RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijings-chilling-imprisonment-of-a-taiwanese-critic-11554057567

Taipei

Li Ching-yu fixes me with a look of steely determination. “Even in prison,” she says, “my husband is a human-rights activist, and he wants the world to speak out, not only for his freedom but for all prisoners of conscience in China. The last time I saw him, he told me: ‘Go everywhere and tell everyone.’ ”

Her husband, Li Ming-che, is a Taiwanese democracy activist. He has languished in Chinese custody for two years because of his writings. Communist authorities arrested him in March 2017 as he tried to enter the mainland from Macau. Ten days later, China revealed he was detained on suspicion of “endangering national security.” For 177 days Mrs. Li received no news, until his trial on Sept. 11, 2017. In a televised confession—almost certainly obtained under duress—he said he had “disseminated articles and essays that maliciously attacked and defamed the Chinese government.” In November 2017, Mr. Li was sentenced to five years for “subverting state power.”

In Mr. Li’s case, Beijing has applied its “One China policy” in a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose fashion. Because China claims sovereignty over Taiwan, it accuses Mr. Li of writing illegally within its jurisdiction. Yet Mr. Li, who supported civil society in China, is believed to be the first activist imprisoned under Beijing’s new law restricting foreign nongovernmental organizations. So even though his activities from Taiwan are regarded as within China’s jurisdiction, China classified him as a foreigner and stripped him of rights to which Chinese nationals are entitled under the law.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13983/palestinians-fleeing-lebanon

International journalists based in the Middle East seem to care precious little about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon, who, for several decades now, have been protesting the apartheid and discrimination practiced by an Arab country.

As a result of these laws, the conditions of Palestinians in Lebanon have worsened to a point where 65% of them live below the poverty line, according to a report by Al-Jazeera.

The Arab and Western silence towards the plight of the Palestinians in Lebanon achieves one thing alone: aggravating Palestinian agony. Yet the only evil the Arab leaders and the international community see is the supposed evil that they link to Israel.

Palestinians appear finally fed up with the apartheid and discriminatory laws they have been subjected to in Lebanon in the past few decades. They appear fed up with the ongoing apathy towards their plight in the international community and media. They also appear fed up with the international media’s obsession with Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The only Palestinians the international media reports about are those whose “problems” are directly linked to Israel.

For the past year, dozens of international journalists based in the Middle East have been covering the weekly protests along the Gaza-Israel border. These journalists, however, seem to care precious little about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon, who, for several decades now, have been protesting the apartheid and discrimination practiced by an Arab country.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13955/turkey-christchurch-new-zealand

The more critical problem is the discrepancy between the way the government and the people of Turkey have been treating the Christchurch attacks, as opposed to the way they have been responding to the murder of non-Muslims in their own country.

While Muslim worshippers were being murdered in New Zealand — and Turkey was among the nations condemning the anti-Muslim slaughter and voicing outrage over “Islamophobia” — they were paying little or no attention to the Christians in Nigeria, Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda, Pakistan and elsewhere who were being violated, abducted or massacred by extremist Muslim perpetrators. Where is the reciprocity?

Until Turks and others are as vocal in their condemnation of religious-based violence and hate crimes against non-Muslims as they are about those against Muslims, it is hard to take what Ataklı referred to as their “talk of tolerance” seriously.

Since the March 15 massacre of dozens of Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Turkey has joined the rest of the world in condemning the murders, praying for the victims and commemorating the event by laying wreaths at the sites of the slaughter.

The German Bild newspaper accuses Ambassador Christoph Heusgen of “pure malice” in comparing Israel to the Hamas terror group.

The German Bild newspaper is accusing the country’s ambassador to the U.N. of “betraying Chancellor Angela Merkel’s security pledge to Israel by comparing the Jewish State to the terrorist organization Hamas,” the Jerusalem Post reports.

The editorial took Ambassador Christoph Heusgen to task for comparing Israel’s security measures against Palestinian terrorists with Hamas rocket attacks, says the Post.Heusgen was quoted as saying that “civilians must live without fear of Palestinian rockets or Israeli bulldozers.”Bild journalist Filipp Piatov responded that “after 130 missiles in a week, pure malice,” a reference to recent Gaza rocket attacks on Israel. “Murderous rockets are not bulldozers.

The Israeli government is not a terrorist militia. This comparison has nothing to do with the promise of Chancellor Merkel,” said the editorial.

http://www.settimananews.it/italia-europa-mondo/lost-italy-should-find-itself-its-geography/Italy’s current crisis goes beyond the contingent disputes between the League and the M5S and the confusion on the agreement on the Silk Road with China behind the back of its traditional allies and partners. It is an epochal event for the peninsula that the Austrian prime minister Metternich in 1815 defined as “a geographical expression”, not a political one.

The modern Italian state was born in 1870 by eliminating the Papal state, which existed for about 1,500 years, and was heir, in turn, to about a thousand years of Roman Empire and the Roman Republic. In that way, Italy has ceased to be a more or less colorful periphery of Rome and has become the territory that dominates the ancient capital.

The modern Holy See was born of this. The Vatican freed itself from the European and Italian territorial anchor and has taken on an increasingly global dimension, up to Pope Francis who is profoundly redefining the Church.

Italy has the extraordinary advantage of hosting the Holy See – the problem is how to take advantage of it without interfering with the Church, which would then kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

On the other hand, there is a similar concern for the Church to take advantage of Italy without bullying the country, which would then return to being surrounded by a semi neo-Papal state that causes a global Church to lose its universal reach.

In this, there is a third element. The years of the DC, from around 1949 to 1992, were those of a unified Italy with greater economic, intellectual, and scientific development.

The fall of the DC occurred because the party did not reconcile their alliance with the U.S. (their “employer” since 1948), and indeed they tried to push the euro through behind Washington’s back, when the U.S. opposed the single currency.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/opinion-post/the-anti-humanist-ideology-o

In the wake of the horrific Christchurch shootings, we need to thoughtfully engage with the ideology which influenced it. Just before the massacre, the self-confessed killer, Brenton Tarrant, distributed what is being called a manifesto, in which he unashamedly describes what he was about to do as a “terrorist attack”, and gives and account of his ideology. We need to understand this ideology, not to give it a platform, but to learn and to equip ourselves to stand against such hatred.

Ideology and Evil

I have recently been re-reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. The Christchurch massacre of people at prayer took place while I was making my way through Solzhenitsyn’s history of the Soviet annihilation of millions of their own. Countless lives were flushed down the vast sewer of the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn traced the Soviets’ descent into darkness as communist ideology took over people’s souls and minds, making many even half-decent people into monsters. He wrote:

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity to natural law. Fortunately it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evil-doers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology — that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses, but will receive praise and honors.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

http://www.israelhayom.com/2019/03/31/brazils-bolsonaro-warmly-received-by-netanyahu-in-israel/

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warmly welcomed Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on his first state visit to Israel on Sunday.

Bolsonaro touched down Sunday and received red carpet treatment from Netanyahu, who is running for re-election in nine days. The Brazilian leader opened his speech after landing with the words “I love Israel” in Hebrew.

The Brazilian president is expected during his four-day trip to decide whether to follow U.S. President Donald Trump’s lead and move the Brazilian Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move he has repeatedly promised.

Netanyahu called Bolsonaro a “good friend” and said Israel and Brazil have entered “a new era” of relations.

The prime minister said he and Bolsonaro would sign “many agreements,” including security deals, and that the Brazilian leader would visit Judaism’s holy Western Wall, “in Jerusalem, our eternal capital.”

Israeli financial news website, Calcalist, reported on Sunday that Brazilian state-run oil firm Petrobras was considering bidding in a new tender to explore for oil and gas offshore Israel and a final decision would be announced during Bolsonaro’s visit.