RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/07/authoritarianism-in-the-air/

Up until a few days ago I was sticking with Glady Berejiklian. This current ridiculous lockdown tested my resolve. But then, I thought, let’s look at the unenviable position political leaders have put themselves in.

First, they slavishly followed China in adopting lockdowns. Bear in mind that this is the first time in the history of epidemics that general lockdowns have been applied. And, I understand, none were ever contemplated.

Don’t want to be conspiratorial but those fake pictures from China showing people dropping down in the street had a purpose. People shown being rounded up and locked in their homes had a purpose. A safe assumption: the Chinese communists are not stupid. An equally safe assumption: they calculate what they do and what they show.

My conclusion is that they wanted the Western world to cripple itself. Of course, they had help from Neil Ferguson and his fellow Imperial College (UK) hysterics in mid-March 2020. Mind you, even they, in their report, did not recommend general lockdowns. True, it is mentioned in passing, but it is not part of the “suppression strategy” which they advocated.

Unsurprisingly, California was one of the first to go full monty. Fauci and epidemiologists around the world soon got on board. What power, basking in the limelight with politicians and the media in thrall! A heady brew.

Second, political leaders, to a man and woman, hid behind medical gurus.  Not our fault you are thrown out of work, your business ruined, they claimed. Blame the expert advice. Follow “the science”.

Powerful political leaders, thinking at first that they were calling the shots, quickly became pawns in the game. To use New South Wales as the example, when Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant says jump, it is now clear that Gladys jumps. I could equally have cited many others, including England’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty. Sure, Boris Johnson was recalcitrant at first but after a personal dose of COVID he soon started paying obeisance to the chief.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/glimpse-future-muslim-majority-britain-katie-hopkins/

Batley and Spen is a small, seemingly insignificant old mill town in the British Midlands. Its drabness and decay are depressing in their ordinariness, but behind these old tenement houses — where outside toilets have been clumsily reattached — is a seething rage no one is prepared to talk about. It’s the reason I have spent time there in the past, to try and force this conversation into the open.

And right now, these awkward truths are glaring the country in the face.

Batley and Spen’s Member of Parliament (similar to a US Congressman) recently stood down, so a by-election was recently held on Thursday, June 30 to find a replacement. That’s the dull mechanics of the thing. The reality is that this tiny town is a glimpse into the political future of Britain (and, by extension, America) — and it is anything but pretty. It has earned the title: the most divisive bi-election in British political history.

Muslim voters are SUPPOSED to vote Labor in the same way black America is SUPPOSED to vote Democrat. But here in this place, religious Muslims oppose Labor’s support for LGBT. This is not politics based on policies. This is politics based on one faith group pitting its grievances against all faith groups. And it’s a faith group that refuses to accept tolerance of LGBT or of Israel. It is a voting block that wants LGBT teaching removed from schools, and wants to express its commitment to “free Palestine” at the polling stations of this tiny Midlands town.

Batley and Spen has made headlines more often than most small towns set miles away from the capital. It drew national attention in 2015 when its MP, Jo Cox, was murdered on the streets in the run up to Brexit, allegedly by an “anti-Muslim white supremacist” — or, in other words, a man with a history of severe mental illness. Cox’s sister, Kim Leadbeater, was put in as the Labor candidate and for perceived righteous reasons, should have been the frontrunner for a win. But this town is not so easily swayed by the emotions of mere mortals. Muhammad matters more.

Perhaps you saw the headlines about a British teacher suspended for showing his Religious Education class a picture of the prophet Muhammad? That, too, happened in this tiny town. A Muslim mob gathered at the gates of the school demanding that he be killed for blasphemy. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17521/china-colossus-clay-foot

To start with the CCP has been an instrument for ruthless repression ever since it seized full power in 1949. By best estimates… the many atrocities it led have claimed at least 80 million lives.

Decades of misguided policies in Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria and Inner Mongolia have surpassed the worst cases of ethnic repression recorded under successive dynasties.

The CCP started with a handful of self-loathing bourgeois intellectuals who sought power by appealing to a peasantry they hardly knew. A century later, it is led by another handful of self-adulating intellectuals who maintain themselves in power with the support of a new class of wealthy entrepreneurs they find harder and harder to control.

The CCP may be proud of its economic success after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, but it celebrates its centenary with “re-education camps” in Xinjiang (East Turkestan), crackdown in Hong Kong and childish but dangerous imperial gesticulations in neighboring seas.

Happy birthday!

As China launches a series of celebrations marking the centenary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), one question cannot be avoided: Is there anything to celebrate?

As far as the party is concerned, the answer is yes.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17532/china-genocide-uyghurs

Ahmetjan Juma’s brother, Mamatjan, suggested that Ahmetjan is being punished simply because he, his brother, works at Radio Free Asia (RFA) as Deputy Director of the Uyghur Service.

The Chinese government has blocked international organizations and journalists from going to the region to conduct an independent investigation.

“My parents told me not to contact my brothers; that if I have anything to say to them or other relatives, just to tell my mother and she will pass the message along to them.” — Mamatjan Juma, brother of Ahmetjan Juma, high school principal and a literary translator, sentenced to 14 years in prison after being held for two years of “training” in China’s internment camps; interview with Gatestone.

“Intellectuals are the people who can lead the social discourse, guide and educate people about their history, culture and everything about Uyghurs. A nation without its intellectuals would be like a person without its brain.” — Mamatjan Juma, interview with Gatestone.

The report, The Uyghur Genocide, states that China bears state responsibility for an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs, and is in breach of the UN Genocide Convention.

Why is the world — and particularly the global Muslim community — largely silent as innocent Uyghurs are destroyed by a brutal, totalitarian regime for the “crime” of having been born a Uyghur?

China’s genocide against its Uyghur ethnic minority in Xinjiang, also known as East Turkestan, presses on. Up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other minorities have been detained in extrajudicial “re-education camps” where deaths, torture and political indoctrination take place. This genocidal campaign seems now specifically to be targeting Uyghur intellectuals. Hundreds have been taken into internment camps, disappeared or died in custody. Among them are professors, journalists, medical researchers, doctors, actors, poets, publishers, writers and students. They are often subjected to harsher prison sentences, as well as death sentences. Many are missing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-italy-relief-and-dread-as-tourists-return-11625232372

“It’s time for you to book your holidays in Italy,” Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi told international visitors in May, hoping to revive a tourism sector that contributes 13% of Italy’s GDP. In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic put an end to most international travel, the country’s tourism revenue dropped by about $113 billion, and things are still far from back to normal.

“Italians go to the beach or the mountains during the summer, and in those areas, things are getting slightly better,” said Giuseppe Roscioli, a hotel owner in Rome and president of the local arm of the hotel lobby Federalberghi. “But historic cities are suffering the most.” The association has used the word “devastation” to describe what the hospitality business is going through. “Half of the hotels in the city are now closed, and most of them won’t reopen until next spring. I am afraid we will be back to the pre-Covid levels only in 2024,” Mr. Roscioli said.

‘Tourism is undoubtedly precious for our community, but at the same time it’s destroying its social fabric.’

— Pierpaolo Capovilla

The inconvenient truth is that ordinary Italians loved having their cities to themselves during the pandemic, finally free from the incessant flow of tourists. The Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso has noted that in the modern world, even a tourist doesn’t like being identified as just another member of the visiting pack: “He enjoys watching tourists, and even bemoaning them. He wouldn’t want to be confused with them.” So one can imagine how the residents feel in a city like Venice, where 75% of businesses revolve around tourism.

“Needless to say, the pandemic is a terrible tragedy, but as a Venetian, I can’t deny that I enjoyed that tourists suddenly disappeared,” said Pierpaolo Capovilla, a musician and artist who has been living in Venice for more than 30 years. “Tourism is undoubtedly precious for our community, but at the same time it’s destroying its social fabric, and it’s pushing regular people away,” said Mr. Capovilla, recalling that before the pandemic the number of visitors in Venice had reached “a distressing level.” Meanwhile, the city center, where 50,000 people currently live, is losing about 1,000 residents each year.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17430/turkey-arms-shipments-jihadis

Erdoğan’s government claimed the cargo was humanitarian aid to Turkoman locals in Syria but then filed criminal charges against the editors Cumhuriyet, for being members of a “terrorist organization,” espionage and revealing state secrets…. The prosecution asked for life sentences for two Cumhuriyet editors. Since then, Can Dündar, then-editor-in-chief, has been living in Germany in exile.

At the beginning of May, Sedat Peker, a convicted Turkish mob boss and a fierce supporter of Erdoğan — until now — began posting videos on social media in which he made uncorroborated accusations of corruption, murder and drug-running against top politicians.

After weeks of silence, Erdoğan… ordered prosecutors and judges to investigate and establish that all of Peker’s claims were lies and a smear campaign against his government. Who will trust the independence of a legal probe when the president has already ordered its verdict?

On January 19, 2014, the Turkish Gendarmerie command in southern Turkey searched three trucks heading for Syria. Accompanying the trucks were Turkish intelligence officers; the trucks had a bizarre cargo: In the first container, were 25-30 missiles or rockets and 10-15 crates loaded with ammunition; and in the second, 20-25 missiles or rockets, 20-25 crates of mortar rounds and anti-aircraft ammunition in five or six sacks. The crates had markings in the Cyrillic alphabet. One of the drivers testified that the cargo had been loaded onto the trucks from a foreign airplane at Ankara’s Esenboğa Airport and that, “We carried similar loads several times before.”

It was evident that the arms were bound for jihadists fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regional nemesis. Nearly two years later, Erdoğan would almost confess to the arms shipments. “What does it matter,” he said in November 2015, “if it [the cargo] was arms or not?”

https://www.newsweek.com/western-silence-gaza-summer-camps-train-future-terrorists-opinion-1605704

The teenage boys of Gaza, some of whom are still in junior high, are learning how to shoot guns, launch anti-tank missiles and protect themselves while peering around walls.

The boys are attending summer camp, but it’s not the swimming and softball, hiking and cookouts that many of us fondly recall. It’s camp as run by the terrorist groups Hamas, which controls Gaza, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). It aims “to fan the flames of jihad among the generation of liberation, instill Islamic values and prepare the long-awaited army for the liberation of Palestine,” as the Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas put it.

Through these camps, which Hamas and PIJ have run for more than a decade, the terrorist groups glorify military operations against Israel and recruit the next generation of terrorists – all of which suggests that Israeli-Palestinian peace will remain as elusive as ever.

One might expect that the terrorist-run camps in Gaza would engender some attention among Western intelligentsia, for which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is always a front-burner issue. That the camps, in fact, attract so little notice shows just how committed leading media and academic institutions are to a narrative of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimization.

Information about the camps isn’t hard to find, if one is willing to look. The terrorist groups promote them on social media, announce their openings at news conferences and post pictures and videos from them.

Moreover, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which brings news from the region to non-regional audiences, has written reports about the camps while posting pictures and videos, and distributes its reports for free.

https://www.newsweek.com/ban-ki-moon-gets-it-wrong-opinion-1605816#slideshow/183474

Ban Ki-moon, former secretary-general of the United National, has had a thought. It is, unfortunately, not a good one. Acknowledging that the Oslo Accords are a failure (true), he then posits two things.

First, that the Israelis and Palestinians must recognize “the fundamental asymmetry between [them]. This is not a conflict between equals that can be resolved through bilateral negotiations, confidence-building measures or mutual sequencing of steps—the traditional conflict-resolution tools.” (Both untrue and true.)

Second, the negotiation failure is because “Israel has pursued a policy of incremental de facto annexation in the territories it has occupied since 1967, to the point where the prospect of a two-state solution has all but vanished.” (Just untrue.)

It is not a “conflict between equals,” but it is true that “confidence-building” and so forth will not work—because the Palestinians remain in a self-avowed state of war with Israel. It is the last remnant of the pan-Arab war against the Jewish state that began before 1948 and is now slowly resolving as follows: “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

Those words should sound familiar to Ban because they are from UN Resolution 242, adopted in the wake of 1967’s Six Day War. Starting with Egypt and Jordan, followed by the Sunni Gulf states, then Sudan and Morocco openly as well as other Arab and African countries quietly, the normalization movement represents precisely the “new approach” Ban seeks.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chinese-communist-word-games/

The most memorable passage of Xi Jinping’s speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s existence is easily this:

We Chinese are a people who uphold justice and are not intimidated by threats of force. As a nation, we have a strong sense of pride and confidence. We have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will. By the same token, we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us. Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.

I’ve emphasized a portion of the last sentence of this selection, because it’s gotten tied up in a debate over translation with political implications. The translation above is from the official version disseminated by the Xinhua News Agency.

Some analysts, however, say that Xi’s remarks were far more violent. The China Media Project and NPR, among others, have translated the line like this: “Anyone who tries to do so will find their head broken and blood flowing against a great wall of steel built with the flesh and blood of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people!”

On Twitter, a Xinhua News employee notes that emphasis on the phrase “seems to be gaining traction, w/ some gruesome translations being floated.” But, he writes, “one of those words that gradually lost their literal meaning over the [years], to [Chinese] ears it conveys total failure, not broken skull & blood”

Xi’s bellicose speech, marking the centenary of a singularly vicious regime, would maintain its broadly defiant message no matter the translation of the phrase in question. In any case, the Party’s violent past and present (and Xi’s promise today to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland) do not inspire much confidence that the true meaning of the line is anything other than what we have come to expect from Communist Chinese conduct.