RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/frau-merkels-farewell/91582/

One thing to watch for as Chancellor Angela Merkel makes her various farewells is her famous eye roll. It is the tic that, on occasion, discloses the impatience and exasperation and intelligence that lurks behind her lugubrious visage. It is brilliantly lampooned — immortalized, even — by comedienne Tracey Ullman in a sketch in which, at the mention of Donald Trump, she rolls her eyes so forcefully that she flips over backwards.

We hoped that Frau Merkel’s eye roll might make an appearance in, say, her press conference yesterday with President Biden. We were disappointed. She stood there lugubriously without the eye roll as Mr. Biden shrugged off the fact that Germany had shrugged off America’s objections to Berlin going ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Russia. “Good friends can disagree,” Mr. Biden burbled.

We met Ms. Merkel only once, in 2003, at a small breakfast in Berlin. It was off-the-record, but we don’t think it would be inappropriate to say that she exuded a kind of intelligence that we greatly admire. She is — like the founding president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann — a chemist by training; plus, she grew up in communist East Germany. So she understands the way the world works in both a political and physical way.

At the time we felt that it would be easy to underestimate her. She acceded to the chancellorship in 2005 in an election in which neither her Christian Democrats nor the incumbent Social Democrats won a majority and both claimed victory. Neither was successful in finding a coalition with the small parties. In a move that astonished us, the two major parties agreed to make a government with Frau Merkel as chancellor.

In that government, the outgoing leftists initially held important ministries — including foreign affairs and finance. It would be like, say, President Trump giving major cabinet posts to Hillary Clinton’s camarilla. We figured Frau Merkel wouldn’t last long. In the event, she’s now in her fourth government and will step down later this year as the second-longest serving chancellor in the history of the Federal Republic.

Yet, we found her years in office to be disappointing. Her economic adviser during the campaign was famously for a flat tax. It stirred in us the idea that President Bush could make Steve Forbes, a tribune of the flat tax, his ambassador in Berlin. Frau Merkel, though, shrank from making so radical a stand as the flat tax, and the potential to really change and excite Europe seemed to wane even before she took office.

President George W. Bush clearly has great affection and regard for her, and talked about it — including the shoulder massage — in an interview the other day at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. We thought, though, that Frau Merkel made a mistake in taking so much offense, as she did, at President Trump. He was right on almost every critique he made of Germany and the Europeans, and she bears a portion of the blame for the failure to find a partnership.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17557/palestinian-leaders-deceiving-americans

The Palestinian Authority does not want the world to know that it has a law that prohibits the sale of property to the Israeli “enemy.”

This is the same Palestinian leadership that is now telling the Biden administration that it is keen on resuming the peace process with Israel.

It is also safe to assume that the Congressmen are not aware of the Islamic religious decrees banning Muslims from even attempting to engage in such deals [selling land to Jews].

The Congressmen do not know about these matters because the mainstream media in the West rarely reports about the apartheid policies of the PA leadership, including the ban on selling properties to Jews.

Abbas knows that if he makes such concessions, he will never enjoy the privilege of being buried in a Muslim cemetery, according to the ruling of his mufti and Islamic religious bodies.

In the meantime, Abbas has no problem telling the Biden administration and members of the Congress what they like to hear (about a peace process with Israel and the so-called two state solution) in order to receive US financial aid.

Abbas will take the money while at the same time his security forces are chasing Palestinians who do business with Jews.

A Palestinian man was sentenced on June 30 to seven years in prison with hard labor after he was convicted of attempting to sell land to Israeli Jews. The man, whose identity was not revealed, was sentenced by a Palestinian Authority (PA) court in the West Bank city of Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinians.

“The Ramallah Court of First Instance, represented by Judges Ramez Jamhour, Ramez Musleh and Amjad al-Sha’ar, issued a ruling convicting the defendant of attempting to carve out part of the land of the State of Palestine in favor of the enemy,” the PA’s official news agency Wafa reported. “He was sentenced to 7 years in prison with hard labor.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/13/cuba-the-collapse-of-another-socialist-utopia-lets-hope-so/

Like an unwatched pot suddenly violently boiling over, Havana and other cities have erupted in defiant protests by Cubans fed up with living in their perpetually depressed tropical police state. True to form, the Castroite regime has already reflexively cracked down on the protests with brutality.

Cubans weary of being treated like animals without rights took to the streets, shouting “Freedom!” “Down with the dictatorship,” and, most pointedly, “Down with communism!” In some cases, protesters carried American flags. This was not an isolated demonstration: According to the Spanish-language data site Inventario, some 63 cities and towns were roiled by demonstrations on Sunday through early Monday.

Here in the U.S., some on the left initially tried to portray this as Cubans being upset over COVID-19 infections and a lack of vaccines. A State Department spokesperson styled it as Cubans “exercising their right to peaceful assembly … about rising COVID cases/deaths & medicine shortages.”

“We call for calm and condemn any violence,” Julie Chung, acting assistant secretary for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, tweeted Sunday.

Nice try. To begin with, Cubans don’t have a “right to peaceful assembly,” nor any other real enforceable rights. All their rights depend on the government’s willingness to grant them. As for the demonstrations, the reasons plainly went well beyond a mere “medicine shortage.” Watch videos: You’ll see it has nothing to do with COVID-19.

Saying we “condemn any violence” is a joke. The Cuban people have lived under perpetual threat of actual violence committed by the Communist regime for 62 years.

In fact, the demonstrations were an outpouring of rage and disgust with the ongoing failures of communist rule. Videos of average Cubans standing in front of Communist Party headquarters, chanting “Cuba isn’t yours” and calling for President Miguel Diaz-Canel to step down, shows they aren’t afraid.

Cuba’s government responded as expected: “The communist dictatorship … started cracking down on the protests, allegedly inflicting violence on the unarmed protesters and cutting off internet access,” wrote the Daily Wire.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17555/palestinian-terrorism-jew-hate

For decades, most articles on the Middle East have portrayed Israel in a negative light, not as a democracy under constant threat. Willfully or not, they promote Jew-hate. Hamas is often described as a “Palestinian militant group,” almost never as a terrorist organization.

Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005. All the same, Israel is accused of imposing a “blockade” on the coastal strip — without a mention that everything necessary for the residents of Gaza is allowed, or that what is being blockaded are deadly weapons. Also never mentioned is the extreme brutality of Hamas operatives towards their own residents of Gaza, who are all Arabs, or that the Palestinian Authority still supports and finances terrorism. The Palestinian Authority’s rewards and incentives for murdering Jews are also always left out.

On June 24, The New York Times published yet another biased report: “Gaza’s Deadly Night: How Israeli Airstrikes Killed 44 People”. The Times stated that “on May 16, Israeli airstrikes destroyed three apartment buildings, decimating several families”. It never noted that Hamas had attacked Israel, that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, or that Israel invariably warns residents in advance about buildings set to be destroyed, to provide time for the residents to leave rather than be injured or killed.

On May 18, when Israel was being subjected to some of the 4,000 missiles fired at it by Hamas, French Prime Minister Jean Castex… announced that he was “worried about the fate of the civilian populations in Gaza”. He did not even touch on what Hamas and Iran are planning for Israel’s population.

London. May 23. An organization called The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign organized a protest against Israel. 180,000 people turned up. Placards compared Israelis to the Nazis, and black flags of jihadist movements, accompanied by cries of “Allahu Akbar”, fluttered alongside the Palestinian flags. “Israel, the new Nazi state”, some read; and “Nazis are still around, now they call themselves Zionists”. This kind of comparison is now common among many in Europe who also seem sympathetic to Marxism, in which there always has to be an “oppressor” and “oppressed”, never a “win-win” or a “making the pie bigger.” Do these new Marxists, who compare Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, to the Third Reich and the Zionists to the Nazis, really not know what the Nazis did to six million Jews, or what Communists and Marxists today, in China, Russia, Cuba, or Venezuela, are still doing to their own citizens?

The protesters in London shouted openly anti-Semitic slogans. One demonstrator, Tariq Ali, a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review, addressing the crowd, implied that the Jews deserve a second Holocaust: “They have learned nothing from what happened to them in Europe. Nothing”. Another man exhibited a drawing of Christ carrying the cross, along with the words: “Do not let them do the same thing again”. A few days earlier, when a convoy adorned with Palestinian flags drove through a Jewish area in North London, shouts from loudspeakers included “Free Palestine”, “F**k the Jews”, “F**k their daughters”, “F**k their mothers” and “Rape their daughters”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17564/biden-iran-feeding-crocodile

Have the Biden administration and the European Union already forgotten the disastrous outcome of appeasing the mullahs in 2015…? US President Barack Obama pledged at the time that he was “confident” the deal would “meet the national security needs of the United States and our allies”.

Throughout that time, the EU and the Obama administration not only initiated and expanded appeasement policies, they made unprecedented concessions in an attempt to dissuade the ruling mullahs from their internal and external aggression. The US and the EU met the Iranian mullahs with generosity and flexibility every step of the way.

After sanctions against the mullahs were lifted, instead of bringing peace and curbing Iran’s malign behavior at home and abroad, those appeasements… generated billions of dollars in revenue for Iran’s military institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as for Iran’s militia and terror groups. Tehran used that influx of revenues to expand its influence throughout the region, especially in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq.

Iran’s aggressive expansion campaign proved immensely successful. The Iranian-armed Houthis ratcheted up efforts to cause death and destruction in Yemen, and Hezbollah escalated its involvement and control of large swathes of Syrian territory. The region also saw a greater propensity for Houthi rocket launches at civilian targets in Saudi Arabia, the deployment of thousands of Hezbollah foot soldiers in Syria, and the constant bombardment of southern Israel by Iranian-funded Hamas rockets.

The present Western strategy is no different from enriching the Nazi Germany during WWII or Soviet Russia during the Cold War. For the rogue state, concessions and appeasements mean weakness. It would have been so much less costly in life and treasure to stop Hitler before he crossed the Rhine.

Winston Churchill famously warned against appeasing the aggressor: “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear — I fear greatly — the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar, ever more loudly, ever more widely. It will spread to the South; it will spread to the North.”

History has repeatedly proven that appeasing a rogue state only emboldens and empowers it. Nevertheless, the Biden administration and the European Union appear determined to pursue this dangerous policy of appeasement against a regime that chants “Death to America”, that plots to push the US out of the Middle East, that is committed to uprooting and replacing Israel, and that is, according to the US Department of State, one of only four state sponsors of terrorism, as well as a leading violator of human rights.

All the same, on July 2, sanctions against three Iranians were lifted under Executive Order 13382. These individuals had also been sanctioned by the previous US administration for their involvement in advancing Iran’s ballistic missile program.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17547/china-mobilizing-war

Beijing looks as if it is preparing for a full-scale invasion of Indian territory…. Ladakh is not the only hotspot. There is a Chinese encroachment in India’s Sikkim as well as incursions in neighboring Bhutan and Nepal.

Lately, Xi’s references in public pronouncements have become unmistakable, and his subordinates have been clear that Xi believes that everyone outside China owes him obedience.

Xi, while spouting tianxia-like language and bellicose words, has been getting the Chinese people ready for war.

The changes signal the growing clout of the People’s Army inside the Party and highlight the militarization of the country’s external relations. China is fast becoming a military state.

Xi Jinping on July 1 told the world what he is going to do. We are, in all probability, in the last moments of peace.

China in recent weeks has sent tens of thousands of troops to its disputed border with India in Ladakh, high in the Himalayas.

Beijing looks as if it is preparing for a full-scale invasion of Indian territory.

This deployment occurred while Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, in the words of the Communist Party’s China Daily, made a “pro-peace, pro-development, and pro-cooperation speech” to celebrate the centennial of the Party’s founding.

“The Chinese people have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will,” Xi said on July 1.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/china/2021/07/ the-darkening-shadows-of-100-candles/

Helmsman Xi Jinping, dressed in his best Mao suit for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), presented himself to the captive population of the PRC, not to mention the (not-yet captive) world, as the third-most significant leader of the party: the successor to Great Helmsman Mao Zedong and Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping. In this, at any rate, Xi was not wrong. Everything else about the July 1 celebrations in Tiananmen Square was pretty much smoke and mirrors.

The great conceit of the Leninist dictator is that that connection between the party, the nation and the people is indivisible. The CCP, according to Xi, has always “loved the Chinese people”. At this point in Xi’s speech, one’s thoughts drifted to the party’s murderously quixotic Great Leap Forward (1958-62) which resulted in the death of approximately 45 million people. Liu Shaoqi (1898-69), at the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962, acknowledged the famine was 30 per cent the fault of nature and 70 per cent human error. In other words, the party was directly responsible for the death of 31.5 million people, even more than the 3.9 million (and counting) thought to have died on account of the CCP virus (also known as SARS-CoV-2).

The fate of Liu, one-time PRC head of state and author of How to be a Good Communist (1939), tells us much of what we need to know about Leninism with Chinese Characteristics. The former Chairman of the People’s Republic was demeaned, tortured, and purged by the party during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Officially designated a former-person, Liu (right) was sentenced to house arrest outside of Beijing and died, ignominiously, in 1969. Although his reputation had been trashed by the party for the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Liu was posthumously rehabilitated by Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping in 1980. His definitive rehabilitation, though, has now formally taken place. Helmsman Xi named him, along with Mao, Zhou, Deng and Zhu, as one of the great heroes of the party at the Tiananmen Square celebration.

As President Xi went on about “the spirit of the party”, I wondered what “the spirit of Liu Shaoqi” might have made of the occasion. Would he have been uplifted by the choir of 10,000 belting out patriotic songs about “national rejuvenation” – material, ethical, cultural, and ecological! – under the guidance of the party? Would the first appearance in the sky of the PLA’s Chengdu J-20 stealth fighters (left) have been a moment of immense pride? And, finally, would his induction into the pantheon of party legends have mitigated the shame he endured in the final years of his life?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/07/07/france-germany-and-britain-sound-alarm-on-irans-nuclear-moves-the-u-s-n1460117

On Tuesday afternoon, France, Britain, and Germany released a joint statement regarding Iran’s latest nuclear moves. VOA’s Jeff Seldin tweeted the statement out.

The three allies “note with grave concern the latest report by the IAEA confirming that Iran has taken steps in the production of enriched uranium material.” The statement further notes that Iran has no credible civilian use for its activities, leading the three to suspect that Iran is taking steps toward developing nuclear weapons.

It should be obvious why this is a gravely serious issue.

It’s made more grave by United States silence on the one hand, and Joe Biden’s obvious eagerness to get the Obama-era Iran deal back in vogue on the other. Like most American leftists, results that benefit Americans are of dubious value and matter a lot less to Biden than the appearances of inking some “historic” deal or initiating some government program that the media will cast as well-meaning. It’s the PR that sells the thought that counts.

Iran is not on strong footing these days, but that matters little. It’s internally as brittle as ever. Israel continues working solid diplomacy with some of its Arab neighbors after Trump’s historic Abraham Accords.

Iran lost power and even its “countdown to Armageddon” clock reportedly went offline in the blackouts. Yes, we’re having some blackouts too thanks to a grid that hasn’t kept up with population growth in Texas and an overreliance on wind and solar there and in other states. But America doesn’t keep a running clock that’s just counting down the seconds until we can annihilate someone based on their race and heritage. Iran does. That clock is what reportedly went dark.

Biden still wants to treat Iran as some kind of quasi-normal state despite the fact that it’s run by one of the world’s worst dictatorships — and one of the world’s most prolific sponsors of terrorism.

Nuclear weapons in such hands spell violence, misery, and doom.

In April 2021, Foreign Policy warned that Biden returning the United States to the Obama-era JCPOA would be unwise.