Displaying the most recent of 90412 posts written by

Ruth King

Iran’s Military Alliance with China Threatens Middle East Security by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16252/iran-china-military-alliance

Announcing Iran’s intention to build a new military base in the Indian Ocean, Admiral Alireza Tangsiri, the commander of the naval attachment of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said that the base would be used to protect fishing and commercial vessels from piracy and “foreign ships”, a reference to the US-led multinational naval task force that is currently protecting Gulf shipping from Iranian interference.

As part of the deal negotiated with Beijing, China is to be allowed access to a number of Iranian ports, including Chabahar, with the Chinese reported to be planning to build a new military base in the vicinity of the port.

The construction of such a base would enable the Chinese Navy to monitor the activities of the U.S. Navy in the area, in particular the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the Gulf, which is permanently deployed to protect shipping passing through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important economic waterways.

Any expansion in Iranian and Chinese military activity in the region would also have an impact on the jointly-administered U.S.-UK base on the island of Diego Garcia, one of the Pentagon’s most important military assets in the region.

The U.S. faces the prospect of a serious escalation in tensions with Iran after Tehran’s announcement that it intends to build a new military base in the Indian Ocean by the end of the year.

The Iranian announcement, moreover, comes at a time when Tehran is on the point of signing a $400 billion trade deal with China, which will include closer military cooperation between the two countries in the region in an attempt to counter Washington’s traditional dominance.

Under the terms of the deal, details of which have been published in the New York Times, Iran could receive as much as $400 billion in Chinese investment over the next quarter of a century.

The agreement, which a senior aide to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says should be signed by March next year, also encompasses closer military cooperation between the two countries, including weapons development, combined training and intelligence sharing in order to combat “the lopsided battle with terrorism, drug and human trafficking and cross-border crimes.”

As part of the new era of cooperation between Tehran and Beijing, concerns have been raised by Western security officials that this could lead to the two countries forming an alliance to bolster their presence in the Indian Ocean, thereby challenging America’s long-standing dominance in the nearby Gulf region.

Announcing Iran’s intention to build a new military base in the Indian Ocean, Admiral Alireza Tangsiri, the commander of the naval attachment of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said that the base would be used to protect fishing and commercial vessels from piracy and “foreign ships”, a reference to the US-led multinational naval task force that is currently protecting Gulf shipping from Iranian interference.

Iran has so far given no indication as to where it intends to build its new base. At present Chabahar port in the Gulf of Oman, which is used, among other activities, for shipping goods to Afghanistan, is the nearest base Iran has to the Indian Ocean.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Where Is the Outrage Over Anti-Semitism in Sports and Hollywood?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kareem-abdul-jabbar-is-outrage-anti-semitism-sports-hollywood-1303210

Recent incidents of anti-Semitic tweets and posts from sports and entertainment celebrities are a very troubling omen for the future of the Black Lives Matter movement, but so too is the shocking lack of massive indignation. Given the New Woke-fulness in Hollywood and the sports world, we expected more passionate public outrage. What we got was a shrug of meh-rage.

When reading the dark squishy entrails of popular culture, meh-rage in the face of sustained prejudice is an indisputable sign of the coming Apatholypse: apathy to all forms of social justice. After all, if it’s OK to discriminate against one group of people by hauling out cultural stereotypes without much pushback, it must be OK to do the same to others. Illogic begets illogic.

Ice Cube’s June 10 daylong series of tweets, which involved some creepy symbols and images, in general implied that Jews were responsible for the oppression of blacks. NFL player DeSean Jackson tweeted out several anti-Semitic messages, including a quote he incorrectly thought was from Hitler (not your go-to guy for why-can’t-we-all-get-along quotes) stating that Jews had a plan to “extort America” and achieve “world domination.” Isn’t that SPECTRE’s job in James Bond movies?

Bias and bigotry on the Syracuse University campus The message for Jewish students is clear: Shed your identity or get canceled.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/bias-and-bigotry-on-the-syracuse-university-campus/

The message for Jewish students is clear: Shed your identity or get canceled. Justine Murray

What appeared to be a noble effort to discuss bias at Syracuse University ironically turned into a vicious exercise in bias and bigotry as the conversations turned into an anti-Semitic witch hunt. A few students recently created multiple Instagram pages, inviting fellow students and faculty to post stories about incidents of bias on campus. Those who share their stories are permitted to remain anonymous, but the students and professors accused of perpetrating bias are freely and fully identified—and targeted.

One of the pages has warned their viewers to look out for “openly Zionist” professors on campus, naming one professor in particular and attacking students who support the faculty member.

Miriam F. Elman, who teaches about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, isn’t the only Jewish professor who works at Syracuse, but she is openly Zionist and isn’t afraid to say so. Despite being on leave for the past year, she is being singled out by a malicious and libelous smear campaign on one Instagram page that is demanding that she be fired because of her Zionism and former service in the Israeli Defense Forces.

Trump’s New Chant: Build the Road Fixing environmental reviews will pay real dividends for years.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-new-chant-build-the-road-11594941448?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Trump often gets itchy to sign some giant public-works spending bill. Here’s a much better gift to America: The White House on Wednesday finished its renovations to the process for environmental reviews. This might sound as dry as old cement, but it’ll help big projects get built for years to come—that is, if President Joe Biden doesn’t use an expedited procedure next year to undo it.

A 1970 law called the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, mandates an environmental study if a major project involves federal funding or permitting. In 1981 the expectation by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) was that even for “large complex energy projects,” the whole review process “would require only about 12 months.”

Today that seems heavenly. In recent years the average review involving an environmental impact statement took 4.5 years, and the final document ran to 661 pages, before appendixes. In a quarter of cases, the process burned at least six years and 748 pages. Those timelines don’t necessarily count any subsequent lawsuits over whether the NEPA review was faulty. One sadly spectacular outlier was a 12-mile highway expansion in Denver that took 13 years to get through environmental review.

The Trump Administration’s reforms, which are the first comprehensive update to NEPA rules since 1978, establish presumptive limits. A full environmental impact statement, the new rules say, should take no more than two years and 300 pages. An environmental assessment, which is less intensive, should max out at a year and 75 pages. Going longer will require written permission by “a senior agency official.”

New York Times denizens respond to Bari Weiss resignation over bullying — with more bullying By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/new_york_times_denizens_respond_to_bari_weiss_resignation_over_bullying__with_more_bullying.htm

 It ought to have been embarrassing for the New York Times to have a top op-ed editor resign with fiery criticism of the paper’s stultifying leftism. In the news industry, it’s pretty rare for anyone to resign, let alone say what the problem was. That’s what happened a couple days ago, when Bari Weiss submitted her resignation to the paper, denouncing the far-left atmosphere of cancel-culture bullying, the signs of which have been pretty obvious for years. After all, not too long ago, this bunch forced the Times’ op-ed boss out merely for running an opinion piece by an elected Republican senator because the snowflake staffers said it made them feel “unsafe.” Weiss had had enough and threw in the towel. Thomas Lifson noted that the letter was likely “historic” in its significance.

Embarrassed? Not in the least. Not at the Times. In fact, plenty of them bit back and got catty. All because what she she wrote. Ms. Weiss writes that she herself faced “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.” She writes that they “have called me a Nazi and a racist.” She adds that she has learned to “brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.'” She has too much grace to mention that her writing about Jews included covering the murders at her hometown’s Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Ms. Weiss’s tenure at the Times became an ordeal. Friendly colleagues were “badgered by coworkers,” she told Mr. Sulzberger.

“My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly ‘inclusive’ one, while others post ax emojis next to my name.” First mean girl out the gate was Hannah Jones, creator of the phony 1619 Project, who had a couple of retweets about Weiss and now has up this counter-claim to victimhood: She also had this screen grab inexplicably up: Then there were the deniers — a collection of whom were collected here: In other words, nothing to see here, Bari Weiss is a liar, no such thing as wokesters taking over, we’re all just objective journalists trying to get at the truth.

The NFL Is on the Brink By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/nfl-football-politics-risks-alienating-fans/

If the multibillion-dollar NFL decides that multimillionaire players have no obligation to stand to honor a collective national anthem, and that there will be separate anthems and politicized uniforms, then millions of Americans will quietly shrug and change the channel

The league survived all sorts of crises in the past, yet they are in deep trouble like never before.

The National Football League celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. This should be a time of self-congratulation for the brutal sport, which has no similar counterpart outside the United States.

The NFL’s megaprofits dwarf those of other professional sports in the U.S. The Super Bowl, not the World Series, is America’s national sports event.

The league survived all sorts of crises in the past. It was one of the first professional sports to integrate its teams, doing so in the 1920s. But the integration unfortunately ceased, and the NFL didn’t reintegrate until the mid ’40s, becoming one of the last sports leagues to embrace fully a racially blind meritocracy.

The NFL successfully absorbed the rival American Football League in 1966. So far the NFL has avoided federal safety regulations that could curb the incidence of physical trauma inherent in the sport.

The league’s owners are a cross-section of America’s most successful entrepreneurs and old-money families — many of them politically well-connected.

Yet the NFL is in deep trouble like never before.

In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem. He claimed he was protesting the treatment of African Americans.

Andrew Cuomo Is Not a COVID Hero

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/andrew-cuomo-is-not-a-covid-hero/

The media have decided to play along with New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s bizarre effort to reinvent himself as the hero of the fight against COVID-19. Cuomo’s motivation is transparent enough, and we are duly impressed at the chutzpah required to even attempt such a thing. But there is no excuse for anyone else enabling him.

You would never know from listening to Cuomo’s glowing press notices (with the honorable exception of CNN’s Jake Tapper) that more than 32,000 New Yorkers have died from the coronavirus — over twice as many as in any other state. Brooklyn and Queens each lost more than 5,500 people, compared with 4,521 thus far in the entire state of Florida. On a per capita basis, New York’s COVID-19 death rate has been a third higher than any nation on earth, and higher than that of any state besides neighboring New Jersey. Italy, an early epicenter of the pandemic, lost 561 people per million; New York lost 1,667.

This is not just a random occurrence. New York’s authorities were reassuring the public to go on as normal until well past the point where the coronavirus had spread pervasively throughout the community. They had let languish the city and state stockpiles of emergency equipment. Most disastrously, Cuomo and New Jersey governor Phil Murphy both ordered nursing homes to take back patients who tested positive for the virus, unleashing catastrophic death tolls in both states’ nursing-home populations.

Cuomo’s claim for success is that the state’s infection, hospitalization, and death rates have come down, which is rather like if New Orleans had celebrated the water level coming down after Katrina. And just this week, it was reported that infection rates are rising again among young adults and in affluent neighborhoods; New York may not be entirely out of the woods.

Locking America Down Again Is Exactly What China Wants Because It Will Ruin Us By Joy Pullmann

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/16/locking-america-down-again-is-exactly-what-china-wants-because-it-will-ruin-us/
Stop trying to make lockdowns happen again. The world can’t afford it.

The governors of Texas and California, the nation’s two most populous states, recently reimposed coronavirus lockdowns despite falling death rates and health-care capacity far beyond hospitalization rates. Numerous other governors have delayed reopenings or reversed them in similar situations.

Lockdowns are not necessary to prevent coronavirus deaths, since the current capacity for treating cases is far above what is needed and people are going to get this disease until there’s a cure. Further, lockdowns accelerate systemic weaknesses such as our national debt, poor education, large numbers of working-age men who do not work, failure to pay for decades of overspending at both the national and state levels, tendency to bail out corrupt institutions such as schools, big business, and hospitals, and bloated health care system.

The Chinese Communist Party knows of all this. That is why it has expertly manipulated American corporate media’s anti-American biases to undermine their biggest competitor for control of the world.

Lockdowns of Western nations, and chiefly of the United States, are China’s only hope for achieving this long-term plan in its coronavirus-weakened state. Thus, continuing to play into this mass-murdering regime’s hands through cuckolded American leadership will have far more deadly consequences than coronavirus. This is why the lockdowns need to end now, and never come back again.

John Podhoretz Woke wolves and the cowardly leaders of liberal America

https://nypost.com/2020/07/15/woke-wolves-and-the-cowardly-leaders-of-liberal-america/

It isn’t really about Bari Weiss.

The mob inside The New York Times didn’t target Weiss, an opinion editor and writer there since 2017, for cancellation to get her specifically — though her smart writing and editing surely didn’t endear her to some of the third-rate digital-media hacks and ­talentless millennials who ­enjoyed the pursuit of this journalistic star on the rise due to their loathsome envy.

As Weiss detailed in a widely read public resignation letter on Tuesday, she left her job after constant bullying by more left-wing colleagues (the vast majority) that included underhanded gossip, anti-Semitic innuendo and public attacks against her that would never have been tolerated had she been the one meting them out.

She also described an atmosphere of pervasive ideological intimidation and conformity that finally made commissioning diverse viewpoints and writing and thinking freely — essential to opinion journalism — all but impossible.

So Weiss left. But again, it wasn’t ultimately about her. The mob’s real targets are twofold.

First, the mob yearns to scare into submission everyone in a position of authority at the Times and any other liberal institution in America who might think it wise to hire someone like Bari Weiss — someone who draws outside the ideological lines and brings a fresh perspective.

U.S. Needs a Broad Response to China-Iran Moves By Lawrence J. Haas

https://www.newsweek.com/us-needs-broad-response-china-iran-moves-opinion-1518160
A new China-Iran economic and military agreement and this fall’s expiration of the global arms embargo on Iran could dramatically upend international relations by expanding China’s global reach, empowering Iran to threaten America’s regional allies, undercutting U.S. efforts to pressure both nations and further destabilizing the Middle East.

From their agreement-which both nations plan to finalize and ratify in the coming months-China will get a greater foothold in the Middle East, threatening traditional U.S. big-power supremacy there. Iran, meanwhile, will receive an important economic lifeline through Chinese investments and oil purchases, and added security from a tighter military relationship with Beijing.

From the arms embargo’s expiration, Iran will get unimpeded global access to sophisticated weaponry-weaponry that it can use to continue building its own threatening arsenal, as well as to arm its allies like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and terrorist proxies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere.

These converging developments demand a thoughtful response from the West. The United States and its allies now need to develop a broad strategy to contain Beijing and Tehran and thwart their ambitions.

“Two ancient Asian cultures,” Beijing and Tehran declared in the opening sentence of their draft agreement, “two partners in the sectors of trade, economy, politics, culture and security with a similar outlook and many mutual bilateral and multilateral interests will consider one another strategic partners.”