RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18080/lebanon-palestinians

A growing number of people in Lebanon fear that… Hamas could drag Lebanon into another war with Israel — as Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorist militia, backed by Iran, has done for the past three decades.

The fears of the Lebanese are well-grounded in reality.

Since 2007, Hamas has fired thousands of rockets at Israel from the Gaza Strip, triggering military confrontations that have wreaked havoc on the lives of Palestinians living there.

The Lebanese are making it clear that they do not want Hamas — or any other Palestinian group — to drag them into another war with Israel. They are saying that they are done with decades-long Palestinian efforts to transform Lebanon into a war zone.

With all this clarity on the part of the Lebanese, it remains to be seen whether international bodies will themselves speak out to prevent another catastrophe in Lebanon carried out by a Palestinian terrorist group.

It appears that the Palestinians are determined to continue their fight against Israel until the last Arab. For decades, the Palestinians have used Israel’s neighboring countries, especially Jordan and Lebanon, as launching pads for various types of attacks against Israel.

In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s several Palestinian groups, including Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), set up military training bases in Jordan and Lebanon to launch attacks on Israel.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/12/28/where_wokism_is_a_oui_bit_different_807482.html

PARIS — Rachel Khan is a 45-year-old writer and actress, half Gambian, half Polish Jew born and educated in France, who was appointed by the mayor of Paris to be co-director of a cultural center called La Place, or The Place, dedicated to hip-hop music in France.  Then she became a target of the wrath of “le wokisme,” French version.

Khan, who was already well-known as a dissenter from the identity-politics orthodoxy on race and victimization, published a slim volume titled “Racée” — meaning racy, daring, but also a play on words — in which she lampooned the politically correct idea that to be authentically black meant that she had to incarnate a “woke” ideology.

“It’s supposedly anti-racism, but in fact it’s dogma,” she told me in Paris in November. “A black actress is supposed to be anti-colonialist. But just as I’m not obliged as a black actress to play a cleaning lady or a prostitute, I’m also not obliged as a black person to be ‘anti-colonial.’”

For her pains Khan was attacked on social media and elsewhere, called a traitor to her race. Early in November, some 50 journalists, producers, bloggers and artists circulated a petition demanding that she be fired from her position at The Place, on the grounds that her ideas are “unacceptable and divisive, validated by the most reactionary fringe of the French media and far-right politicians.”

This attack prompted a rejoinder from France’s minister of education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, who tweeted, “Our friend @KhanNRachel suffers from permanent harassment.”

As Blanquer’s rejoinder shows, Khan has her supporters in France, where she has become something of a media darling, turned to when an anti-woke voice is needed. Still, her book, the attacks on her, and the defense of her from the high reaches of the French government all show that “le wokisme” has become a hot topic in France, around which the debate sometimes reaches a fever pitch.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18078/desmond-tutu

He was among the world’s most respected figures. His recognizable face—with its ever-present grin—has become a symbol of reconciliation and goodness. But it masks a long history of ugly hatred toward the Jewish people, the Jewish religion and the Jewish state. He not only believed in anti-Semitism, he actively promoted and legitimated Jew-hatred among his many followers and admirers around the world.

He has attacked the “Jewish” – not Israeli – “lobby” as too “powerful” and “scary.” He has invoked classic anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes about Jewish “arrogance”, “power” and “money.” He has characterized Jews a “peculiar people,” and has accused “the Jews” of causing many of the world’s problems. He once even accused the Jewish state of acting in an “unChristian” manner.

Let the record speak for itself, so that history may judge Tutu on the basis of his own words — words that he has often repeated and that others repeat, because Tutu is a role model for so many people around the world. Here are some of Tutu’s hateful words, most of them carefully documented in a petition by prominent South Africans to terminate him as a “patron” of the two South African Holocaust Centers, because he used his status with these fine institutions as legitimization for his anti-Jewish rhetoric.

He denied that Israel is a “civilized democracy” and singled out Israel—one of the world’s most open democracies—as a nation guilty of “censorship of their media.” He urged the Cape Town Opera to refuse to perform George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in Tel Aviv and called for a total cultural boycott of Jewish Israel, while encouraging performers to visit the most repressive regimes in the world.

He was far more vocal about Israel’s imperfections than about the genocides in Rwanda, Darfur and Cambodia.

Even in death, his bigotry against Jews must be recounted and considered in any honest reckoning of his decidedly mixed legacy, and in any decision whether to honor him with statues or other forms of canonization, especially at a time of increasing antisemitism throughout the world.

At a time when the statues of good people who had done bad things are being torn down, the world must reckon with the mixed legacy of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, even in the immediate aftermath of his death.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18039/sweden-gang-violence

Sweden is facing much more than a “serious problem”.

Sweden has the highest number of fatal shootings per million inhabitants in Europe according to the latest report by Brå on shooting, released in May. Sweden, furthermore, is the only country in Europe in which fatal shootings have increased since the year 2005.

“The main underlying reason for the development with shootings and explosions is the situation that prevails in vulnerable areas, where residents feel threatened by criminals, where there is open drug trafficking and where criminals in some places have created parallel social structures”, Swedish police wrote in a recent press release.

In six out of seven police regions, gangs use 12-year-old children in the conduct of their criminal activities, including selling drugs and transporting weapons.

Sweden’s new Prime Minister, Social Democrat Magdalena Andersson, who previously served as finance minister, has a formidable task ahead of her: Dealing with the ever-growing gang violence and shootings in Swedish cities. Her predecessor, Stefan Löfven, notably failed even to contain the exponential growth in shootings during his seven-year tenure. Sweden’s parliament narrowly elected Andersson as Löfven’s successor in November, after Löfven announced his resignation in August.

https://civicrm.unwatch.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=2408

10. UN Review Praises Slave-Holding Mauritania’s Human Rights Record

When Mauritania came up for a mandatory UNHRC review of its human rights record, UN Watch exposed the farce of how 85% of country statements actually praised the slave-holding state’s record. North Korea commended Mauritania for its “promotion and protection of human rights”; China welcomed Mauritania’s “strategy for accelerating growth and prosperity”; Cuba praised Mauritania’s efforts to “increase the quality of life of its population.”

9. UN Rights Council Ends Yemen Investigation After Saudi Pressure

Yemen’s civil war has killed 100,000 people and displaced 4 million, and atrocities are widespread. Yet in October, the UN’s top human rights body voted to end its investigation of war crimes in Yemen. Diplomats reported an intense Saudi campaign of incentives and threats against council members preceding the vote—including an offer of financial support to Togo, and a threat against Indonesia to restrict their citizens’ visits to Mecca. Saudi Arabia’s military is a key figure in the Yemen war, along with Iran.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18071/hatred-for-christian-cross

“Under no circumstances is a human permitted to wear the cross.” Why? “Because the prophet — peace and blessings on him — commanded the breaking of it [the cross].” — Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Tarifi, Saudi expert on Islamic law, YouTube, May 8, 2013.

One Pakistani shoe-seller placed the image of the cross on the soles of his shoes so that the crucifix could be trampled with every footstep.

Despite being called “people of the book” — a view apologists for Islam tend to strain — both Christians and Jews are, in the end, also classified as infidels (kuffar; singular, kafir). Thus Koran 5:51 warns Muslims against “taking the Jews and Christians as friends and allies … whoever among you takes them for friends and allies, he is surely one of them”—that is, he too becomes an infidel. Koran 5:73 declares that “Infidels are they who say God is one of three,” a reference to the Christian Trinity; Koran 5:72 says “Infidels are they who say God is the Christ, [Jesus] son of Mary”; and Koran 9:30 complains that “the Christians say the Christ is the son of God … may Allah’s curse be upon them!”

The final word on both Christians and Jews was “revealed” in Koran 9:29: “Fight those among the People of the Book who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, who do not forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and who do not embrace the religion of truth [Islam], until they pay the jizya [monetary tribute] with willing submissiveness and feel themselves utterly subdued.” With that, their fate was sealed; like all other infidels, Christians and Jews were to be warred on until “subdued”.

While attacks on people would of course be worse than attacks on inanimate religious symbols, appeasement, sadly, seems only to encourage these outbursts of hate.

2014: After Muslims were granted their own section at a cemetery, and allowed to conduct distinctly Islamic ceremonies, they began to demand that Christian symbols and crosses in the cemetery were offensive and that they should be removed or at least covered up during Islamic funerals.

“At this hospital there are members of staff who go to a mosque four times a day and no one says anything to them. Hindus wear red bracelets on their wrists and female Muslims wear hijabs in theatre. Yet my small cross around my neck was deemed so dangerous that I was no longer allowed to do my job.” — Mary Onuoha, a 61 year-old Christian woman who escaped her Nigerian homeland to Britain in 1988 in order to worship freely and was “bullied” out of her London job as a nurse for refusing to remove her small cross necklace; Daily Mail, October 8, 2021, United Kingdom.

Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt mauled a young Christian woman, Mary, to death after they saw her cross.

Also in Egypt, Ayman, 17, a Christian student, was strangled and beaten to death by his teacher and fellow students for refusing to obey the teacher’s demand that he cover his cross. When the school’s principal was informed of the attack, he ignored it and “continued to sip his tea.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18011/ireland-antisemitism

Ostensibly, the BDS movement’s goal is to shift world opinion to declare that Jewish settlements in the historically-named areas of Judea and Samaria are supposedly illegal seizures of Palestinian Arab land. In truth, the principal and outspoken objective of Palestinian organizers of the BDS movement is the destruction of Israel.

In Ireland, Jew-hatred does not well up from the general public but seems clearly driven from the top down. These Goebbels-like attacks on Israel include salvos from several Sinn Fein members of parliament. One of them, Martin Browne, represents Tipperary and claims, falsely, that Israel created ISIS. Another, Matt Carthy representing Cavan-Monahan, has stated that Israel is the worst human rights offender on earth — presumably dwarfing China, North Korea, Venezuela and Iran.

There is understandably some sympathetic sentiment among the Irish people for the plight of Palestinians, as there is also among Israelis, saddened to see people suffer unnecessarily under a brutal and corrupt Palestinian leadership, which has full autonomy over much the territory under dispute. The Palestinians long ago agreed, in the Oslo Accords of 1993, to settle those disputes by direct negotiation, not by external fiat.

All Israelis — about 20% of whom are Muslims, along with Christians and Druze — have identical rights under the law. Israeli Arabs can vote, have political parties and prominent job opportunities, and are members of Israel’s parliament. The one exception is that Arabs are not required to serve in the Israeli military; in the event of possible conflicts with Arab states, Israelis did not want brother fighting brother.

Even more shocking was that fully a third of Irish members of parliament of voted to expel Israeli diplomats from Ireland.

The Irish Parliament, on the night of May 25, 2021, staged a “legal Kristallnacht” against the nation of Israel. Following an avalanche of vituperative anti-Israel and anti-Semitic diatribes by members of the Dáil Éireann (lower house of Parliament), its members voted unanimously to discuss a motion on whether or not Ireland should support BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) legislation to try to strangle Israel economically. Ostensibly, the BDS movement’s goal is to shift world opinion to declare that Jewish settlements in the historically-named areas of Judea and Samaria are supposedly illegal seizures of Palestinian Arab land. In truth, the principal and outspoken objective of Palestinian organizers of the BDS movement is the destruction of Israel.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/soviet-union-thirty-years-later-bruce-bawer/

For years, if you opened the closet in the foyer of my Manhattan apartment, you’d encounter a pile of copies of the New York Times from the week in late December 1991 during which the Soviet Union breathed its last. I’ve never been in the habit of hanging on to old newspapers in which my byline didn’t appear, but that week, it seemed to me at the time, was the greatest historical turning point I’d ever experienced.

It was certainly the most astonishing. I remember a point, sometime in the late 1980s, when, during a visit to Washington, I expressed over lunch with American Spectator editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski what was then an almost universal cynicism about talk of a post-Communist Europe. “No,” said Wlady, who was far more plugged into these developments than most of us, “it’s really happening.”

That was the moment when I started believing it. But you have to forgive my doubts. Throughout the postwar era, nearly everybody had taken the U.S.-Soviet standoff for granted. The division of the world into two parts, free and unfree, felt like a fact of nature. Mutual assured nuclear destruction made any major change in the world order inconceivable.

For virtually everybody, that is, except Ronald Reagan. My biggest professional regret of all time is that, as a snotty young grad student in the early 1980s, I penned a condescending screed about the Gipper that appeared on Newsweek’s “My Turn” page, which was reserved for contributions by amateurs. And boy, was I an amateur. Although I’d voted for Reagan in 1980, I’d since bought into the media clichés about him and, in my silly piece, spat them back out as if they were a product of original thought.  

Like every other detractor of Reagan, however, I learned soon enough that I’d been a fool. All the know-it-alls at the State Department had shivered with embarrassment when he’d shouted in his 1987 Berlin speech: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” But the wall did come down. I was there, in 1990, when parts of it were still being chipped away at. All around me, people were snapping up pieces to take home. But I couldn’t bring myself to pick one up. I didn’t feel I’d earned it.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/12/chinas-post-covid-new-trade-order/

NEW YORK – China has become the dominant source of demand for Asian manufactures and the leading supplier of goods to the United States and Western Europe during the past two years, reshaping global trade patterns.

The sheer increase in China’s export volume is impressive, but just as important is the composition of trade. Asia has become tightly integrated as a Sinocentric trade zone, and the Western industrial nations have become more dependent on Chinese goods.

Some American strategists worry about China’s growing power in Asia. China’s enormous gains in Asian trade during the past two years at the expense of the US and Japan make that a moot point.

Elbridge Colby, a former Defense Department official who advocates a “strategy of denial” against China, tweeted on December 22: “Global peace isn’t our goal. Preserving Americans’ security, freedom and prosperity is. Not compatible with China dominating Asia, the world’s largest market area.”

In economic terms, that concern is two years late and a trillion dollars short.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18050/china-latin-america

China’s involvement in Latin America clearly seems to be translating into control, and not just of national resources.

“In the past four years, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Panama have each switched their recognition from Taiwan to China”, TIME Magazine wrote in February. “Gaining these kinds of alliances in Latin America offers Beijing invaluable votes at the U.N. and backing for Chinese appointees to multinational institutions. It also empowers China to embed standard-setting technology companies like Huawei, ZTE, Dahua and Hikvision – all sanctioned by the U.S. – in regional infrastructure, allowing Beijing to dictate the rules of commerce for a generation.”

Ecuador’s debt to China is equal to 38.7% of its GDP.

“The U.S. is losing Latin America to China without putting up a fight… And China is waiting, saying, ‘We’re here. We’re giving you money.’ They want control of course, but they don’t say that.” — Axios, September 23, 2021.

“It is not necessary to show malevolent PRC intentions with respect to its activities in Latin America and the Caribbean to conclude that the current and long-term implications of that engagement are grave for prosperity, democracy, and liberties in the region, as well as the security and strategic position of the United States,” — Professor R. Evan Ellis, Testimony before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, May 20, 2021.

In 2000, China’s trade with Latin America amounted to $12 billion. By 2019, the number had grown to a staggering $330 billion.

The astounding growth is suggestive of how China’s influence in Latin America has deepened over the past two decades.