jurisdiction even though the United States has neither signed nor ratified it. It claims sovereign criminal jurisdiction over all American citizens even though those citizens have through their elected representatives withheld that consent.
The prospect of American soldiers and political leaders being held up to ridicule and prospective imprisonment by an arm of an institution as morally corrupt as the United Nations horrified the senator.
In an address before the U.N. Security Council in 2000, Senator Helms noted:
“Americans look with alarm at U.N. claims to a monopoly in international moral legitimacy. They see this as a threat to the God given freedoms of the American people.”
Jesse was the canary in the coal mine. As the world succumbs and admits to helplessness in the face of a new age of savagery, Sen. Helms had an answer to the Prince Zeids of the world: No, not now, not ever will we submit to those whose mission is the belittling and eventual destruction of the power of the American nation.
