RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kong-police-make-arrests-on-tiananmen-square-massacre-anniversary-11622793577

HONG KONG—Police arrested two people they accused of using social media to promote a banned candlelight vigil commemorating the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, an annual event that is now seen as testing the limits of China’s crackdown on dissent.

One of those arrested Friday morning was Chow Hang-tung, a lawyer and human-rights activist, who is a senior member of the group that organized previous vigils. The group had canceled the vigil after police banned it citing social-distancing rules tied to the coronavirus pandemic.

Pro-democracy groups say the government is trying to dim the flames of the only mass Tiananmen remembrance held on Chinese soil. Restrictions on gatherings remain in place in Hong Kong, which hasn’t recorded a local and untraceable Covid-19 infection for more than a month.

Tensions were high in parts of the city Friday after police said they would put the vigil’s traditional venue of Victoria Park on lockdown and local media reported 7,000 officers, or more than a fifth of the force, would be deployed to avert protests Friday evening. Officials have warned that anyone attending or publicizing unlawful assemblies faces arrest and up to five years in jail.

Every year since the 1989 gunning down of student-led protesters by Chinese troops around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, crowds have gathered in the park, exercising freedoms that were enjoyed for decades by residents in the former British colony, in contrast with their mainland counterparts.

Police Senior Superintendent Law Kwok-hoi said a woman surnamed Chow and a man were arrested Friday because they had used their social-media accounts to advertise or publicize an unauthorized assembly. The two were “extremely irresponsible” and could cause others to break the law, he said.

https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=190674&sec_id=190674

France is embroiled with protests over the court decision not to try the Muslim killer of the Orthodox Jewish retired teacher, Sarah Halimi, for alleged mental incapacity to stand trial. The decision gave rise to protests in France, Canada, UK, and Israel seeking justice. The Jerusalem Post reported in late May 2021, “Leaders and officials from France, Canada, Israel and the United Nations held a special digital rally demanding justice for Sarah Halimi, a French Jewish grandmother murdered by Kobili Traore.” France hosts Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim Communities.

        This news came shortly after the cease fire ending the 11 day Fourth Israel-Hamas war during which more than 4,000 rockets and missiles were launched by the Gaza Muslim Brotherhood extremists and Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad. That reign of terror was thwarted by Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defense system in a nightly ‘Star Wars’ display with a 90 percent downing of incoming rockets fired indiscriminately by these Islamist extremists. Hamas aroused sectarian protests in the West Bank, Temple Mount, Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah section—originally a Jewish area seized by Jordan during the 1948—over legal evictions of Arabs who lacked deeds of ownership. Add to the outbreak pogroms in joint Arab-Jewish towns in Israel like Lod, Jaffa, Acre, and others. Israel made ‘precision’ attacks on Hamas tunnels, command structures sparing as much as possible Gazan civilians. That was, admitted by the UNWRA director before being forced to recant by Hamas. Because the US and international media provocatively portrayed Israel’s defense as “excessive” the Jewish nation’s usual Democratic supporters in Congress were riven given calls by so-called progressives of “apartheid” and “occupation” insinuating a racist anti-Semitic toxic meme. That led to an outburst of Palestinian protesters attacking Jews in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles spiking anti-Semitic incidents. Concerns over existential threats to Israel and the American Jewish community were expressed by the Biden White House, major Jewish communal leaders, and condemned by the leaders of the Democratic majority and Republican opposition in Congress.

        France by contrast banned Palestinian protests given nightly protests and burnings during Ramadan among the Muslim banlieues suburbs. The French National Assembly had introduction legislation against “separatism” —a euphemism for dealing Islamic extremism. In late April, a French policewoman was killed by a Tunisian émigré. Those illegal Palestinian protests that did occur through France were relatively smaller than in prior outbursts. The National Police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse protesters in Paris and other major French cities. The separatism issue was the subject of an open letter from 1,000 French Servicemen, including 20 former generals raising the threat of insurrection, especially in the predominantly Muslim banlieues. The separatism issue will figure prominently in the upcoming 2022 Presidential election in France pitting President Macron against Marine Le Pen of the National Rally. There is also concerns about France commitment to combatting rising Islamist extremist threats to the G-5 countries in former French Equatorial Africa region of Sahel.

        Against this background we brought back very dear friend, Nidra Poller, long-term American expat in Paris, talented writer, author, and activist for her views. Nidra (right) has written extensively on Islamic Antisemitism, murders of French Jews, terrorist events in France and elsewhere. She is most noted for being one of the earliest investigators in the Muhammad al-Dura affair that involved a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was allegedly killed by Israeli gunfire on September 30th, 2000, at the start of the second Intifada. That was a piece of classic Palestinian propaganda. It was made up. Unfortunately, it involved a French, Jewish producer for France 2 tv whose 54-second film clip triggered this entire investigation. I met Nidra Poller nearly 18 years ago in Boston to go over some of the original findings in that groundbreaking effort. Much of that has been captured in a book that she wrote, published in 2014, called Al Dura: Long-Range Ballistic Myth  Poller contributes commentary on English-speaking media for ELNET which is a strong international organization defending Israel and defending democracy.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/06/02/canada-19-escaping-the-virus-n1451752

A fearful, gullible and low-information public is no match for the masters of deceit: the Marist Mainstream Media, a suborned medical institution, and a political consortium in love with autocratic governance. Thankfully, there are citizens, in countries like Sweden and in the American red states, who have seen through the repressive and failed measures intended to combat COVID. My own country, governed entirely by ideologues and intellectual incompetents on both the federal and provincial levels, is devoid of political sanity and moral courage. A docile and ignorant electorate is easy prey for its leaders. There are exceptions, of course—business owners who have lost everything, people whose cognitive abilities have remained intact—but they form a media-discredited minority.

My anecdotal count is obviously personal and informal, without larger statistical warrant, but I would say that nine out of every ten people I meet and converse with are all for locking down and masking up. I have neighbors who rarely emerge from their apartments, more than a year into a serial disaster. I observe, incredulously, masked parents pushing strollers of masked infants impervious to the virus, swallowing their spittle and exhalations. I see far too many people driving masked, making it hazardous to navigate in the city, especially at traffic merges. We have had several narrow escapes as increasingly maladroit drivers, no doubt drowsy from breathing in their own narcotic CO2, seem to regard the roads as a dreamscape. The lack of awareness, both mental and sensory, beggars belief.

Moreover, people rush to the vaccination tents like adolescents to a rock concert, completely unaware of or indifferent to the large number of adverse reactions to the vaccines. This is true of many populations around the world, but Canada seems exceptional in the extent of its compliance. As mentioned, my personal tallies are anecdotal, but I know of several individuals who were hospitalized with critical reactions, some of whom have died. It is hard to escape a veritable cloud of despair that shadows my waning respect for my countrymen, 70 percent of whom vote Left—which tells one everything one needs to know about Canada.

A friend sends an example that stands as a symbolic marker for the vast majority of my fellow Canadians. On a hike through a 20+ mile conservation area, whose trails circle a man-made lake, he noticed a kayaker who looked fit and healthy. “He was miles from anywhere he could have launched from,” my friend writes, “fishing and just tooling around out on the lake. Outdoors. On a sunny day. Alone. In the middle of a lake. WEARING A MASK.” My friend wondered about the organic composition of this man’s brains—to put it decorously—which explained why “politicians will never let us get back to normal”—or why, we might add, many people seem quite happy with things continuing as they are. “Things as they are/Things as they will be by and by,” wrote poet Wallace Stevens, “A fat thumb beats out ay-yi-yi.” Ay-yi-yi is a reasonable sentiment in context. It has been said of this country that the most discouraging thing about it is the people in it.

My wife and I have long discussed the national decline and considered our personal prospects. We are pinioned here for now, partly from family obligations, and partly as a result of the draconian travel restrictions imposed by our overlords. We couldn’t go anywhere no matter how much we wanted to. But as soon as opportunity permits, we will be decamping to the free and rational jurisdictions in the U.S., possibly Texas, most likely Florida, where we have friends. We have been doing our due diligence, researching the best alternatives. Everything considered, Marco Island seems like a good bet. 

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/chinas-attempt-to-avoid-the-american-tech-monopoly-trap/

One of the great paradoxes of recent economic history is how little the information technology sector has contributed to overall productivity. Economist Raicho Bojilov examined total factor productivity across the major industrial economies from the 1970s to the present and observed:

Somewhat surprisingly, we do not witness, even with a lag, a major pickup in the productivity growth in other industries that are directly and indirectly connected to the IT industry. One would expect that if the IT industry were the engine of the US economy that generates the products, technologies, and techniques of the future, then the other industries would even­tually experience a jump in productivity rates to levels comparable to those of the IT industry. Thus, one may wonder why aggregate productivity in the US has not grown much more in accordance with the innovations and major productivity gains that have been achieved in the IT industry.1

Bojilov adds that “the annual rates of indigenous innovation in the US and the UK have made only a partial recovery during the IT revolution: while higher than the rates for the period 1970–1990, they are still lower relative to the rates witnessed in the postwar years until the late 1960s.”

Why have IT improvements failed to radiate through the broader economy? There are many possible explanations, but the transformation of once-disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies is surely an important one. The monopolization of information technology arises from the nature of the technology itself: so-called network effects make it convenient to have one venue on which to post political comments and cat pictures, one provider of office software that everyone uses, one giant internet retail marketplace, and so forth. But the fact that technological monopolies have their origin in network effects rather than in the nefarious manipulation of mar­kets does not eliminate the potential for abuse.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17403/china-belt-road-forced-labor

Almost all the workers had been deceptively recruited with promises of certain wages and legal work visas. Instead, their passports were confiscated right after they disembarked the plane, leaving them unable to leave unless they paid a heavy fine to the Chinese employer…. They were locked up in poor living and working conditions on the work premises, which were guarded by security guards…. They suffered excessive work hours of up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week with no holiday allowance… Many workers were injured during work with no access to medical treatment…. After a worker from a Chinese mining company in Indonesia was diagnosed positive for Covid-19 in November 2020, he was put in isolation in an empty dormitory room for more than 20 days without any medical treatment. Later other workers found his dead body.

The Chinese embassy also seems to have actively worked to suppress… complaints…. “Several workers said they tried to call the Chinese Embassy to report that their passports were detained by their employing company. The embassy’s reply was that it had no right to intervene and the workers were told to file a report at the local police station. However, these workers, cannot even get out of the gate of the work site, and they also face language barriers. It is quite unrealistic for them to call the local police. — “Silent Victims of Labor Trafficking: China’s Belt and Road workers stranded overseas amid Covid-19 pandemic”, China Labor Watch, April 30, 2021.

Forced labor exists in two distinct forms in China. One form is modern slavery, not directly sanctioned by the state, as exemplified by the BRI workers mentioned above. According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, “on any given day in 2016 there were over 3.8 million people living in conditions of modern slavery in China…. This estimate does not include figures on organ trafficking.”

The other form of forced labor is systematic and legal under China’s penal system. Communist China has used forced labor and labor camps, citing “reeducation”, since the 1950s. In 2013, the CCP claimed that it was abolishing the practice, only to reinstate it again some years later to “reeducate” Uyghurs. A study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, published in September 2020, found that the Chinese government had built nearly 400 detention camps in Xinjiang.

“Tens of thousands of former detainees are likely to have been transferred into forced labour programmes…. They contaminate the supply chains of hundreds of multinational companies with forced labour, and they implicate not only Chinese authorities, but much of the rest of the world in a concerted campaign of ethnic replacement that credible reports suggest may well amount to genocide”. — Nathan Ruser, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, The Guardian, September 24, 2020.

[A] much less known fact is that China also subjects Tibetans to forced labor on a large and organized scale. In the first seven months of 2020, China drove more than half a million Tibetans into forced labor according to a 2020 report, “Xinjiang’s System of Militarized Vocational Training Comes to Tibet,” by the Jamestown Foundation.

“The entire Belt and Road initiative is based on forced labor,” according to Li Qiang, director of China Labor Watch. “Chinese authorities want the Belt and Road projects for political gain and need to use these workers.”

A new report, “Silent Victims of Labor Trafficking: China’s Belt and Road workers stranded overseas amid Covid-19 pandemic” by China Labor Watch, published on April 30, details the conditions of some of those overseas Chinese workers, who are building China’s Belt and Road infrastructure projects across the world. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) forms a crucial part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign policy and is a key tool in China’s ambition to become a global superpower.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irans-navy-heads-to-the-americas-11622586717?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Reports that two Iranian frigates may be steaming into the Atlantic toward Venezuela ought to concentrate minds in the Biden Administration. So much for Iranian goodwill amid President Biden’s determination to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal.

The vessels’ destination isn’t clear, and they could still turn back. But when asked by reporters on Monday about U.S. monitoring of the frigates, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said “Iran has constant presence in international waters, is entitled to this right on the basis of international law, and can be present in international waters.” He added: “I warn that nobody should make a miscalculation. Those who live in glass houses must be cautious.”

Iran’s navy isn’t the U.S. Sixth Fleet, but the entry of warships into Caribbean waters would be a notable provocation. If it sails into these waters without resistance, a precedent will be set for adversarial navies operating in the region. Don’t be surprised if Russia and China decide to join the party in the future.

Iran is a long-time Cuban ally, and since Hugo Chávez turned Venezuela into a dictatorship 20 years ago, Tehran has nurtured an ever-closer relationship with Caracas. The two regimes have engaged in joint defense ventures in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, and Venezuela is known to supply fake identities to Iranian operatives to move around the region.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-whos-dictators-11622586882?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

President Biden rejoined the World Health Organization as one of his first official acts, and his Administration has vowed to “strengthen and reform” it. That effort isn’t going well, as last week’s World Health Assembly shows.

The annual WHO confab started badly as China succeeded in blocking Taiwan’s participation—and embarrassing the U.S. in the process. The island democracy, which hoped to participate as an observer, has one of the world’s best records combatting Covid-19 and could spread its lessons to the world.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month that there is “no reasonable justification for Taiwan’s continued exclusion from this forum,” and the G-7 nations supported its participation. But China, which tries to block Taiwan from all international institutions, prevailed over the Western democracies.

Then on Friday the World Health Assembly voted to appoint Syria and Belarus to WHO’s executive board, which sets the governing body’s agenda and implements its policies. Video of the vote shows it proceeding with neither debate nor objections.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/06/01/irans-stock-of-enriched-uranium-16-times-higher-than-limit-set-out-in-jcpa/

Iran has also failed to explain traces of uranium found at several undeclared sites, a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency shows, possibly setting up a fresh diplomatic clash between Tehran and the West that could derail wider nuclear talks currently underway in Vienna.

Iran holds a quantity of low enriched uranium nearly 16 times higher than the limit authorized in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to a report Monday by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

After Washington pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018 under former US President Donald Trump and re-imposed crippling economic sanctions against Tehran, Iran began breaching the deal’s restrictions on its nuclear activities as of 2019.

One of its more recent breaches, enriching uranium to 60%, a big step towards weapons-grade from the 20% it had previously reached and the deal’s 3.67% limit, continued. The IAEA estimated that Iran had produced 2.4 kg of uranium enriched to that level and 62.8 kg of uranium enriched to up to 20%.

Iran’s production of experimental quantities of uranium metal, which is prohibited under the deal and has prompted protests by Western powers because of its potential use in the core of nuclear weapons, also continued. Iran produced 2.42 kg, the IAEA reported, up from 3.6 grams three months ago.

Iran has also failed to explain traces of uranium found at several undeclared sites, the report by the UN nuclear watchdog showed, possibly setting up a fresh diplomatic clash between Tehran and the West that could derail wider nuclear talks that are currently underway in Vienna.