Ad for The Awakening 2012 (Photo: Tea Party Manatee)

The Freedom Federation, a network of conservative faith-based organizations, will host its “Awakening 2012″ event in Orlando next year, featuring a long list of big conservative names as “invited speakers.”

Presidential hopefuls Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry have all been invited to Awakening, which will take place April 19-21 at Calvary Assembly in Winter Park. According to the group’s website, Republicans Sen. Marco Rubio, Rep. Allen West and Gov. Rick Scott have also been invited to speak, but have not yet been confirmed.

Other invited speakers include: Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Live Action founder Lila Rose, and James “Jim Bob” Duggar, subject of the TLC reality series 19 Kids and Counting.

John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, is a confirmed speaker, along with Frank Gaffney, who penned a controversial op-ed insinuating that President Obama was “America’s first Muslim president.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also been confirmed to address the rally via video feed.

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich made an appearance at the 2011 Awakening event, telling more than 100 faith-based leaders that House Republicans should not compromise on fundamentals because the budget is a “moral battle.”

During a panel discussion on “Sharia Law and the Constitution,” Gaffney blamed Norquist, who is married to a Muslim, for “enabling and empowering Muslim Brotherhood influence operations against our movement and our country,” as reported by ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes.

Gaffney inserted Norquist’s image in a PowerPower presentation on the influence of radical Muslims and told the audience, “This is how that has happened.”

Watch the video:

In a separate interview with ThinkProgress, Norquist accused Gaffney of waging “a direct attack on religious liberty.”

Asked if the concern of Sharia law will play a constructive role for the GOP, Norquist told Keyes: “I don’t know that it’s having much impact one way or another. The challenge there is a religious liberty issue. When you say, we’re going to start telling people you can’t build a church, a synagogue or a mosque somewhere, that’s a direct attack on religious liberty.

Listen to the interview:

At the “How to Take Back America” conference in St. Louis, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy led two workshop sessions — one on “how to defeat attacks on sovereignty by U.N. treaties and North American Union” and one on “how to understand Islam.” At that first workshop, he took a question on the North American Union and stated that it “wasn’t black helicopter stuff,” but that its framers might miss their goal of a 2010 union between the United States, Mexico and Canada.

An anti-Law of the Sea Treaty ad from the Coalition to Preserve American Sovereignty (YouTube)

Shortly after leaving their offices on June 24, dozens of Hill staffers, foreign policy experts, and old Washington hands made their way to the lower floor of the Capitol Visitors Center, a sprawling complex below the halls of Congress. The occasion was the low-key launch of the new House Sovereignty Caucus, the project of three Republican members — Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), and Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) — who had become more and more worried about Americans ceding their rights to foreign institutions. Retired Lt. Col. Oliver North and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith stopped by to make remarks and pose for photos. Patrick Henry College Chancellor Michael Farris made small talk near a table of fruits, vegetables and soft cheeses.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“I have said for years that we ought to get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S.,” said Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), addressing the crowd in an impromptu speech. “I’ll do everything I can in the Congress to maintain the U.S. as a sovereign nation, subservient to no one but the almighty God.”

A series of traffic delays meant that, Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center For Security Policy, was the last supporter of the new caucus to give a speech. He bemoaned the confirmation of Harold Koh as Legal Adviser to the State Department, an “enemy” of sovereignty, shortly after the Senate had agreed to move ahead to a vote on his nomination. But he was optimistic. “We may now have in the House a vehicle for keeping the so-called ‘Upper House’ more honest on these issues.”

While Republicans and conservative activists were disappointed by the confirmation of Koh, the long delay leading up to the vote and its relative closeness — 65 to 31 to end debate on the nomination and 62-35 to confirm him — have boosted their hopes of successfully battling treaties that they characterize as threats to American rights and national interests. Treaties need the votes of 67 senators to be ratified, and can gum up the business of the Senate for weeks if they become flash points for controversy. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, for example, has convinced Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) — a member of the House Sovereignty Caucus — to introduce a Constitutional amendment protecting the right of American parents to discipline their children and send them to religious schools.

Those hopes are likely to be tested at least twice this year. According to staffers for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or the Law of the Sea Treaty — a 1982 treaty that governs the right of countries to use the oceans — could be reintroduced next month. And President Obama is in Russia this week in part to move forward the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, the 1996 agreement on weapons testing that was rejected by the Senate in 1999, when the upper chamber contained 55 Republicans and 45 Democrats. Of the 16 treaties that the State Department included on its priority list in a May 11 letter to the committee, both sides agree that these two will be the first to face full votes. And both sides agree that the Koh vote provided a good idea of the support these treaties might command from a very skeptical Senate Republican conference.

“The vote against Harold Koh is probably the minimum vote against both of those treaties,” said John Bolton, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, and who has been a forceful critic of both treaties. “I think that a lot of Republicans, whether they agreed or disagreed with Koh’s views, basically agreed that president had the right to appoint his own team. Whether they would also support these treaties, given their concerns about national sovereignty, is another question.”

The power to approve treaties rests entirely with the Senate; on the surface, that would seem to make the House Sovereignty Caucus and its supporters less relevant. But both supporters and opponents of the treaties said that skeptics of international law and international agreements will have an outsized influence in this debate. Senate staffers from both parties, experts from liberal groups, and experts from conservative groups all cited the same handful of people as the ones able to turn opinion on treaties: Bolton, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, and fellows at the Heritage Foundation and Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). For an example of their influence, one supporter of the treaties pointed out what happens when someone does a basic Google search for “Law of the Sea.” The first links include the Heritage Foundation’s page on the treaty, CEI’s page, and the site UNLawoftheSeaTreaty.org, owned by another think tank that opposes the treaty.

Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at CEI, said that there was some truth to this characterization. “At the one end, the American people are very suspicious of more United Nations involvement in their lives,” said Ebell. “When you’re saying that you’ll put the UN in charge of the oceans, that’s pretty strongly opposed by the American people. But at the other end, most Washington insiders, a lot of experts who work on this, a lot of admirals, say we ought to do that and say that the problems have been fixed since President Reagan opposed it. So we’re not a very broad coalition.”

Treaty supporters, who had hoped that a Democratic president and heavily Democratic Senate could get past this standoff, are frustrated by the conservatives’ success. “The fight over the Law of the Sea has been a textbook example of the politics of intensity trumping the politics of common sense,” said Don Kraus, the CEO of Citizens for Global Solutions, a group that supports both treaties. “The treaty’s narrow group of opponents have whipped up conspiracy theories to feed political temper tantrums in swing states.”

While negotiations that could lead to progress on the CTBT are taking center stage this week, treaty opponents are focusing on the Law of the Sea Treaty because it will come up first, and because its fate in the last Congress provided a roadmap for both sides. A tough campaign against the treaty, which included TV ads from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and pressure on conservative senators like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), whittled down its support. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who had long supported the treaty, backed down and said that it needed “changes” shortly before the 2008 New Hampshire presidential primary.

According to Baker Spring, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, opposition to international law and treaties like these has coalesced in the wake of the campaign against the Law of the Sea Treaty and because of worries about President Barack Obama. “We have a president in office who is potentially serious about this agenda. Nobody held the view that George W. Bush was going to scurry down a road that would undermine our national sovereignty.”

Spring suggested that Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, slow-walked the treaty last year because he wanted to get a majority of Republicans on board. Lugar spokesman Mark would not confirm that, but he pointed out that so far the Obama administration’s support for the treaty is comparable to the Bush administration’s — just one of the items on the priority list. “The Obama campaign was fantastic at using social networking to organize and build up grassroots support,” said Hayes. “The administration has chosen to use that skill on some campaigns, like the health care push, but not on other campaigns.”

Unless that happens, skeptics of international law suggested that high-visibility coalitions like the House Sovereignty Caucus can win the argument.

“I think it can have a real impact if it raises the volume of the debate,” said John Bolton. “The higher the salience of the issue, for conservatives in particular, the greater the likelihood that people will oppose these treaties.”

“I thought the vote would be a little closer,” said Perkins. “I think that this nomination is a threat to our whole understanding of American law. But this is typical of this administration, and there’s probably more to come. I think their approach to public policy is like a food fight, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, as people are dodging and ducking.”

After this I heard Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy address the launch meeting of the new Sovereignty Caucus, where he talked about Koh. “Harold Koh is one of the enemies,” he said, “if that’s not too charged a word, one of the enemies of sovereignty.”

A campaign that delayed Koh’s confirmation by several months will almost certainly come to an end shortly.

UPDATE: Koh was confirmed by the full Senate, 62-35.

Smith focuses on Gaffney’s Hitler analogies, but I’m stuck on his three-part proof of Obama’s secret Islam.

Mr. Obama referred four times in his speech to “the Holy Koran.” Non-Muslims — even pandering ones — generally don’t use that Islamic formulation.

Mr. Obama established his firsthand knowledge of Islam (albeit without mentioning his reported upbringing in the faith) with the statement, “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” Again, “revealed” is a depiction Muslims use to reflect their conviction that the Koran is the word of God, as dictated to Muhammad.

… Mr. Obama said he looked forward to the day “. . . when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.” Now, the term “peace be upon them” is invoked by Muslims as a way of blessing deceased holy men. According to Islam, that is what all three were – dead prophets. Of course, for Christians, Jesus is the living and immortal Son of God.

Did Gaffney contact Ben Rhodes, the very white and very non-Muslim speechwriter who did plenty of work on this speech? Does he actually think that stretching to use local or religious rhetoric is proof that the speaker is hiding his secret connections? This is the thinking of the man who was been quite successful so far in making a controversy of the nomination of Yale Law Dean Harold Koh for the top legal job in the State Department.

–

TWI is on Twitter. Please follow us here.

Frank Gaffney – we can use Memorial Day recess to build opposition to Harold Koh

Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii.

He didn’t write this in some listserv or something. It appeared in The Washington Times. There’s really nothing you can say that takes you off Glenn Beck’s rolodex.