RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/honoring-jimmy-lai-11624248153?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The Committee to Project Journalists was founded 40 years ago to fight for journalists who are “attacked, imprisoned or killed.” In this spirit, the CPJ on Monday announced it is honoring Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai with its 2021 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award. Mr. Lai, the founder, owner and contributor to the Apple Daily newspaper, won’t be able to accept the award in person because he sits in prison in Hong Kong.

The CPJ honor comes after another police raid on the newsroom last week. Five Apple Daily execs were arrested, and two—editor-in-chief Ryan Law and chief executive officer Cheung Kim-hung —were charged under the new national security law and thus denied bail. The CPJ notes that Mr. Lai “fights for the right of his Apple News organization to publish freely, even as China and its backers in Hong Kong use every tool to quash them.”

The grim news is that those who want Apple silenced may be succeeding. We have learned that Apple may be only days away from stopping its presses. This itself is a lesson in freedom. Instead of directly censoring the publication, Hong Kong authorities, backed by China, have targeted the lifeblood of any news organization, its business operations.

The lesson of Apple is that freedom of the press doesn’t exist in the abstract. It depends on property rights. By freezing Apple’s corporate accounts, by stopping Mr. Lai from voting his shares (he holds 72% of the company), and by scaring people from advertising in Apple or doing business with it, Hong Kong has been trying to deny the paper the wherewithal to continue. Lenin understood this more than a century ago, recommending that Communists control newsprint and advertising to bring the press to heel.

There’s a warning here for other Hong Kong business enterprises that may not think they have a stake in what happens to Mr. Lai or Apple. Hong Kong authorities are stealing Mr. Lai’s company because they don’t like his political views—and they have done it by police orders, without due process or judicial review. If they can do it to his company, does anyone really believe they won’t do it to a bank or tech company that offends China?

The men and women at Apple have been making a valiant stand to keep publishing despite the risk of arrest and imprisonment. They are an example of real journalistic courage that should educate an American media that likes to play up its bravery in challenging the government while living under the protection of the First Amendment and a free society. Mr. Lai and his journalists have put their freedom at risk to challenge a real tyranny.

The CPJ award is richly deserved, and it should put a global spotlight on what is happening to Mr. Lai and Apple. As China’s Communist Party seeks to expand its political control over critics world-wide, often with the acquiescence of Hollywood and U.S. tech companies, Jimmy Lai speaks for everyone fighting for the cause of liberty.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-sends-a-message-to-biden-11624130662?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Islamic Republic of Iran isn’t a real democracy. But the result of Friday’s presidential election still reveals important truths about the government that the U.S. and Europe are trying to appease on nuclear weapons.

Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s chief justice, won the presidency with about 62% of the vote, according to preliminary results published Saturday. Sometimes discussed as a potential successor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei —who wields the real power in Iran, particularly over foreign affairs—Mr. Raisi had the race wrapped up before the polls opened.

The Guardian Council, Iran’s election watchdog, has long barred candidates not to the Supreme Leader’s liking. But past races have been competitive and even unpredictable, giving Iranians a small voice in deciding their future. Approved candidates are always loyal to the Islamic Republic and its revolutionary ideology. But some, like lame-duck President Hassan Rouhani, spoke the language of moderation and reform even as they followed the Khamenei line.

Iranians understand they live in a dictatorship but have often voted in high numbers to choose their least bad option. Initial results suggest this year’s race had turnout around 50%—down from more than 70% four years ago and the lowest of any vote since 1979. Millions decided to boycott this year’s election as the country’s already small spectrum of permissible views grew even smaller.

Last month the Guardian Council culled dozens of candidates, including many ostensible centrists or reformers. Of the seven candidates approved to run, three dropped out shortly before the contest—paving the way for Mr. Raisi, who is typically described as a hard-liner or ultraconservative cleric.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17469/china-and-russia

The actions of the Beijing government since the earliest days of concern about the disease have shown in stark relief how a closed, authoritarian society tries to deny and shift blame for its misdeeds. How it seeks to co-opt international health agencies. How it tries to bribe foreigners to do its bidding. How it has infected more than not just American bodies, but American society and its institutions at many levels.

Almost no one in American politics, on the Left or Right, has been hailing the Chinese communist government for its efforts to stem the fourth deadly pathogen to come from its shores and devastate the rest of the world. The Chinese government concealed all information about how the virus originated, encouraging speculation they did so intentionally. According to Gordon Chang, they may even be preparing to do so again, only worse…. By comparison, Russia’s crimes against the West, real and imagined, amount to a relative nuisance.

Foreign policy, however, is made towards nations, not individual leaders. In geo-political terms it asks: What is another country’s ability to help you, or harm you?

In the 1980s no one would have suggested that Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, or Muamar Qaddafi was America’s greatest enemy. They were obnoxious sideshows, annoying tinpot dictators with a flair for the microphone, but not existential threats on the order of the Soviet Union.

What this poll suggests is that threat assessment has somehow become a partisan issue, based on political grudges and perceptions that have little to do with a particular nation’s real capacity to damage American interests. The divide among Republicans and Democrats between China and Russia as our largest threat fails to account for a modern analysis of China’s power, influence, aggressiveness in action, and willingness to corrupt American political and cultural leaders. It should not be a partisan issue, no matter how obnoxious one nation’s current leader may be.

Putin loves to tweak America; Xi prefers quieter, more damaging forms of aggression.

It is vital for American voters to understand that bribery is a key part of doing business for both China and Russia.

No matter how much he might like to, Vladimir Putin cannot threaten the balance sheets of huge American companies such as Apple and Microsoft; China could do it tomorrow.

Imagine yourself sitting at a poker table with one opponent who fingers his dwindling stack of chips while glowering at you and daring you to bump the pot. Meanwhile, your other opponent with more chips sits quietly behind his cards while his paid spies behind your chair signal him the contents of your hand.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17481/china-g7

While Obama looked the other way, China militarized a string of atolls in seas around it as part of a long-term plan to forge an aggressive profile against its neighbor and the United States.

The Chinese challenge can and must be met both in the global arena and inside the People’s Republic itself. Any move in that direction would require a realistic assessment of the People’s Republic in terms of hard and soft power.

China’s pursuit of global power and influence is modelled on the Western empire-buildings of the 19th century, which consisted of importing raw material, exporting manufactured goods, and weaving networks of trade with the help of a seemingly endless flow of settlers, gunboats and colonial outposts across the globe. China cannot fully adopt that model for a number of reasons. Its model is based on the assumption that capitalism can forever do without democracy, something that the experience of the Western imperial powers of the past proved to be fallacious.

At the G7 summit in Cornwall last weekend, US President Joe Biden warned his fellow-summiteers that unless something was done “China would eat our lunch.” Did Biden overegg the pudding with his colorful language or is the world ignoring the invisible chopsticks at work?

In a sense China, as the biggest trading partner of almost all the G7 members, is already eating part of their lunch while it is clear that without Western investment, technology and, of course, markets, China might have remained hungry and stuck between the madness of Maoism and the inertia of Ah-Quism.

Biden, of all people, should know all that. For it was during the Obama administration in which Biden was part of the décor that the “Asia-Pacific” cliché was launched as the principal future direction of the US global strategy. While Obama looked the other way, China militarized a string of atolls in seas around it as part of a long-term plan to forge an aggressive profile against its neighbor and the United States.

The Europeans saw the “Asia-Pacific” motif as a signal that China was the future and that they had better put as many chips on its number as they could.

Like his other grandiose schemes, Obama’s “Asia-Pacific” failed because his administration was unable to define China’s place in the global system and its relations with the United States. Unable to decide whether China was friend or foe, Obama, the quintessential ego-worshipper, believed his charm would be sufficient to coax China into the channel he desired.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/18/is-it-racist-to-confront-a-suicide-bomber/

The independent inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017, in which 22 pop fans were killed by an Islamist extremist, has published the first volume of its report. It makes for chilling reading. The inquiry has found there were numerous ‘missed opportunities’ to confront Salman Abedi, the bomber, and potentially stop him from detonating the device in his rucksack. Most chilling of all is the reason given by one of the key security guards on patrol that evening as to why he failed to question Abedi. He was worried, he said, that asking a brown-skinned man why he was hanging around the arena might be construed as racist.

Take that in. There was a very shifty-looking young man around the foyer and mezzanine of the Manchester Arena towards the end of an Ariana Grande concert, carrying a ‘bulging’ rucksack so large he ‘struggled’ under the weight of it, and a security guard was reluctant to confront him lest he be accused of racism. In the words of the report, this was a significant ‘missed opportunity’. The ‘inadequacy’ of the security guard’s response to the presence of a highly suspicious individual was one of the many misjudgements made on that black, fateful night, the report says. Is it possible that the fear of being thought of as racist is screwing up everyday life, and even hindering sensible action in threatening situations?

To be clear, the security guard who was cagey about questioning Abedi is not responsible for the failure to stop Abedi from detonating his device. The first volume of the inquiry’s report – which covers security at and around the arena on the night of 22 May 2017 – criticises certain individuals, including the security guard, for not doing their jobs diligently enough. But it says that it was the organisations responsible for security at the arena – the arena’s own security firm and also the British Transport Police – that were ‘principally’ to blame for the ‘missed opportunities’. It also makes the reasonable point that it is impossible to know what would have happened if Abedi had been confronted. It proposes that there may still have been loss of life – if, for example, he had detonated his device while being questioned – but that it would have been less severe than the horrors that shortly unfolded.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17473/iran-fake-presidential-election

The genuine power in Iran is made up of unelected, authoritarian, religious and fascist military elites who, for decades, have, frozen in place the revolutionary, theocratic ideology of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The nomination mechanism for presidential candidates is itself part of the fraudulent process.

Past elections have either been rigged in favor the hardliners, as in today’s election, or so overshadowed by the power of the regime’s deep state, that no president is been able to effect any substantive reforms to loosen the chokehold that the mullahs maintain on Iranian citizens.

The most likely dark horse is former Central Bank of Iran President Abdolnasser Hemmati, a (relative) moderate…. Hemmati’s biggest obstacle is the lack of interest by the majority of Iran’s electorate. They seem to have despaired of any real change in the Islamic Republic, at least in the near future. The US negotiating team, seemingly desperate for a deal — any deal — with the mullahs, could cause far less global damage if they despaired of it, as well.

Iran’s so-called presidential election today, June 18, is a fraud, a ruse for the world to observe and seemingly domestically designed to release some pent-up popular pressure.

Iran’s presidency itself is a weak institution of weak political superstructure which also includes the legislative branch (the majles, the sort-of equivalent of a parliament). This highly visible but insubstantial governmental apparatus masks the real power in Iran: the “deep state” of the Islamic Republic.

The genuine power in Iran is made up of unelected, authoritarian, religious and fascist military elites who, for decades, have, frozen in place the revolutionary, theocratic ideology of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The nomination mechanism for presidential candidates is itself part of the fraudulent process. All candidates must first be approved by the hardline and powerful Council of Guardians (COG), which decides whether the prospective candidate is loyal enough to Islamic revolutionary principles. Any candidate who is judged by the appointed 12 member Council of Guardians (six mullahs, six laymen) to be insufficiently “Islamic” or unwanted by the clergy is rejected. Almost always, this process favors conservative hardliners, thereby serving its intended purpose.

The office of the Supreme Leader (Rahbar), who is the titular head of the “Deep State,” is occupied by the autocratic Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It is the Supreme Leader who can always intervene and make known his preferences to the Council of Guardians behind the scenes before the COG announces its final list of approved candidates

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/beating-down-brits-katie-hopkins/

It has been quite the week here in the UK. On Monday, Boris Johnson canceled ‘Freedom Day’. On Wednesday, he started the forced vaccination of Care Home staff. And the week isn’t over yet.

First, Boris and his G7 chums stopped milling about on a private beach in Cornwall having BBQs and taking pretend-socially-distanced photographs while leg humping each other in private. Then, Boris posed like a stranded beluga whale on the Cornish shoreline for the press, before returning to Number Ten.

Next, replete with tan and sea salt in his hair from his morning swimming adventures, Boris crushed the hopes of every hardworking Brit hoping to go overseas on holiday by canceling Freedom Day.

The cursed day was supposed to be June 21. I say cursed because all fabricated ‘goalposts’ are cursed by their very nature. Remember ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’ before it became ‘freedom is a vaccine’? That was just before it became ‘hospitalizations and deaths’, before it became cases, and only slightly after it becomes ‘vaccination rates in the 18-40 age group’. And all that before we get going on the so-called “variants” that are imagined up to cage the nation a little longer.

Either hung-over or just bored by his own lies — it was difficult to tell which under his weird hair which now grows at a constant 40 degrees from his head — Boris even managed to conjure up a new ‘pretend’ Freedom Day, announcing it first as July 29, then July 19. The British people are so sick of all this painful captivity that they barely flinched — like a patient who’s been stuck with so many needles that another one doesn’t even register.

The British Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, was on hand to bore everyone into disinterest with a series of slides pretending to provide the data for this decision. Given there is no data, this was a tough job. But Whitty has been well-lubricated by Bill Gates in the past and is absolutely prepared to keep bending over in the name of the state injectable he likes to refer to as a ‘vaccine’.

I should point out for the unaware what Chris Whitty (our Fauci) looks like.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/racist-xenophobe-tyrant-raymond-ibrahim/

Criticism against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is again on the rise, now that his nation is set to take the presidency of the Visegrad group of Central European nations next month.  According a recent report, “Britain’s government has condemned comments made by Viktor Orbán about Muslims and migrants on the eve of a bilateral meeting between the Hungarian leader and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.  In a statement, No. 10 Downing Street said that Orbán’s 2018 comment to a German newspaper about ‘Muslim invaders’ and his later description of migrants as ‘a poison’ were ‘divisive and wrong.’”

In fact, Orbán’s ultimate motive is to secure his nation against the crimes and problems that come along with Muslim migrants.  Speaking back in 2015, during the heyday of mass Muslim migration into Europe, he clearly laid out his logic:

Those [migrants] arriving [into Europe] have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims.  This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity….  We don’t want to criticize France, Belgium, any other country, but we think all countries have a right to decide whether they want to have a large number of Muslims in their countries. If they want to live together with them, they can. We don’t want to and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see….

The prime minister went on to invoke history—and not in the politically correct way (to condemn Christians and whitewash Muslims) but according to reality:

I have to say that when it comes to living together with Muslim communities, we are the only ones who have experience because we had the possibility to go through that experience for 150 years.

Orbán was referring to Islam’s conquest and occupation of Hungary from 1541 to 1699.  Then, Islamic jihad, terrorism, and Christian persecution were rampant.

Indeed, on this very day in history, on June 15, 1389, a horde of Muslim Turks met and crushed a coalition of Serbs, Hungarians, Poles, and Romanians, at the pivotal Battle of Kosovo.  Thereafter, much of southeastern Europe, including Hungary, and portions of modern day Russia, was conquered, occupied, and terrorized by the Turks—sometimes in ways that make Islamic State atrocities seem like child’s play.  (Think of the beheadings, crucifixions, massacres, slave markets, and rapes that have become IS trademarks—but on a much grander scale, and for centuries.)

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/david-solway-2/2021/06/16/a-case-study-how-one-health-official-represents-the-tribe-n1455195

On April 19, the Vancouver Sun printed an article about the COVID-linked death of an infant under two years old. Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s provincial health officer, lamented that the infant’s tragic death “reminds us of the vicious nature of this virus.” The kicker, which Henry failed to mention, is that this was the very first COVID-19 death under the age of 30 in a province with a population of over 5 million.

It turns out it was inside the BC Children’s Hospital that the child caught its infection—“behind the doors of a government institution,” as Julius Ruechel in a monumental study of institutional malfeasance puts it. The vast majority of COVID fatalities, as the study makes indisputably clear, occur within government institutions—care homes, prisons, and hospitals. Moreover, the Sun article points out that the child had serious pre-existing health conditions, which explains why the two-year old was admitted into hospital in the first place.

As Ruechel observes, “The fear sparked by the headline and by Dr. Bonnie Henry’s statement is palpable. Yet buried in the text of the article is the missing context. Dr. Henry was using the magician’s tool of misdirection to hide what was in plain sight,” namely, that the child “was already a patient before catching the virus inside the hospital.” The reason the infant was in hospital in the first place was owing, not to the “vicious nature of the virus” but to pre-existing health conditions, severe enough, as CTV points out, to require specialized care—regrettably, in a government-run infectorium.

Like innumerable other government-affiliated health officials, Henry reminds me of a trained seal, jumping through hoops, balancing balls on her nose, performing for the public in the great political aquarium where government functionaries swim and frolic. She does what she has been schooled to do and the crowd loves it. Henry is admired and even adored by the general public as a caring and motherly public servant.

Which begs the question. For Henry is adept not only at evading the truth but at contradicting herself with evident sangfroid amounting to an access of earnest conviction. On April 10, 2021, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms released a video titled Covid: The Political Pandemic treating of the government’s ongoing violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms on the pretext of managing the COVID outbreak. Clips of Henry’s various interviews and addresses reveal a startling but predictable story of blatant dissimulation.

For example, on March 6, 2020 (time stamp 20:10), Henry states that people who are well should not wear masks, since masks “are not an effective way of protecting yourself.” Same on March 19, 2020 (20:28) and May 11, 2020 (20:33). On June 22, 2020 (20:37), we learn that “We cannot rely on a mask”—masks are “not recommended,” and again on September 11, 2020 (20:50). Bonnie Henry is so sure, apparently, that masks are useless—as indeed they are—that she does not hesitate to go repeatedly on public record affirming her claim. But wait. On March 11, 2021 (20:55), Henry tells us that “I have always supported wearing masks…I’ve never said don’t wear them.” Never is a big word. What are we to make of this obvious canard? Amnesia or duplicity? A rhetorical question. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kong-police-arrest-newspaper-editor-under-national-security-law-11623908475

HONG KONG—National security police in Hong Kong arrested the top editor of a popular pro-democracy newspaper and searched the company’s newsroom, in the most targeted action involving a media organization’s journalistic operations yet in a yearlong crackdown on dissent.

Apple Daily’s editor in chief, Ryan Law, was photographed on Thursday being led away in handcuffs by officers from his home in the Quarry Bay neighborhood. The raid was the latest in a series of moves against the newspaper group and its publisher, Jimmy Lai, a multimillionaire Beijing critic.

Scores of police, armed with a warrant they said covered the “power of searching and seizure of journalistic materials” under the national security law, also searched the Apple Daily newsroom. The newspaper reported that officers were looking through computers and searching desks.

Four other directors of the company were also arrested. Police said all five were detained under suspicion of “collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security.”

Steve Li, a senior police superintendent, told reporters that the publication has conspired with others to request foreign countries, organizations and individuals to impose sanctions against Hong Kong and China. More than 30 Apple Daily articles were involved, and authorities froze the equivalent of $2.3 million from three related companies: Apple Daily Ltd., Apple Daily Printing Ltd. and AD Internet Ltd.

The articles played a crucial part in a conspiracy and provided ammunition for foreign countries or groups to impose sanctions, Mr. Li said.