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February 2021

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Pax Sinica takes shape in the Middle East David Goldman

By on February 4th, 2021

https://asiatimes.com/2021/02/a-pax-sinica-takes-shape-in-the-middle-east/

The emerging Sinocentric bloc of Turkey, Iran and Pakistan could leave America’s ally India isolated and weak

A “Pax Sinica” is emerging in the Middle East and Central Asia in plain sight, albeit unnoticed by American planners. The main brace of the strategic architecture is an emerging alliance between Pakistan, a Chinese economic dependency, and Turkey, which relies increasingly on China for financing and trade. Chinese media reported the Turkish foreign minister’s visit to Pakistan Jan. 12 to 13th as a key step towards such an alliance.  And if Turkey and Pakistan ally, “Iran has no choice but to find a way to join the Turkish-Pakistan camp,” in the view of a Chinese military site reposted by NetEase.

I first raised the prospect of a “Pax Sinica” in the Middle East in 2013, and noted last year that a much-discussed (but so far only discussed) Sino-Iranian investment deal of up to $400 billion was “a move on a global game board in response to American efforts to hinder China’s breakout as a technological superpower.” The Turkey-Pakistan rapprochement of the past several months adds a new dimension to China’s ambitions in the region.

While America focused on the peace agreements between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan, China maneuvered among the only three Muslim states with significant military capacity and economic potential. The $2 trillion Belt and Road Initiative will provide the economic foundation for Chinese hegemony from the Indian Ocean to the Black Sea. The emerging Sinocentric bloc of Turkey, Iran and Pakistan will leave America’s ally India isolated and weak, Chinese planners believe. It’s geopolitics played on the principles of Go, whose object is to encircle and isolate the opposing pieces.

The “Abraham Accords” between Israel and several Arab states have symbolic importance, and expose the Arab-Israeli conflict as the least interesting fault line in Western Asia, as former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren wrote Jan. 12. They are the result of American weakness rather than strength; Trump’s declared intention to remove American boots from the region’s ground left the Gulf States to fend for themselves against Iran and Turkey. The Gulf monarchies decided that Israel was less objectionable than Iranian Shi’ites or the Turkish-backed Muslim Brotherhood. But Israel and the Gulf States cannot quite fill the gap left by the strategic withdrawal from the United States. China means to fill it by working with Turkey, Iran and Pakistan.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

UAE embraces trade with Israeli-owned businesses in Judea and Samaria Eliana Rudee

By on February 4th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/?ct=t%28Daily+Syndicate+1-31-21+%28old%29_COPY_01%29

Yaakov Berg, who owns the Psagot Winery with his wife, expresses his hope that “peace with the Emirates will change our relationship with Palestinians.”

The Psagot Winery sits on the peaks of the Binyamin region mountains in Judea and Samaria, north of Jerusalem and just east of Ramallah. Though Psagot and many Israeli-owned businesses operating over the 1967 armistice lines have historically experienced boycotts in Europe and throughout the Arab world, many say that in the context of the Abraham Accords, this may be changing.

When Yaakov Berg and his wife, Naama, established the Psagot Winery in 2002, they made fewer than 3,000 bottles. Today, that number has grown to 750,000 bottles per year—70 percent of which are exported to 30 countries, including North America, as well as throughout Europe, Asia and Australia. Their new goal is to produce 1 million bottles with a vast majority of them for export, including to Arab countries, which was not before possible.

According to Yaakov Berg, he and wine suppliers in the United Arab Emirates are finalizing “several deals in the making” to export the Israeli wine to the Gulf, crediting the progress made in trade relations between Israel and the UAE to the Trump administration and former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who visited the Psagot Winery during his most recent visit to Israel, becoming the first top American diplomat to tour an Israeli-owned company located beyond the pre-’67 borders.

In December, Hamad Baumim, the UAE head of Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said in an interview with Globes that he has “no problem” with Israeli products made in the West Bank, and that when they are imported to the UAE, they will be treated as all other Israeli products and with no special labeling.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Andrew Cuomo Was a Villain All Along By Pradheep J. Shanker

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/andrew-cuomo-was-a-villain-all-along/

A deep dive into New York AG Letitia James’ COVID report reveals disturbing truths about the celebrity governor’s pandemic deception.

F or much of the past year, the mainstream media and Democrats have largely blamed former president Donald Trump and his administration for most of America’s COVID-19 deaths. Trump did indeed fail in certain aspects of coordination, messaging, and inserting politics into the parts of the process where it didn’t belong. He deserves credit, however, for Operation Warp Speed, the initiative that (ultimately successfully) fostered the development of coronavirus vaccines, one of the most successful public-private ventures in modern history. But Trump’s overbearing personality tended to absorb all the attention, leaving little room for real debate on the successes and failures of other politicians, except when the media found time to criticize Republican governors. But serious criticism of Democrats in this period was rare.

Until now.

It is important not to dismiss a critical fact here: James herself is a longtime Cuomo political progeny. He supported her attorney general campaign. That someone who for years has been closely aligned with Cuomo released this report is damning in and of itself. Yet the evidence it contains is even worse than the report itself suggests. If anything, the media response to it has been an underreaction.

The 76-page report relates, in great detail, the state’s irresponsible reaction to COVID raging through extended-care centers, primarily nursing homes. James and her team went straight to nursing homes to obtain the data, bypassing the state’s own data-collection entities. They took a random data sampling from 62 nursing homes around the state and found that 1,914 of their residents had died from COVID, 56 percent more than the 1,229 the state reported. If that sample is truly representative of the total for New York, the state’s nursing-home deaths total more than 13,000, where the state tallies just 8,711. (Overall New York COVID deaths remain unchanged.)

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Israel Leads the World in Vaccinating Its Population Its fast start is producing lessons and benefits for other countries Charles Lipson

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/02/03/why-israel-lea

No country has been more successful in getting COVID vaccine to its citizens than Israel. Why? Three reasons stand out, and the third one is likely to help people around the world.

Israel can vaccinate the population quickly because it has a very competent, comprehensive national health system, based on several health maintenance organizations, all supervised by the Ministry of Health. The system includes digitized medical records for everyone in the country.
Israel bought enough vaccine. Earlier in the pandemic, it contracted for millions of doses from Moderna. More recently, it agreed to buy millions more from Pfizer so everyone over 16 can be vaccinated by the end of March. To clinch the Pfizer purchase, Jerusalem gave the company two incentives: It paid well above the market price, and it offered to share medical data with the company—data that few other countries could gather.
Israeli biostatisticians can pair the medical reactions of millions of vaccine recipients with each one’s medical history and demographic data. This will allow public health professionals worldwide to gain a nuanced understanding of how the vaccine works, both in the entire population and in various subgroups, such as women over 80 or people with Type II diabetes.

The country could afford the mass purchases thanks to decades of economic growth, grounded in high-technology, medical research, water conservation, sophisticated weapons development, cybersecurity and more. The growth was spurred by market-oriented public policies, adopted after years of sluggish European-style socialism under Labor governments.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

What to do about Marjorie Taylor Greene? By Sally Zelikovsky

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/what_to_do_about_marjorie_taylor_greene.html

Along with Democrats, many Republicans are calling for newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s expulsion from Congress because of her controversial comments about school shootings and Jews starting forest fires with space lasers.  Daniel Greenfield writes at frontpagemag.com that kooks like her sabotage our efforts against the Democrats.

Greenfield makes a legitimate point: GOP crackpots can indeed inflict tremendous damage on the party.  Who could forget Todd Akin’s comment about “legitimate rape”?  Not only did Republicans drop him like a hot potato, but his Senate run against Claire McCaskill imploded. A similar fate befell Indiana’s Richard Mourdock for an equally bizarre rape comment and, thus, Democrats rode the Republican “War on Women” all the way to Obama’s re-election. 

But, unless MTG did something criminal or morally repugnant, just because we think we know better – and maybe we do – should House Republicans be able to nullify her election by giving her the boot? (Liz Cheney’s situation differs in that Republicans seek to remove her as Conference Chair, not from holding office.)  Isn’t Greene entitled to her opinions—no matter how wrong, repugnant, or absurd they may be—in the same way that Adam Schiff’s belief that Trump urinated on Obama’s hotel bed, is still indulged? 

Such folly isn’t just for conservatives.  Every time Pelosi opens her mouth something ridiculous falls out, like passing a bill in order to read it.  The Squad speaks almost exclusively in anti-Semitic and racist tongues.  Hank Johnson feared Guam would tip over from the weight of soldiers.  Whites are racists because of their skin color.  Trump murdered all Covid victims and Cruz tried to murder AOC.    

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MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: THREE CHEERS FOR JARED KUSHNER AND MICHAEL POMPEO BY RUTH KING

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/three_cheers_for_jared_kushner_and_michael_pompeo.html

President Biden’s ventriloquist, Barack Obama, will make every effort to scuttle or damage the historic Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab nations. Those efforts will fail thanks to the sage counsel and logistical cooperation of his trusted adviser, confidante, and son-in-law Jared Kushner and his loyal and effective Secretary of State Michael Pompeo.

From 1967 until the advent of President Donald Trump, every single administration has put forth peace plans that air-brushed the terror and genocidal ambitions of Israel’s Arab enemies and predicated a gratuitous demand that Israel accept concessions and territorial withdrawals in exchange for “recognition of its right to exist.” The Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, and the Gaza withdrawal were clones of each other.

No sober democracy would have accepted those terms from tyrants, and no good-faith American President would have demanded them. However, the Israeli governments of Menachem Begin, Itzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu did so, and each agreement was followed by unrelenting terror against hapless civilians. The dead were cynically referred to as “casualties of peace.”

Enter President Donald Trump who, breaking with tradition, relied more on Jared Kushner, David Friedman (America’s Ambassador to Israel), and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, rather than on the standard recommendations from the military and State Department officials.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Sends 2,000 Doses of a Covid-19 Vaccine to Palestinians The country is a leader in immunizations but could still be at risk if the virus keeps spreading in the West Bank and Gaza by Dov Lieber

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-sends-2-000-doses-of-a-covid-19-vaccine-to-palestinians-11612201397?mod=world_major_1_pos8

TEL AVIV—Israel transferred the first batch of a Covid-19 vaccine to the Palestinians amid growing concerns over the disease’s spread in the neighboring West Bank and Gaza becoming a threat to the country.

The Defense Ministry on Monday supplied 2,000 doses of Moderna Inc.’s vaccine to the Palestinian Authority, which governs part of the West Bank, Israeli officials said. Israel has agreed to give a total of 5,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccine to the Palestinians to inoculate front-line medical workers, they added.

The shipment was approved out of health concerns resulting from the mixing of Israeli and Palestinian populations, the officials said. A local committee of professional health advisers last week told the Israeli government that vaccinating the Palestinians is a “clear necessity” for Israel’s battle with the pandemic.

Israel two weeks ago had sent the Palestinian Authority 100 doses of a coronavirus vaccine for Palestinian health staff as a one-time humanitarian gesture, according to an Israeli security official.

Palestinian Authority officials couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.

Israel leads the world in vaccinating against Covid-19 in terms of percentage of the total population inoculated. It aims to vaccinate much of its population by March, but even if it succeeds, the coronavirus could still be a risk as long as it continues to spread in the West Bank and Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians enter Israel and the Jewish settlements in the West Bank for work, mainly in the construction sector, every day.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Burma’s Coup and Biden’s Choice The U.S. response needs to take into account China’s regional designs.

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/burmas-coup-and-bidens-choice-11612222727?mod=opinion_major_pos1

From protests in Moscow to Chinese air incursions over Taiwan, the world is wasting no time testing Joe Biden’s foreign policy team of liberal internationalists. On Monday Americans woke up to news of a swift and (so far) bloodless coup in Burma, whose transition to democratic government was touted by the Obama Administration as one of its major achievements.

Now the country’s generals are moving to reassert control after their party was walloped in November elections. Aung San Suu Kyi, the top elected leader of Burma (also called Myanmar), wanted to use her mandate to change the constitution to limit the generals’ power. That looks like the trigger for the military’s forced suspension of civilian government and communications blackout.

The Biden Administration is rightly denouncing the move, but the U.S. has limited leverage acting alone. The West has used market access as a carrot to urge Burma’s military rulers to cede power to Ms. Suu Kyi. Yet the extent that a power transition actually occurred was exaggerated. A return to economically isolating the country of 54 million on China’s southern border could hurt the Burmese people and play into Beijing’s hands.

As our Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2019, “Western fecklessness has made China look to Myanmar like a more stable and reliable partner.” President Trump’s great-power diplomacy was sometimes crudely transactional. Yet the Biden team might be tempted to pivot too far in the opposite direction, stressing liberal values at the expense of core American interests.

The top U.S. priority in Asia is limiting Beijing’s ability to control independent states like Burma, which is strategically situated in the Indo-Pacific. China is holding back from condemning the coup, likely in hopes of making diplomatic inroads with a military government.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: No to Normalization with the ‘Zionist entity’ by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17024/palestinians-normalization-israel

The anti-normalization campaign, which is also waged by Palestinians, means that any Palestinian leader or negotiator who is seen sitting with an Israeli will be condemned by Palestinians and possibly other Arabs as a traitor…. and accused of committing treason.

The last thing any Palestinian officials wants is to be labeled a traitor because, in the world of Fatah and Hamas, that crime is punishable by death.

If… Abbas wants to avoid such a fate, he must do an about-face and put an end to the anti-Israel incitement that is coming, first and foremost, from his very own loyalists.

If and when the Biden administration manages to revive the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, it will have to take into consideration that the Arab campaign against normalization with Israel remains as aggressive as ever.

The anti-normalization campaign, which is also waged by Palestinians, means that any Palestinian leader or negotiator who is seen sitting with an Israeli will be condemned by Palestinians and possibly other Arabs as a traitor.

Two recent examples of the ongoing campaign:

On January 6, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), a body dominated by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction and representing hundreds of Palestinian journalists, issued a warning to its members against engaging in normalization activities with Israelis.

The warning came in response to reports that the Israel Defense Forces had invited Palestinian journalists to participate in a Zoom briefing on Israel’s measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Some of the Palestinian journalists who reportedly received the invitation alerted the PJS, which swiftly issued the warning to all its members.

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BOOKS, HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When a Far-Left, Female-Led Domestic Terrorism Group Bombed the U.S. Capitol Forgotten in the wake of January 6.

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/when-far-left-female-led-domestic-terrorism-group-lloyd-billingsley/

In the furor over the January 6 riot, which Sen. Mitt Romney called an “insurrection incited by the president of the United States,” a more serious assault on the Capitol has been overlooked. For those who weren’t around or may have forgotten, here’s what went down on the evening of November 7, 1983.

“Listen carefully, I’m only going to tell you this one time,” a caller from the “Armed Resistance Unit,” told the operator at the Capitol switchboard. “There is a bomb in the Capitol building. It will go off in five minutes. Evacuate the building.” A Senate document, “Bomb Explodes in Capitol,” describes what happened.

The caller warned that “a bomb had been placed near the chamber in retaliation for recent U.S. military involvement in Grenada and Lebanon.” At 10:58 p.m. “a thunderous explosion tore through the second floor of the Capitol’s north wing.” The device, hidden under a bench at the eastern end of the corridor outside the Senate chamber, “blew off the door to the office of Democratic Leader Robert C. Byrd.  The blast also punched a potentially lethal hole in a wall partition sending a shower of pulverized brick, plaster, and glass into the Republican cloakroom.” The adjacent halls were virtually deserted, so “many lives had been spared.”

Later than night, the Armed Resistance Unit called National Public Radio and proclaimed, “Tonight we bombed the U.S. Capitol.” The bombers “purposely aimed our attack at the institutions of imperialist rule rather than at individual members of the ruling class and government. We did not choose to kill any of them at this time. But their lives are not sacred and their hands are stained with the blood of millions.”

Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol is the title of the 2020 book by historian William Rosenau. In a Smithsonian magazine article headlined “In the 1980s a Far-Left, Female-Led Domestic Terrorism Group Bombed the U.S. Capitol,” Rosenau outlined the group’s back story.

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