Displaying posts published in

2016

Chun Han Wong& Gordon Lubold :U.S.-Beijing Spat Escalates Over South China Sea Secretary of State John Kerry questions President Xi Jinping’s credibility over Chinese leader’s pledge not to ‘militarize’ disputed islands

http://www.wsj.com/articles/south-china-sea-missile-deployment-entrenches-u-s-chinese-positions-1455729019

The Obama administration sharply criticized Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday after charging that China’s military had deployed batteries of advanced missiles on a disputed South China Sea island.

Secretary of State John Kerry said the missile deployment was at odds with a pledge made by Mr. Xi while visiting the White House last year to refrain from militarizing clusters of disputed islands throughout the South China Sea.

Chinese officials, while not directly confirming or denying U.S. and Taiwanese claims about the missiles, said they plan to keep strengthening defensive capabilities in the South China Sea.

While both sides have no appetite for open conflict, their entrenched positions are narrowing their options for a diplomatic solution, while fueling the potential for dangerous flare-ups.

U.S. officials said Wednesday that they had confirmed commercial satellite imagery appearing to show the deployment of surface-to-air missiles on Woody Island in the disputed Paracel chain. The commercial images, from the firm ImageSat International NV, indicate the missiles were deployed sometime after Feb. 3.

The U.S., which in recent months challenged Beijing by sailing warships and flying bombers near Chinese-held islands, had warned against China’s buildup in a region where both sides increasingly find themselves locked into opposing positions.

“When President Xi was here in Washington, he stood in the Rose Garden with President Obama and said China will not militarize in the South China Sea,” Mr. Kerry said on Wednesday. “But there is every evidence, every day that there has been an increase of militarization of one kind or another. It’s of serious concern.”

The rebuke appeared to douse any lingering warmth from Mr. Xi’s state visit to the U.S. For its part, just a month after the Obama-Xi summit, the U.S. started testing China’s posture with what it labeled as freedom-of-navigation patrols near islands controlled by Beijing. READ MORE AT THE SITE

The Obama administration has made a mess of its “Made in Israel” rules. Asaf RomirowskyBenjamin Weinthal

In a move uncharacteristic of U.S. policy as it has been carried out for decades, the Obama administration recently endorsed Europe’s version of a soft Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) campaign targeting Israeli merchandise.

In late January, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency changed its policy on imports from the West Bank, imposing, in effect, a sanction on such goods.

The penalty states that products must no longer be labeled “Made in Israel,” because the United States views the West Bank as territory illegitimately controlled by Israel.

Europe adopted such a labeling policy in November. Since then, the United States has chartered a zigzag course through the product demarcation debate. When asked in November if labeling constitutes a boycott, Mark C. Toner, U.S. State Department deputy spokesman, said: “It’s a—it could be—it could be perceived as a step on the way.”

Just last month, however, Toner’s boss, spokesman John Kirby, announced: “We do not view labeling the origin of products as being from the settlements a boycott of Israel. We also do not believe that labeling the origin of products is equivalent to a boycott.”

The United States, like the European Union, goes to great lengths to insist that demarcating Israeli products from the settlements is not a boycott.

Who Was Abba Eban? The “voice of Israel,” as David Ben-Gurion dubbed him, was revered abroad, mocked and sidelined at home. A new biography helps explain why.Neil Rogachevsky

For much of the second half of the 20th century, Abba Eban was one of the world’s most famous Jews. As the first representative of the fledgling state of Israel to the United Nations in 1948, and then as its ambassador to the UN and Washington, Eban shot to prominence through his eloquent defenses of the Jewish state in some of its most perilous early hours. For two decades after 1960, serving as Israel’s on-again, off-again foreign minister, he remained in the eyes of the world the indispensable “voice of Israel,” as David Ben-Gurion had dubbed him. His books on Jewish and Israeli history and a hefty autobiography were best-sellers, and Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, a 1984 public-television series in which he served as both writer and presenter, drew more than 50 million viewers.

Counting on posthumous recognition is a hazardous business. Still, it has been surprising how fast Eban has fallen out of memory since his death in 2002. This is too bad. Despite his fair share of personal flaws, most notably a pride that often slipped into vanity, Eban was one of the most interesting and impressive statesmen of the last century, and both his successes and perhaps especially his disappointments tell us much about the state of Israel.

That is reason enough to welcome the appearance of Asaf Siniver’s Abba Eban: A Biography. (An early, mainly hagiographical treatment by the journalist Robert St. John appeared in 1972.) An Israeli historian teaching in Britain, Siniver has produced an informative and well-researched if also somewhat boring account mainly of Eban’s political career. Although not so engaging as Eban’s own Autobiography, where the emphasis falls on thoughts and ideas as well as on politics, Siniver’s book does permit reflection on the central puzzle of Eban’s career.

Fearing the ‘G’ Word, the State Department Turns Its Back on Middle Eastern Christians By Nina Shea —

Islamist extremists are waging a religious persecution so severe that, as Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill stated in their historic joint statement last week, “whole families, villages and cities of our brothers and sisters in Christ are being completely exterminated.” Nowhere does this obtain more than in Iraq and Syria, where Christian communities, a groundswell of prominent voices is now acknowledging, face genocide. On February 4, the European Parliament, with near-unanimity and solid socialist support, passed a resolution declaring that ISIS “is committing genocide against Christians and Yazidis” and “other religious and ethnic minorities.”

Despite a foreign-policy mandate to speak out against religious persecution, the United States government has so far been silent on whether this epic religious cleansing of Christians,Yazidis, and other minorities from the heart of the Middle East ranks among the gravest of crimes.

With pressure mounting, the State Department in October leaked word that an official genocide designation would be forthcoming but made clear that State would recognize only a Yazidi genocide and not one against Christians. This prompted Congress to mandate that Secretary John Kerry make a determination by March 16 on the precise question of whether “persecution . . . of Christians and people of other religions in the Middle East by violent Islamic extremists . . . constitutes genocide.”

Black Lives Matter at Cornell: Climate Change Is Racist By Katherine Timpf —

The co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement gave a speech at Cornell University’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture earlier this month, where they taught students important lessons like the fact that climate change is racist.

According to an article in the Cornell Review, one of the co-founders, Opal Tometi, referred to climate change as “global anti-blackness” because six out of the ten countries on the top of the “climate change vulnerability index” are in Africa.

Co-founder Alicia Garza hit some other topics, such as how she would like to “retire” the phrase “black-on-black crime” and instead, as the Review put it, “focus instead on the violence of the state.”

Activist Janaya Kahn also participated in the talk, which, according to the Review, was filled to the school’s Sage Chapel’s 750-seat capacity so quickly that ushers had to turn people away at the door.

The Cornell Review describes itself as a “conservative, libertarian, contrarian, anti-establishment” publication.

The speech was originally covered in an article in the College Fix.

Trump, Lies, and Bankruptcy A pattern emerges. By Kevin D. Williamson

Donald Trump is a habitual liar, and the thing about habitual liars is that they lie habitually.

In a testy exchange with former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Trump insisted that he’d never gone bankrupt, and that claims to the contrary are a lie. That’s the Trump magic right there: Lying about your business history is one thing, lying that your critics are lying about it is another.

Trump has a peculiar way of speaking about bankruptcy: He has a deep aversion to the word itself. He speaks of “putting a company into a chapter” without ever answering the implicit question: “Chapter of what? Moby-Dick?” The answer, of course, is the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, to which Trump has taken recourse at least four times over the course of his business career. The chapter in question is the famous Chapter 11, which applies to business bankruptcies. Trump proudly insists that he never has had recourse to Chapter 13, the personal bankruptcy code. This is his apparent justification for saying that he’s never been bankrupt. But of course one of the purposes of Chapter 11 bankruptcy is to keep men such as Donald Trump out of Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

Trump’s first bankruptcy was in 1991 after he borrowed a stupidly irresponsible amount of money to finance that monument to excruciatingly bad taste known as the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Trump is such a good manager that the casino’s slot machines began failing during its first week of business. Never one to let reality stand in the way of his confidence, Trump had financed the $1 billion project largely with junk bonds, which meant very high interest payments. Trump did not make enough money to meet his interest payment and so was forced into bankruptcy. His ownership of the casino was diluted, and he ended up having to give back 500 slot machines to the company that had provided them.

Pseudo-Scholarship, Intersectionality, and Blood Libels Against Israel In the Left’s endless search for victims, Israel is always added to the list of oppressors. Richard L. Cravatts

Jews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.

That medieval blood libel, largely abandoned in the contemporary West, does, however, still appear as part of Arab world’s vilification of Jews—now transmogrified into a slander against Israel, the Jew of nations. But in the regular chorus of defamation against Israel by a world infected with Palestinianism, a new, more odious trend has shown itself: the blood libel has been revivified; however, to position Israel (and by extension Jews) as demonic agents in the community of nations, the primitive fantasies of the blood libel are now masked with a veneer of academic scholarship.

On February 3rd, for example, Jasbir K. Puar, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University delivered a lecture at Vassar College, “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters,” sponsored, shamefully, not by radical student groups but by the school’s American Studies Department and departments of Political Science, Religion, and English, and the programs of Africana Studies, International Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Jewish Studies.

The lecture examined “the use of technologies of measure to manufacture a ‘remote control’ occupation, one that produces a different version of Israeli ‘home invasions’ through the maiming and stunting of population. If Gaza, for example, is indeed the world’s largest ‘open air prison’ and an experimental lab for Israeli military apparatuses. . , what kinds of fantasies (about power, about bodies, about resistance, about politics) are driving this project?” In other words, Professor Puar’s central thesis was that Israeli military tactics involve the deliberate the “stunting, “maiming,” physical disabling, and scientific experimenting with Palestinian lives, an outrageous resurrection of the classic anti-Semitic trope that Jews purposely, and sadistically, harm and kill non-Jews.

BernieCare and Sanders’ Lies How Sanders’ proposed replacement for Obamacare will bankrupt America much sooner. Matthew Vadum

Socialist Bernie Sanders is lying about the crushing cost of his quixotic government-run universal health care scheme because he can.

Sanders and the true-believers who surround him claim implausibly that BernieCare will save America $6 trillion over a decade. Forbes, on the other hand, asserts that BernieCare could lead to an astonishing $44 trillion in new federal spending over a decade.

Of course, facts are malleable things to the Left.

The insurgent candidate for the Democrats’ presidential nomination will never admit just how damaging his totalitarian approach to health care delivery would be to America. That’s because Sanders is a Marxist ideologue to whom money isn’t something real. Sanders and the other small-c communists who dominate today’s Democratic Party regard people as playthings, and they don’t care about the laws of economics, which they regard as obstacles to be overcome in the furtherance of social progress. And the mainstream media, for the most part, is in no hurry to hold the Independent senator from Vermont to account.

To some, single-payer health care seemed like a good idea around World War Two.

Palestinian Leaders: Who Are They Fooling? by Khaled Abu Toameh

For Abbas and the Palestinian leadership, the death of more than 170 Palestinians and 26 Israelis in the past five months occurred in the context of a “popular and peaceful uprising.” One can only imagine what the uprising would have looked like had it not been “peaceful.”

Abbas assured his people that those who die defending their holy sites would go straight to heaven. “Every drop of blood that is spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood,” he stressed.

According to the Palestinian Authority, these youths are acting out of despair — over settlements, checkpoints and lack of progress in the peace process. The attackers are in fact targeting Jews because they have been incited and brainwashed by the same leaders who are now denouncing Israel for protecting itself.

Not a single senior Palestinian official has condemned the targeting of innocent civilians in this “peaceful” uprising. They are too busy glorifying the assailants and naming streets after them.

The blood of the Palestinians who are being shot and killed while attacking Jews is on the hands of Abbas and his senior officials.

It is a puzzle: are the leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) playing dumb, or do they believe their own ridiculous rhetoric?

Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Politicized UN by Richard Kemp and Jasper Reid

The UN’s assertion that the Saudi-led coalition has committed war crimes in Yemen is unlikely to be true. UN experts have not been to Yemen, depending instead on hearsay evidence and analysis of photographs.

The UN has a pattern of unsubstantiated allegations of war crimes against the armed forces of sovereign states. Without any military expertise, and never having visited Gaza, a UN commission convicted the Israel Defense Force of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians in the 2014 conflict. It was an assessment roundly rejected by America’s most senior military officer, General Martin Dempsey, and an independent commission.

The Houthis have learned many lessons from Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, groups also supported by Iran. Those lessons include the falsification of civilian casualty figures and their causes. The UN swallowed the fake Gaza figures hook, line and sinker, and are now making the same error in Yemen.

The Houthis exploit gullible or compliant reporters and human rights groups to facilitate their propaganda, including false testimony and fabrication of imagery.

Forensic analysis shows that rather than deliberately targeting civilians, the Saudis and their allies have taken remarkable steps to minimize civilian casualties.