Hawaii '61

So, the most controversial document of the last few years is...Barack Obama's birth certificate. Not content with the 'short' copy of his birth certificate released in 2008, political campaigners have continued to pressurise the U.S. President into revealing his 'full' birth certificate, which he did today. Congratulations to all the 'birthers' who have tirelessly fought for this moment. No, really. After all the economic turmoil, political peaks and troughs and, more recently, unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, it's good to see that a minority have their eyes firmly set on the key issue: whether their President was born in the U.S..

Now, don't get me wrong, if it were proved Obama was not born in America, that would have been a significant legislative issue. But no more than that. In the grand scheme of things, the obsession with a leader's birthplace is quite ridiculous: his political decisions were not made because he was born in Hawaii, they were made because they represent what he believes is necessary. Donald Trump's comments before and after the release of the full birth certificate only serve to perpetuate this nonsensical obsession with Obama's birthplace. Nevertheless, hopefully the ludicrously high number of people in the U.S. who believe that Obama was brought into this world outside of America will finally realise the truth and, should they choose to do so, challenge the U.S. President over his policies, rather than his background.

As a non-American, I find the whole affair laughable; that a politician be forced to publicly reveal his birth certificate and have it posted all over the internet is indicative of a political system where politics is secondary to personality. Furthermore, no matter what anyone might say about this not being a racial matter, it is. I don't remember a clamour in 2001 for George W. Bush Junior's birth certificate. The whole affair may well be a case of Conservative sore losers refusing to accept Obama's leadership but, at the end of the day, it is also a reminder that some American political figures feel that a man with African ethnic roots cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the country of his birth. In the supposedly multicultural 21st Century, it is not the message that the U.S. should be sending out to countries where it is ostensibly trying to promote 'democracy' and 'freedom'.

Who cares about legality when it comes to 'freedom'?

United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, announced yesterday plans to provide $25 million of funding to those trying to circumvent restrictive internet policies and technologies. While this is all very well, what gives the US the right to interfere with the policies of sovereign states? Now, I am not being so naive to suggest this is a new approach to foreign affairs. Quite the contrary, I am only surprised that this plan has been declared so openly as this is, after all, the same government which is restricting the access of Federal employees to the Wikileaks site. One can only assume therefore, that the US government sees itself as a far better judge of what information people should access than the Chinese, Burmese, Cuban or Syrian governments identified in Mrs Clinton's speech.

It is no secret that US governments have long considered themselves the global defenders of 'freedom', with numerous Cold War incidents (for example, the Bay of Pigs invasion) and the extensive covert funding of dissidents in countries which found themselves on the wrong side of those in Washington. It is however, intriguing that this funding has been publicised, as it appears to be against the spirit, if not the letter, of international law. The United Nations Charter upholds the sovereignty of all states, which includes the right to a state's authority over its domestic affairs. By openly supporting dissidents and technologies intended to circumvent internet restrictions, the US government is meddling in the domestic affairs of a state and potentially opening a proverbial can of worms.

What gives the US the right to determine what websites the Chinese government, deems 'acceptable'? If the Obama administration is suggesting that the internet is a global resource, then surely any attempts to police it, by the removal of alleged 'terrorist' or 'indecent' material, is a restriction of freedom, as it is a basic right of any human to communicate. Now, while I do not condone the material mentioned above, there needs to be some equality when it comes to the supposed 'freedom' of the internet. If the US believes bomb-making material to be a security threat, why can't the Chinese government argue the same about Twitter? As a social networking tool, Twitter is a potential security threat to autocratic governments and as much as the US may want to see these regimes fall, its higher-than-thou neo-liberal approach is extremely shallow and likely to do more harm than good.