RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-china-said-reach-partial-190854141.html

The U.S. and China agreed on the outlines of a partial trade accord Friday that President Donald Trump said he and his counterpart Xi Jinping could sign as soon as next month.

As part of the deal, China would significantly step up purchases of U.S. agricultural commodities, agree to certain intellectual-property measures and concessions related to financial services and currency, Trump said Friday at the White House. In exchange, the U.S. will delay a tariff increase due next week as the deal is finalized, though new levies scheduled for December haven’t yet been called off.

The agreement marks the largest breakthrough in the 18-month trade war that has hurt the economies of both nations. Importantly, Trump said the deal was the first phase of a broader agreement. The president indicated he could sign a deal with Xi at an upcoming November summit in Chile.

While the limited agreement may resolve some short-term issues, several of the thorniest disputes remain outstanding. U.S. goals in the trade war center around accusations of intellectual-property theft, forced technology transfer and complaints about Chinese industrial subsidies.

Xi told Trump in a letter — which the White House distributed on Friday — that it’s important the countries work together to address each others’ concerns. “I hope the two sides will act in the principle and direction you and I have agreed to, and work to advance China-U.S. relations based on coordination, cooperation and stability,” the letter said.

http://carolineglick.com/trump-did-not-betray-the-kurds/

The near consensus view of President Donald Trump’s decision to remove US special forces from the Syrian border with Turkey is that Trump is enabling a Turkish invasion and double crossing the Syrian Kurds who have fought with the Americans for five years against ISIS. Trump’s move, the thinking goes, harms US credibility and undermines US power in the region and throughout the world.

There are several problems with this narrative. The first is that it assumes that until this week, the US had power and influence in Syria when in fact, by design, the US went to great lengths to limit its ability to influence events in Syria.

The war in Syria broke out in 2011 as a popular insurrection by Syrian Sunnis against the Iranian-sponsored regime of President Bashar al Assad. The Obama administration responded by declaring US support for Assad’s overthrow. But the declaration was empty. The administration sat on its thumbs as the regime’s atrocities mounted. They supported a feckless Turkish effort to raise a resistance army dominated by jihadist elements aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama infamously issued his “redline” regarding the use of chemical weapons against civilians by Assad, which he repudiated the moment it was crossed.

As ISIS forces gathered in Iraq and Syria, Obama shrugged them off as a “jayvee squad.” When the jayvees in ISIS took over a third of Iraqi and Syrian territory, Obama did nothing.

As Lee Smith recalled in January in the New York Post, Obama only decided to do something about ISIS in late 2014 after the group beheaded a number of American journalists and posted their decapitations on social media.

The timing was problematic for Obama.

The threatened Turkish assault and invasion of heavily Kurdish northern Syria, which prompted President Trump to withdraw American forces, has begun.

Try as one may to paint a nicer picture, this brings back repeated bad memories…

Unfortunately, for at least a half century, America has replaced Great Britain as primary “outside” user and abuser of the Kurds. 

Inside, Kurds have let internal divisions and shortsightedness to allow Arab and Turk conquerors of their own millennially geographical majority territory to do this to themselves as well. Some Kurds even allied with Saddam Hussein, responsible for Operation Anfal and other Arab genocidal actions, which ultimately took some 200,000 Kurdish lives–including many gassed to death.

I had hoped that this time, in Syria, it would be different.

Yes, I knew of President Trump’s promise to disengage from the region militarily during his election campaign. However, I also hoped, with his own “thinking out of the box” moves already having a positive impact elsewhere, that he would rethink the nasty State Department-driven policies towards our loyal friends and allies, who suffered tens of thousands of dead and wounded fighting for America’s own causes as well. The late great William Safire of The New York Times wrote a series of articles about this Henry Kissinger-led disgrace in the ‘70shttps://kurdistantribune.com/henry-kissinger-realpolitik-genocide/.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14980/france-homegrown-terrorism

French police investigating a woman for suspected ties to ISIS discovered a USB drive that contained personal details, including home addresses, of thousands of French police officials. Who provided that information?

“In the street, veiled women and men wearing jellabas are de facto propaganda, an Islamization of the street, just as the uniforms of an occupying army remind the defeated of their submission.” – French journalist Eric Zemmour, September 28, 2019.

Le Monde, France’s most prestigious newspaper, ran an op-ed after the recent attack, charging the country with “Islamophobic McCarthysm.” Harpon, the terrorist who murdered his colleagues at police headquarters, would have agreed.

The problem is that France has, for years, been in a state of denial about the proliferation of radical Islam.

This time, the terrorist did not use firearms; his victims were not unarmed children, cartoonists or Jews but policemen.

The site of the October 3 attack was also striking: “The interior of the Paris police headquarters is supposed to be a stronghold; it is the symbol of public order in France and of the anti-jihadist struggle that has been shaken,” the French scholar Gilles Kepel told Le Figaro.

“We have entered a… terrorism made in France… with a mixture of Friday preaching by extremist imams, social networks and the instrumentalization of fragile individuals. It is about creating a new panic in society by targeting iconic … places… The attack is a major turning point in Islamist terrorism.”