RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18597/un-putin-war

Putin went to war to turn into reality his much repeated insistence that Ukraine is an illegitimate state that has no right to exist and is inseparable from the rest of Russia. Similarly, the UN mandate allows it to question the very existence of the State of Israel. Unlike all other UN inquiries, this one has no historic time limit and enables the commission to range right back to the foundation of the state. The commissioners won’t be bold enough to explicitly declare that Israel has no right to exist, but you can be certain that will be the subtext running throughout its report.

[E]ven before the notorious 2009 Goldstone Report, the UNHRC justified and encouraged Hamas violence, and that has played a crucial role in efforts to vilify and isolate Israel as well as incite greater bloodshed in the Middle East and attacks against Jews around the world.

[L]ike Putin in Ukraine, Hamas’s war against Israel aims to conquer the territory of a sovereign democratic state that it believes should not exist.

Both Hamas and Putin’s Russia, like most dictatorships, habitually plead self-defence as their justification for aggression. Putin pretends that NATO is a threat to Russia, yet he understands it is a defensive alliance that has no hostile intent; Hamas claims Israeli aggression while knowing that Israel would not and has never used force except in defence of its sovereign land and people.

Hamas and Russia share totalitarian values; both are kleptocracies, both ruthlessly repress internal opposition and both readily resort to violence — be it political assassination, terrorism or all-out war.

The chair of the UN commission, Navi Pillay, has indirectly played into the Israel-Nazi theme, supporting and justifying the viciously anti-Israel UN Durban Conference at which fliers were handed out with a picture of Hitler captioned with an assertion that if he had won there would be no Israel. Durban is just one of Pillay’s numerous credentials against Israel, set out in detail by the NGO UN Watch in a submission to the UN. Her indisputable anti-Israel bias is shared by her two fellow commissioners, Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti, as outlined in an article by David Litman earlier this month in JNS.

The funding level for this commission of inquiry is the second-highest of all 33 such investigations the UNHRC has ever conducted (after a probe on Myanmar). The budget for the first three years alone is $11.81 million followed by $5.47 million each year for an indefinite period. These eye-watering figures are an indication of the lengths the UN is prepared to go to push forward and publicise its anti-Israel agenda.

[L]ike Putin’s mock trials such as the one that recently convicted opposition leader Alexei Navalny… the UNHCR commission’s findings were certain from the moment it was convened.

Commenting on the Russia-Hamas talks, Walid al-Mudallal, a professor of political science at the Islamic University of Gaza, said that while Moscow would be unlikely to supply weapons and finance directly to Hamas, “such support can be done in indirect ways, through Iran and Hizballah, which have forged an alliance with Moscow…”

Just like Putin, Hamas’s “protection” was merely a sham, with the threat from Israel to Muslims and holy sites nothing other than fiction.

On June 13, among its wide range of anti-Israel findings, including accusations of apartheid (a calumny originally dreamt up in Moscow), the commission will deem Israel guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. As Putin supported the UN General Assembly resolution establishing the commission, he will support its report — for it will be a report that legitimises and justifies a mirror image of his aggression against Ukraine.

These future wars launched from Gaza will not only be enabled by weapons and funding supplied via Iran, including Russian weapons. The most important enabler will be the UNHRC with its trumped-up and provocative reports on Israel that provide political cover for Hamas violence. It should be a matter for international outrage when later this month the UNHRC supports the aggressors in a conflict and condemns the defenders while the deadliest European war since 1945 rages on.

The United Nations Human Rights Council’s Permanent Commission of Inquiry into Israel, due to make its initial report on June 13, has a mendacious mandate worthy of Vladimir Putin himself. Putin went to war to turn into reality his much repeated insistence that Ukraine is an illegitimate state that has no right to exist and is inseparable from the rest of Russia. Similarly, the UN mandate allows it to question the very existence of the State of Israel. Unlike all other UN inquiries, this one has no historic time limit and enables the commission to range right back to the foundation of the state. The commissioners won’t be bold enough to explicitly declare that Israel has no right to exist, but you can be certain that will be the subtext running throughout its report.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-great-naval-leap-forward-cambodia-military-base-navy-beijing-xi-jinping-11654637895?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

First by stealth, then by degrees, and now by great leaps, China is building a blue water navy and a network of bases to extend its military and political influence. A new secret Chinese military base in Cambodia ought to wake up America’s political class—including the U.S. Navy brass—to what is fast becoming a global Chinese challenge.

The Washington Post on Monday cites Western officials about the facility under construction at Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base on the Gulf of Thailand. The Journal reported in 2019 that Cambodia and China had secretly agreed to let the Chinese military use a naval base in the Southeast Asian nation. China and Cambodia denied it at the time.

But now China is building a naval facility for its exclusive use “and taking extraordinary measures to conceal the operation,” according to the Post.

The Cambodian government is denying the latest report, and that’s no surprise. The Cambodian constitution bans foreign military bases inside the country’s borders, and the presence of the Chinese forces could stir a nationalist backlash. China’s naval base also won’t please Cambodia’s Southeast Asian neighbors, including Thailand, which has been a major non-NATO ally of the U.S. since 2003, and Vietnam, which has had a tense relationship with China.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18594/help-taiwan

An important lesson learned after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that the Free World should immediately establish normal diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

The only message that ambiguity sends to Communist China is weakness, and a tacit green light to invade. America and her Asian allies would also do well to implement military and political initiatives in the Indo-Pacific region that would discourage any Chinese calculus to “reunite” with Taiwan by force.

On the diplomatic front, the Free World — led, one wishes, by the US — could help raise Taiwan’s global diplomatic profile by sponsoring its participation as an official member state in several international organizations, including the United Nations. The US Department of State should restore full diplomatic relations with Taiwan, as advocated by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a recent visit to Taipei. In addition, the US could encourage the world’s democracies to establish official bilateral links.

Another initiative by the US could be officially to recognize Taiwan as the Republic of China, while urging all the world’s democracies to do the same.

Taiwan is not Ukraine, but the suppression of Taiwanese democracy by the Chinese Communist regime would be at least as negatively consequential to global democracies as any Russian conquest of Ukraine.

Unless the West acts boldly and demonstrates to China that the cost to it of on attack on Taiwan will be crushing, China will not be able to help feeling irresistibly tempted not only to carry out its longtime dream of overpowering Taiwan, but also assuming dominance, for a start, in the South and East China Seas.

China has already built artificial islands that it pledged would not be militarized, but which soon were; and has effectively taken over the Solomon Islands — near American territory in Guam and Hawai’i — and wields strategic influence in Sri Lanka, at the control-point of the Indian Ocean. The Chinese military might then “help” its near-abroad neighbors to resolve bilateral territorial disputes in China’s favor. These might include the Japanese-claimed Senkaku Islands, the Philippines’ claimed Scarborough Shoal, and Vietnam’s claim to the Paracel Islands.

Such an apocalyptic turn of events could even encourage North Korea finally to attack South Korea.

America’s needs above all quickly to establish a massive credible deterrence against the People’s Republic of China. Unfortunately, that seems the only realistic means of bringing China’s out-of-control aggression to a stop.

US President Joe Biden, when, during a May 23 joint press briefing with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, was asked by a reporter if ” the US would militarily support Taiwan if China attacked” he answered, “Yes, that is the commitment we made” — a statement that unfortunately the State Department immediately walked back.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/06/05/over-50-feared-killed-in-terror-attack-on-nigerian-catholic-church-n1603375

Reports coming out of Nigeria say that dozens of worshippers including women and children were killed in an attack on St. Francis Catholic Church, in the southwestern Nigerian state of Ondo. The attackers targeted parishioners who were celebrating Pentecost Sunday, with terrorists firing weapons into the congregation and detonating explosives. The terrorists also abducted a priest.

“Only fiends from the nether region could have conceived and carried out such dastardly act,” said Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, according to a spokesman. He called the attack “heinous” and promised, “No matter what, this country shall never give in to evil and wicked people, and darkness will never overcome light. Nigeria will eventually win.” Buhari was elected to office on a platform of making Nigeria more secure.

The New York Post reports that “It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack on the church. While much of Nigeria has struggled with security issues, Ondo is widely known as one of Nigeria’s most peaceful states.”

Catholic Church head Pope Francis issued a statement via the Vatican press office: “The pope has learned of the attack on the church in Ondo, Nigeria and the deaths of dozens of worshippers, many children, during the celebration of Pentecost. While the details are being clarified, Pope Francis prays for the victims and the country, painfully affected at a time of celebration, and entrusts them both to the Lord so that he may send his spirit to console them.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18586/nato-expel-turkey

“Turkey is a member of NATO, but under Mr. Erdoğan, it no longer subscribes to the values that underpin this great alliance. Article 13 of the NATO charter provides a mechanism for members to withdraw. Perhaps it is time to amend Article 13 to establish a procedure for the expulsion of a member nation.” — Former US Senator Joe Lieberman and Mark D. Wallace, Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2022.

“[G]iving in to Ankara’s demands amounts to letting an autocrat design the security architecture of Europe and shape the future of the Western system.” — Cengiz Çandar, journalist, Al-Monitor, May 24, 2022.

With its $8,000 per capita GDP, Erdoğan’s ailing Turkey is not more powerful than the other 29 NATO allies combined. NATO’s political leaders must stop acting as if it is.

Just when, after years of idling around, NATO appears to be gaining some strategic prominence following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the only Muslim member of the alliance is holding 29 other members as hostage, blocking the most critical move in its history. Surrendering to an Islamist’s well-known oriental bargaining tactics will mean the demise of the alliance.

In a historic move, Sweden and Finland recently submitted their written applications to join NATO but Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is threatening to use his country’s veto power to block the Nordic nations coming under the Western security umbrella. This is putting NATO’s renewed credibility at stake, presumably to the delight of NATO’s nemesis, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18585/iran-summer-discontent

The latest protests, however, appear to be different in a number of ways. First, the main theme, although not the immediately acknowledged one, is regime change.

So far such a move had been stalled because the regime’s many opponents regarded it as their second choice, each being its own first choice. That meant that each group would rather see the present regime remain in place to prevent a rival opposition group from replacing it.

Whether the protests continue or where they will end up it is too early to tell. But one thing is clear: something has snapped between the Khomeinist regime and many Iranians, producing a gap that can no longer be bridged with the usual slogans.

For the past two weeks a large number of Iranians, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have been taking part in protest marches in more than 100 cities across Iran to vent their anger against a system that they consider to be corrupt, incompetent and oppressive.

At the same time, the government is facing the threat of massive bread shortages later this year amid reports that wheat stocks have fallen to a record low while talks to purchase from Russia 6.2 million tons of wheat, more than half of Iran’s annual consumption, seem to have stalled.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2022/05/30/it-became-necessary-to-destroy-the-country-to-save-it-n1602025

Peter Arnett’s celebrated quote — “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” — was a fabrication during the Vietnam War but has a macabre application to Ukraine. American fecklessness and Russian rapacity together will leave a grease spot where Ukraine used to be. It was all tragically, idiotically unnecessary.

I argued in 2008 and on many subsequent occasions, including the February 2014 note in PJ Media reposted below. The obvious course of action in Ukraine was to permit its people to vote for a divorce, as the Czechs and Slovaks did. Instead we elected to keep the NATO option open for Ukraine, knowing that this was a red line for Russia. Never mind that Putin is a wicked fellow; he is a predictably wicked fellow with a well-defined understanding of Russian national interest, and his response to Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership was entirely predictable.

After three months of nearly-unanimous media predictions of the collapse of Russia, it now appears that the Russian army is close to controlling the Donbas. Extricating it will be difficult if not impossible. The result, as Henry Kissinger suggested at Davos last week, will be (eventually) a peace in which Ukraine cedes territory to Russia. All the “don’t appease Putin-Hitler” rhetoric will simply make us feel shabbier when we make the deal. We should feel shabby. We screwed this up on the grand scale.

Our bathetic outpouring of sympathy for Ukraine served mainly to obscure the ugly fact that Russia has better strategic weapons than we do (hypervelocity missiles and the S-400/500 air defense systems). No doubt the Russian army is corrupt, as Western commentators aver, but not so corrupt by orders of magnitude as our Pentagon, which pays top dollar for obsolete weapons while Russia and China innovate. The Javelin and Switchblade and Stinger are fine toys, but the West remains in fear of Russian nuclear weapons–as well we should. The Biden Administration won’t sent long-range missiles to Ukraine because it fears, correctly, that Ukraine might use them to attack targets deep inside Russia and start a broader war.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18581/turkey-terrorists-nato

Turkey, reportedly on the verge of yet another military incursion into Syria, appears up to other fun and games as well.

The so-called “terrorists” to whom Erdoğan is referring are Kurdish politicians, political activists, and refugees who live in Sweden and Finland. In particular, those who engage in advocacy for political equality and the official recognition of Kurds in Turkey and Syria. The Turkish government wants the two Nordic nations to extradite these individuals to Turkey.

Erdoğan’s regime, however, does not see actual jihadists in the region as terrorists and even actively supports them. For instance, news outlets have documented evidence of Erdoğan’s government’s close relationship with ISIS (the Islamic State).

ISIS collaborators received Turkish citizenship, a leaked official Turkish report showed, detailing how the jihadi group used Turkey to traffic money and obtain supplies.

Turkey is also home to Hamas terrorists…. “Hamas operates its headquarters in Istanbul.” — Israel Hayom, February 1, 2022.

Turkey’s Islamist allies in Afrin have since committed many crimes against civilians, including Christians, Yazidis and Kurds. These crimes include extortion, detention, abduction, rape, torture and murder.

For NATO’s well-being, Turkey’s threats, aggression and blackmail must not be allowed.

Turkey, reportedly on the verge of yet another military incursion into Syria, appears up to other fun and games as well.

While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine remains ongoing, two Nordic nations have applied for NATO membership: Sweden and Finland.