RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-chinese-communism-11625092616?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Chinese Communist Party will celebrate its 100th anniversary on July 1 with fireworks and nationalist fervor, but it is no occasion for joy. The Party retains its iron grip on power, and it now poses the leading threat to global freedom and democracy.

Note that we are referring here to the Party, not the Chinese people. They are not the same. The 95 million Party members have special privileges and rule over 1.4 billion by the threat of arrest and ruin for dissent. “In the east, west, south, and north, the party leads,” Party chief and Chinese President Xi Jinping once said, echoing founder Mao Zedong.

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The most important fact never to forget is the Party’s murderous history. The Communists retreated to Yenan in the 1930s and let the Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek do most of the fighting against Japan in World War II. Mao then won the civil war in 1949 and proceeded like all Communists to purge opponents and take total control.

What followed were the bloodiest decades in world history, rivaled only by Stalin’s purges. The Great Leap Forward led to mass famine. In the Cultural Revolution, Mao unleashed the Red Guards to torment anyone suspected of disloyalty or bourgeois tendencies. Millions were banished to the countryside, and over the Mao years unknown millions of Chinese died.

After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping won a power struggle and began the free-market reforms that have produced China’s fantastic economic growth. For a time, social and political controls eased. But the Party has never relinquished power, and in 1989 Deng crushed the democratic uprising in Tiananmen Square. China still censors even the word Tiananmen on search engines, often with the acquiescence of Western tech companies.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/boris-johnson-says-its-time-to-learn-to-live-with-covid/?utm_

If you’re worried about society-wide COVID restrictions becoming a permanent feature of life in Europe, here’s a positive development in the United Kingdom:

Boris Johnson took an increasingly hardline approach to ending lockdown on July 19 today, telling the Cabinet the country will have to ‘live with Covid in the future’.

Amid clear signals that ministers are increasingly set on ending draconian restrictions in three weeks come hell or high water, the Prime Minister highlighted that the link between infections and serious illness and deaths has been significantly weakened.

Downing Street said the Cabinet – including new Health Secretary Sajid Javid – ‘agreed that once we have completed the road map, we will be able to live with Covid in the future, even if cases continue to rise, thanks to the protections provided by the vaccine.’

The United Kingdom has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, but the number of cases jumped from 2,000 per day in May to over 16,000 per day in late June.

The Daily Mail notes studies show that, in a society that’s mostly vaccinated, COVID’s infection-fatality rate is now about the same or a bit lower than that of the flu: “A separate study from scientists at Cambridge University found that fewer than one in a thousand people who catch Covid in England now die from the disease. They estimate the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) of coronavirus has been driven down to 0.085 per cent thanks to the country’s hugely successful vaccine rollout.”

An analysis conducted by the Associated Press found that unvaccinated people accounted for 99.2 percent of all COVID deaths that occurred in the United States during the month of May.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17512/end-china-trade

The real problem for Beijing is that consumption, the only sustainable part of the Chinese economy, looks far softer than officially reported, something evident from the widely followed China Beige Book survey. Spending will not fully recover until the coronavirus pandemic passes, and that is unlikely to happen soon due to China’s barely effective vaccines.

In any event, Washington must begin enforcing laws, especially those banning the importation of products made with forced or slave labor.

Japan’s Uniqlo is not the only brand that has been implicated. Nike and Apple have, through subcontractors, apparently used such labor. Enforcement has been hampered by, among other things, lack of personnel and a failure of political will.

The larger goal has to be an ending of trade relations with China. “Because the threat posed by China to the United States results from its hostile system and includes economic, technological, and military dimensions, only systemic, not piecemeal, responses can possibly protect critical U.S. interests,” Washington, D.C.-based trade expert Alan Tonelson tells Gatestone. “Sanctions against individuals or companies will inevitably produce only pinprick effects, and even these are easily nullified with shell game corporate renamings and personnel changes.”

“I want to be clear on this, our goal is not to hold China back,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a June 25 interview with Anne Claire Coudray of TF1. “It is not to establish a policy against China.”

Really? The Chinese regime spread a disease that has at last count killed 604,000 Americans; last year it urged the violent overthrow of the American government; it is killing tens of thousands of Americans annually with fentanyl and related opioids; and it steals half a trillion dollars of American intellectual property every 12 months. It has even declared a “people’s war” on America.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/false-claim-muslims-are-being-lynched-india-ashlyn-davis/

We received an interesting reply to one of our articles yesterday. When we reported about the Muslim preacher Mohammad Umar Gautam, who has been arrested by the Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terror Squad for running a religious conversion outlet, one Twitter user claimed, “They are already lynching Muslims on streets with impunity, don’t make their situation worse.” 

We found it incongruous that in a country where a Muslim preacher, supported by politicians and industrialists, openly holds congregations to convert non-Muslims to Islam, Muslims are being lynched on the streets, and that, too, with impunity. But we believe in giving a fair chance to all claims and so did some research, and this is what we found.

In 2017, a Muslim man, Pehlu Khan, was attacked under the suspicion of cow theft, and succumbed to his injuries. The incident got immediate judicial attention; the accused were detained by the police and then-Home Minister Rajnath Singh assured justice. Crimes cannot be obliterated from a country of over 1.3 billion. But to contend that the crime against the Muslim was committed with impunity is a shameless stretch of the truth in order to claim eternal victimhood.

This is the dear and treasured victimhood status that many Muslims have been unremittingly exploiting throughout Narendra Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister. Nurturing their deep-seated hatred for Hindus, they have now prefixed their favorite hyperbolic claim, “lynched for being a Muslim” with “forced to chant Jai Shree Ram,” in order to satiate their occasional cravings for affronting Hindu sentiments.

We have previously detailed how, earlier this month, the Muslim intelligentsia, comprising Muslim media personalities, politicians and political influencers, distorted the Muslim-on-Muslim violence in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad into an assault on a Muslim by Hindu extremists. This venomous cabal has mastered the art of coming up with false and deceptive claims of “hate crimes” every time a Muslim is victimized, regardless of the faith of his offender or the cause of the attack. Hinduphobic media houses and assorted websites have repeatedly latched onto such stories, ensuring they reach every corner of the world, but have done nothing to negate the impact of the misinformation after investigations revealed these to be warped narratives and that no hate crime was involved.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/pro-palestinian-anti-semitism-europe-joseph-puder/

Violent anti-Semitic eruptions in Europe following the outburst of hostilities between the Gaza-based Hamas terrorists and Israel have become common and repeated occurrences. The European governments have done little to prevent the largely Muslim and some local anti-Semites from initiating violence against European Jews. It is particularly true of the German government and its leader, Angela Merkel. Chancellor Merkel invited over a million migrants into Germany, mostly Muslims from the Middle East and Africa. Their inculcated hatred for Israel and Jews has resulted in the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, Holocaust memorials, and attacks on synagogues. To assuage Jewish concerns, Merkel and the German government pay lip-service to the unacceptability of anti-Semitism in Germany due to Germany’s role in perpetrating the Holocaust in which Six Million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany. In reality, few of the perpetrators are punished, and certainly not with long prison terms or deportation. 

The New York Times reported (May 19, 2021) that rocks were thrown at doors of a Synagogue in Bonn. Israeli flags were burned outside a synagogue in Munster. Pro-Palestinian rallies took place in Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, and Leipzig. “In Germany, where historical memory runs especially deep because of the Holocaust, pro-Palestinian rallies have been held in cities across the west of the country and in the capital, Berlin. Several have descended into violence, including anti-Semitic chants, calls for violence against Israel, desecration of memorials to Holocaust victims, and attacks on at least two synagogues.”

The German Interior Minister Horst Seehoffer threatened to crackdown on anti-Semitism at pro-Palestinian protests. He stated, “We will not tolerate the burning of Israeli flags on German soil and attacks on Jewish facilities.” He added, “Anyone who spreads anti-Semitic hatred will feel the full force of the law.” We have heard these immaterialized threats before, but then, political correctness appears to cause German officials to fold rather than deal forcibly with violent Muslims, many of them new migrants. European White Guilt, particularly toward Third World people, accompanied by the loss of national pride, and the will to defend its own traditional values, is allowing a violent minority to perpetuate anti-Semitic violence.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/06/somali-refugee-stabbed-8-women-germany-while-daniel-greenfield/

Obviously, the authorities are blaming “psychiatric” problems.

Three women were killed and five others were seriously injured after a 24-year-old man who is also a Somali immigrant attacked the women in Wuerzburg. 

The attack began in a store when the attacker asked where the business kept its knives, regional police president Gerhard Kallert said.

He then stabbed and killed the saleswoman and two other people in the store before running out on the street and stabbing five more women as well as a child.

Regional Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said authorities are investigating an Islamic motive for the attack as witnesses claim the attacker yelled “Allahu akbar” before the rampage.

The suspect, allegedly named Abdirahamn J, was another refugee whose application was denied, but never left Germany. German media sources suggest that there was ISIS material in the homeless shelter where he was staying.

 Abdirahamn, who came to Germany from Mogadishu, began stabbing women at a Woolworth store, as part of his Jihad.

The “Bild” newspaper reported, with reference to an internal notice from the authorities, that the accused had said when he was arrested that he had carried out his “jihad” with the attack. Investigators at the press conference confirmed that the word “jihad” had been used. 

That’s what happens when countries enable Jihad migration.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/in-the-west-incorrect-speech-is-increasingly-treated-as-blasphemy/

Europe’s ‘hate-speech laws’ have taken the core principles of ‘blasphemy laws’ and dressed them up in a watered-down Western packaging.

Freedom of speech is one of the most fundamental American values. This value was brought all the more sharply into focus recently when my fellow expat, Prince Harry, quite royally offended his host nation by calling the First Amendment “bonkers” on the California-based Armchair Experts podcast. Even as a Brit, I could still detect the irony of the blood descendent of King George III complaining about constitutional rights in the land of the free.

But Prince Harry’s ability to speak freely about his beliefs might not have fared so well in other countries that were formerly under the Crown. Take Pakistan. Last week, advocates supported by human-rights group ADF International celebrated a victory for free speech at the High Court in Lahore, Pakistan. A couple was accused of sending an offensive message about the Prophet Mohammed and the Qur’an in English in 2014. Never mind that they don’t speak English. Never mind that the wife’s phone had been missing for a full month before the inflammatory text was sent. Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Kausar are Catholic, illiterate, and entirely innocent. The couple, parents of four, were sentenced to death in 2014. In a landmark ruling, the High Court has now thrown out the case. The SIM card from the phone in question had not been sent for a forensic test, and therefore was deemed inadmissible as evidence, undermining the case of the prosecution.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-a-free-society-becomes-a-police?token=

By my lights, the most important news event of this past week was not the New York mayoral primary (my condolences to Andrew Yang). It wasn’t Bitcoin dropping below $30,000. And it certainly wasn’t the new bipartisan infrastructure deal announced by President Biden.

It was the forced closure of Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong.

You may not have heard of Apple Daily. I knew of it, but only vaguely. It is — or rather, it was — Hong Kong’s version of the New York Post combined with William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. A tabloid, yes. But also: a voice for freedom. 

Ever since it began publishing in 1995, Apple Daily has been a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party. Its commitment to democracy and freedom had everything to do with its founder, Jimmy Lai.

It’s not possible to do Lai’s whole story justice in a column — someone should make a blockbuster — but here is the cliffsnotes version: Lai fled mainland China at 12 years old as a stowaway on a fishing boat. He found a job in a Hong Kong sweatshop and eventually worked his way up in the garment trade (or, as we in the Jewish community call it, the shmata business.)

Along the way, he encountered fellow garment workers in New York who introduced him to free-market theorists like Frederick Hayek, Karl Popper and Milton Friedman, with whom he later developed a close relationship. “This is a guy who didn’t have any formal schooling past the age of maybe eight,” Mark Simon, who has been Lai’s right hand for the past two decades, told me in an interview this week. “Those books started his real political awakening.”