RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-is-falling-behind-china-in-an-asian-arms-race-11549583595

When it comes to military spunk, no Indian politician shows it off like Narendra Modi. The prime minister sometimes dons camouflage to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, with troops on the borders with China and Pakistan.

While inaugurating a film museum last month, Mr. Modi greeted the audience with a catch phrase from “Uri: The Surgical Strike,” a recent Bollywood hit about a 2016 military operation in which Indian soldiers entered Pakistani-controlled territory to take out purported terrorist training camps. The prime minister often cites the episode to contrast his muscular leadership with the allegedly feckless opposition.

Unfortunately, Mr. Modi’s spending priorities do not match his rhetoric. Last week’s federal budget—a stopgap exercise before national elections this spring—underscores his habit of choosing butter over guns.

The budget promises income support for poor farmers, increased outlays for a government health-insurance scheme, tax cuts for the middle class, and pensions for workers in informal businesses. Though the $60.9 billion earmarked for defense is the most ever in absolute terms—and an 8% increase over last year—defense outlays have dipped to a modest 2.1% of gross domestic product.

That decline is made worse because much of India’s military budget is consumed by salaries for its bloated 1.4-million-strong army, rather than for buying weapons and investing in new technologies. Inflation and a weakening rupee—India imports about two-thirds of its military hardware—crimp the budget further. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13700/venezuela-china-russia

The partnership of Beijing and Moscow is certainly up to no good. As an initial matter, the duo, powers from the other side of the world, are in Venezuela to take on the United States, not help it.

It is doubtful, as Matt Ferchen of the Leiden Asia Center in the Netherlands suggests, that Beijing can help another society transition to democracy. The same, of course, can be said about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. After China and Russia worked to turn Venezuela into “the Syria of the Western Hemisphere,” they are not about to democratize it.

An outreach from Washington “would legitimize the concept that Russia and China have a constructive role to play in Western Hemisphere security… the U.S. has everything to lose from inviting China and Russia to the table, and no realistic prospect of gains.” — Robert Evan Ellis of the U.S. Army War College, to Gatestone.

China and Russia make no global problem better. The only sensible approach, therefore, is to remove them from our hemisphere, and the place to begin to do that is Venezuela.

“What are our national security interests in Venezuela?” Adam Smith, the Washington Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, asked Erin Burnett on January 29 during her CNN primetime show. “The idea that we’re going to go in and do battle in Venezuela over who should be running that country, I don’t see a single U.S. national security argument for doing that.”

Not a single interest, Chairman Smith? In December, two Russian Tu-160 Blackjacks landed near Caracas. The Mach 2, nuclear-capable bombers can launch cruise missiles with a range of 3,410 miles, putting the U.S. homeland at risk from the airspace over Venezuela. The Blackjack bombers also buzzed America’s West Coast as they left the region last month.

Representative Smith charged President Trump with making Venezuela policy “on whims and fantasies and no reality behind it.”

On the contrary, Trump policy is based on the reality that the U.S. must be involved in the resolution of the Venezuelan crisis and not on the whims or fantasies that bad actors on their own will produce constructive solutions.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13704/turkey-erdogan-muslim-brotherhood

The picture sent shockwaves through the Turkish grassroots: A poor Egyptian member of the Muslim Brotherhood, handcuffed by the Turkish police, put aboard a Turkish Airlines plane to fly back to Cairo, to be tortured and eventually executed. Is President Erdoğan not a staunch supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood? Is he not an eternal enemy of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who came to power after toppling the Muslim Brotherhood man, former president Mohamed Morsi, a darling of Erdoğan?

The “mistake” was that the Erdoğan administration was not expecting Hussein, so the immigration officers treated him as just another illegal entry. He would not have been arrested and extradited if the Turkish authorities had known he was a member of the Ikhwan.

False alarm. Erdoğan apparently has not changed, after all.

The picture sent shockwaves through Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s grassroots: A poor Egyptian member of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan in Arabic) handcuffed by the Turkish police, put aboard a Turkish Airlines plane to fly back to Cairo, to be tortured and eventually executed. Is President Erdoğan not a staunch supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood? Is he not an eternal enemy of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who came to power after toppling the Ikhwan man, former president Mohamed Morsi, a darling of Erdoğan? Did Erdoğan not freeze diplomatic relations with el-Sisi’s Egypt?

https://worldisraelnews.com/anti-semitism-in-uk-reaches-record-high-numbers-report-says/

The increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom has set a new record for the third year in a row.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom has set a new record for the third year in a row, according to a report released this week by the Community Security Trust (CST).

In 2018, 1,652 expressions of hatred of Jews were reported across the country, which represented a 16% jump from the previous year. The number for 2017 showed an increase of 3% over 2016.

The vast majority of incidents – 1,300 – consisted of verbal invective, hate mail, and graffiti.

The “good” news is that physical assaults were down by 17%, with 123 attacks versus 149 in 2017. Property damage was on a similar downward trend, with 78 occurrences as opposed to 93 the previous year.

Nearly three-quarters of the incidents took place in London and Manchester, home to the largest Jewish communities in the U.K. Most of them “involved verbal abuse randomly directed at visibly Jewish people in public,” the CST stated, while almost 25% were found on social media.