RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/10/locked-down-in-london/

Leaving the re-opened London Library (masks compulsory throughout, all borrowed books subject to sterilisation) in the late afternoon I walk through a West End so desolate it could be the set for an apocalyptic film. All but a handful of its scores of cafes, restaurants and drinking places have closed, many of them permanently. Not only are there no tourists or theatregoers, but most of the businesspeople have not come back, despite the end of lockdown. The staff in the Jermyn Street gentlemen’s shirtmakers, bootmakers and hairdressers try not to look like men and women contemplating unemployment and poverty. 

Other, more residential quarters of the capital have returned to busyness. But even on the busiest high streets there are bleak stretches of boarded-up shops and restaurants. Things were not good on the high street even before COVID-19. High rates—the business-destroying property taxes on which the English exchequer excessively relies—high rents, internet shopping, and the drift away from communal entertainment had all taken their toll. The lockdown turned the possible demise of thousands of enterprises into certainties. For most people, or at least most people over thirty-five, it is sad to see the end of so many pubs, butchers’ shops, newsagents, cinemas, grocery stores and the abundant cheerful cafes that enlivened British life and improved British coffee-drinking taste after the 1980s. For others, especially the sort of person who sees all technological or internet-related change as an unqualified good, or who prefers to communicate or be entertained while physically alone, none of this seems like a great loss.

Among the British political and journalistic class there seems to be remarkably little concern about the economic impact of the lockdown, the millions of jobs that have already been lost, or the likely political and psychological impact of mass unemployment and impoverishment.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16616/pasteur-noble-vision

It is Communist China the source of COVID-19, and a country that has, as its openly stated aim, global domination. Equally dangerous are those in league with Beijing. Their eyes are on cheap labor and a market of 1.5 billion consumers. These sympathizers wish, for their personal profit, to trade away the future of our democracy. They are collaborating with Marxist Communists and need to be exposed and held accountable for being accomplices to tyranny and the deaths of more than 1,000,000 people by the virus exported by China.

Pasteur’s Noble Vision stands in stark contrast to a Vision of Evil as he reminds us that, “It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes… (and)… It is in the power of man to cause all infectious diseases to disappear from the world.”

It is Communist China that will use anyone and any means to reduce America to a second rate power.

“It is not the germs we need worry about. It is our inner terrain,” Louis Pasteur put the world on notice.

One of the greatest microbiologist in history is still warning all of us about where the real danger lies in this era of politics and pandemic. It is important to look beyond COVID and see what really threatens our nation’s future.

It is Communist China, the source of COVID-19, and a country that has, as its openly stated aim, global domination. Equally dangerous are those in league with Beijing. Their eyes are on cheap labor and a market of 1.5 billion consumers. These sympathizers wish, for their personal profit, to trade away the future of our democracy. They are collaborating with Marxist Communists and need to be exposed and held accountable for being accomplices to tyranny and the deaths of more than 1,000,000 people by the virus exported by China. It is Communist China that will use anyone and any means to reduce America to a second rate power.

Pasteur’s Noble Vision stands in stark contrast to a Vision of Evil as he reminds us that, “It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes… (and)… It is in the power of man to cause all infectious diseases to disappear from the world.”

Every American patriot needs to heed Pasteur. Our central problem is not about germs. It is about those from China abroad and their Fifth Columnists at home who are trying to destroy our freedoms and control the Free World. The warning is clear for those wise enough to hear it. It is time to act.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16615/erdogan-armenia-azerbaijan

The emergence of Turkey as a key player in the latest eruption of violence in the disputed Caucasus region of Nagorno-Karabakh needs to be seen within the context of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambition of recreating the Ottoman Empire.

As the bitter fighting intensifies between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan over the disputed territory in the Caucasus Mountains, it has emerged that Mr Erdogan is supplying the Azeris with weapons and mercenaries in their campaign to reclaim control of the enclave.

Apart from supplying conventional weapons, there have been suggestions that Turkish-made cluster bombs — which are banned under international law — have been used in attacks on Armenian positions.

In addition, Ankara has been accused of sending Syrian rebels to Azerbaijan to help with its campaign to reclaim the enclave.

Turkey’s support for Azerbaijan, which could prove to be decisive in the conflict, stems from Mr Erdogan’s determination to recreate the glory of the Ottoman Empire, when Turkey formed the epicentre of the Muslim world.

Although the territory that now constitutes modern Azerbaijan was never under direct Ottoman control, the local tribes came under the influence of Muslim Turks, to the extent that many Azeris today speak a form of Turkish dialect.

More recently the bond between Turkey and Azerbaijan has resulted in the two countries undertaking joint military exercises on a regular basis.

Never one to miss an opportunity to expand Turkey’s influence in the Muslim world, Mr Erdogan has been quick to lend his backing to Azerbaijan in its bid to reclaim control over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Within hours of the conflict erupting, the Turkish president tweeted, “The Turkish people will support our Azerbaijani brothers with all our means as always,” adding for good measure that Armenia was “the biggest threat to regional peace.”

The dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh dates back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s when the territory, whose population is primarily Armenian, opted to break away from the control of neighbouring Azerbaijan, a country composed mainly of Shiite Muslims.

The decision prompted a bitter war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in 1992 after both countries gained independence from the Soviet Union, claiming the lives of an estimated 30,000 people.

Since then an uneasy truce has settled on the region as a result of a Russian-brokered ceasefire in 1994.

The latest outbreak of violence — the most serious to affect the region since the early 1990s — began at the end of last month, after Azerbaijan was accused of launching a full-scale assault against Armenian positions in the mountainous enclave, prompting a full-scale mobilisation of Armenian forces.

During the recent fighting, it is estimated that more than 300 people have been killed and thousands forced from their homes as the fighting has intensified.

On one level, Turkey’s support for Azerbaijan is not surprising in view of its long and troubled relationship with the Armenian people, with the Turks accused of being responsible the systematic mass murder and expulsion of around 1.5 million Armenians during the last days of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.

Even so, Mr Erdogan’s intervention in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute puts him at odds with another major power with aspirations to increase its influence in the region, namely Russia.

Russia regards Armenia as an important regional ally, and maintains an important military base at the country’s second largest city, Gyumri.

Consequently, Mr Erdogan needs to proceed with caution so far as his support for Azerbaijan is concerned. Otherwise he could find that Russian interest in the Caucasus presents a formidable obstacle to his plans to recreate Turkey’s Ottoman glory.

Con Coughlin is the Telegraph’s Defence and Foreign Affairs Editor and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/02/the-end-of-the-age-of-insurgency/

This week marks 20 years since the outbreak of the Second Intifada. The years that followed witnessed bus and café bombings perpetrated by organizations wrapped in the banners of insurgent political Islam, most importantly Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Their tactics—including suicide bombings and the deliberate targeting of civilians—were borrowed from an earlier generation of Islamists, the Shiite jihadis of the Lebanese group Hezbollah.

The history of the past 20 years marks the rise of the revolutionary political idea of insurgent political Islam—but also its sudden decline. For a distinct period, bottom-up Islamism was the most vital political ideology in the Middle East, capturing the energy that was once invested in pan-Arab nationalism in an earlier era. Islamism’s ongoing eclipse is no less stark than the similar decline of its predecessor ideology.

The Second Intifada was the first eruption of political Islam in its insurgent form against a Western democracy (Sunni Islamism had already risen against and been defeated by the Syrian and Algerian regimes in the 1980s and ‘90s, respectively.) It felt unfamiliar at first, but would quickly become a harbinger. One year later, as Israel was still in the middle of its assault of suicide bombings, al Qaeda destroyed the twin towers in New York. That attack—together with subsequent ones in Madrid, London, and Paris—ushered in a global focus on the issue of insurgent political Islam.