RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/uk-whistleblower-bruce-bawer/

Though not well known in the U.S., former cop Maggie Oliver is a household name in Britain, where she blew the whistle on official indifference to the so-called “grooming gangs” – that is, the Muslim rape crews that have victimized thousands of white girls in cities around England. A recent YouTube interview with Peter Whittle led me, belatedly, to her 1999 memoir, Survivors, and let me begin by saying this: however much you may know about the grooming gangs – and, in particular, about the years of shameless stonewalling by police and other authorities who were terrified of Muslim unrest – reading about it all from the point of view of a frustrated insider is a supremely enraging experience.

Oliver was not a career cop. She’d already raised four children before she decided, in middle age, to join the Greater Manchester Police (GMP). Four years into the job, in 2001, she was put on a team investigating the drug death of 15-year-old Victoria Agoglia, a social-services client. A man was already in custody, charged with giving her drugs. It was soon established that there were a number of other white Manchester girls who were being plied with alcohol and narcotics by gangs of Pakistani men who treated them more or less as a shared harem.

What ensued was Operation Augusta, an attempt to identify and prosecute these malefactors. The gangs, Oliver learned, were no secret to social workers, who’d been trying for years to get the police to shut them down. One reason why police had refused was that national “performance indicators” rewarded them for solving burglaries and robberies, not child rapes. Another reason was that they saw the girls not as rape victims but as prostitutes. (This was largely a class issue: virtually all of the victims were working-class girls whom the police considered “white trash.”) Finally, the cops knew that if they started cuffing Muslim men, they’d be tagged as racists in the Guardian and by members of what the Brits like to call “certain communities.”

Though shocked by her fellow officers’ apathy, Oliver hoped to turn it around. By August 2004, her team had compiled a list of over 200 men who they suspected of abusing at least 26 girls. She was sure that the evidence they’d accumulated would set the wheels of justice turning. But she was wrong. Higher-ups ordered Operation Augusta shut down, the decision coming immediately on the heels of the jihadist London bombings of July 5, 2005, in which 52 people were killed and almost 800 wounded. In short, instead of responding to this barbaric act of religious war by stepping up efforts to crush a rape gang that was, after all, pursuing its own brand of jihad against the most vulnerable of infidels, the powers that be decided to go into a defeatist cringe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17217/china-five-year-plan

The Chinese Communist Party’s overarching strategy for the next five to fifteen years, apparently, is to accelerate China’s rise by becoming an innovation superpower, technologically independent of the West and dominating global tech.

One of the great causes of tension between China, the US and other Western countries is how the CCP carries out its goal of becoming a dominant technological power — by using deception and theft.

Chinese theft of US intellectual and other property was happening on “a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.” — Christopher Wray, Director Federal Bureau of Investigation, July 7, 2020.

The plan calls for the acceleration of “national defense and armed forces modernization,” and aims to “speed up weapons and equipment upgrading and the development of intelligentized weapons and equipment”.

Since General Secretary Xi Jinping became leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2012, he has spoken repeatedly of the “Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of Chinese nation”. This statement translates into China’s ambition of becoming the world’s greatest power by 2049, thereby surpassing the US as the economic, political and military leader of the world, as pointed out by Michael Pillsbury in his 2015 book, The Hundred Year Marathon.

This March, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) passed a roadmap for China’s rise in the coming years, when it approved China’s new Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (2021-2025). This time, however, the five-year plan also included long-range objectives through the year 2035, by which time the Chinese Communist Party expects China’s economic, scientific, technological and overall national strength to “leap dramatically” and for China to have achieved major breakthroughs in “key and core technologies”.

The CCP’s overarching strategy for the next five to fifteen years apparently is to accelerate China’s rise by becoming an innovation superpower, technologically independent of the West and dominating global tech.

China’s five-year plan sets out that China will focus on innovation in “artificial intelligence (AI), quantum information, integrated circuits, life and health, brain science, bioengineered breeding, aerospace technology, deep earth and deep sea [exploration], and other cutting-edge fields”. It will carry out “major forward-looking and strategic national science and technology projects” and construct “comprehensive national science centers and regional innovation hubs” in addition to “the formation of science and technology innovation centers for Beijing, Shanghai and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area”.

The strategy has already been set in motion with the 10-year “Made in China 2025” plan, which the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released in 2015. That plan aims to make China a global tech leader by accelerating innovations in ten strategic areas, among them electric cars and other new energy vehicles, next-generation information technology and telecommunications, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence, emerging bio-medicine, new materials, aerospace engineering and agricultural technology.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-china-iran-axis-11617059716?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Anyone who thought the world would warm to U.S. interests once Donald Trump left the scene has received a rude awakening in the last two months. The latest sign is the weekend’s pact between China and Iran, an example of U.S. adversaries uniting to advance their strategic ambitions.

The two sides signed what they described as a 25-year “strategic partnership” that amounts to a significant deepening of ties. China will invest several hundred million dollars in a variety of Iranian projects, including nuclear power, ports, and oil and gas development. In return China will get a steady supply of Iranian oil. The two will also deepen their defense cooperation as China will transfer some military technology.

Apologists for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal are saying this doesn’t add up to more than the status quo, and thus shouldn’t interfere with renewed U.S. courtship of Iran. Don’t believe them. This is a big deal that advances the strategic interests of both sides—at the expense of the U.S. and stability in the Middle East.

The deal helps Iran dodge American sanctions, and the cash infusion will ease economic pressure on the ruling mullahs. Iran will have a long-time buyer for its oil exports that were reduced by U.S. sanctions. The foreign-exchange income, if that’s how the payments are made, will finance the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and proxy forces in Yemen, Syria and Iraq.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17215/china-whitsun-reef

The failure of the Obama administration to defend the Philippines in early 2012, in a confrontation similar to today’s, emboldened China’s regime to adopt an even more aggressive posture in its peripheral waters.

China claims all the waters inside the dashes are sovereign as well, terming them “blue national soil.” There is no legal basis for an assertion of sovereignty of this sort.

Whitsun, which Manila calls Julian Felipe Reef, is 175 nautical miles from Palawan, an island of the Philippines. The feature is within the Philippine “exclusive economic zone”….

Since December, large Chinese trawlers have lashed themselves together and parked in formations near Whitsun. Vessels come and go, but the numbers have gone up over time. They have not been engaged in fishing.

Near Whitsun, retired U.S. Navy Capt. James Fanell tells Gatestone, China is building “two concentric rings of new artificial island bases.”

Washington [in 2012] brokered an agreement for [China and the Philippines] to withdraw their craft [from Scarborough Shoal], but only Manila complied. Beijing has been in firm control of Scarborough Shoal ever since. The Obama administration, despite the brazen Chinese seizure, decided not to enforce the agreement it had just arranged.

Worse, by doing nothing to hold China accountable for deception and aggression at Scarborough, Washington empowered the most belligerent elements in the Chinese political system by showing everybody else in Beijing that aggression worked.

Chinese vessels have continued pressure in the South China Sea, especially at Second Thomas Shoal, also thought to be part of the Philippines, as well as other Philippine-controlled features.

“Many on the Biden team failed to act in 2012. They now have a very rare opportunity to get another chance to do the right thing. Let’s hope they will.” — Capt. James Fanell, former director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet, to Gatestone Institute, March 2021.

James Holmes, who holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, told Gatestone that China’s current actions at Whitsun are “an offensive that looks like conquest by increments.” Fanell maintains that not opposing China’s actions at Whitsun will soon put both Taiwan and the Senkakus at risk.

About 220 Chinese fishing vessels, almost certainly part of China’s maritime militia, are now crowding around Whitsun Reef in the Spratly chain in the South China Sea in another attempt to break apart the Philippines.

Whitsun is where the United States and the region should confront an increasingly expansionist China. The failure of the Obama administration to defend the Philippines in early 2012, in a confrontation similar to today’s, emboldened China’s regime to adopt an even more aggressive posture in its peripheral waters.

Whitsun Reef is inside China’s infamous nine-dash line. The line on official maps defines an area informally known as the “cow’s tongue,” which includes about 85 percent of the South China Sea. Beijing maintains it has sovereignty over every feature there, including Whitsun, which Beijing has named Niue Jiao.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17213/us-china-russia-thucydides-trap

The Paris Climate Accord is more of an aspiration than a strategy while the Iranian nuclear problem has always been a way of avoiding the real issue: the danger that the Islamist regime poses for regional peace and stability.

[T]he Biden doctrine, if one might suggest such a label… could cause lasting damage because it concerns relations with China and Russia.

Is China [and Russia] a rival, a challenger, a competitor, an adversary or an enemy? Is the US heading for a cold, lukewarm or even a hot war…?

[W]ithout answering that question it won’t be possible to develop serious policies to deal with them.

The phrase “Russia wants to subvert our democracy” has become a Bidenian leitmotiv. And, yet, the same Russia is invited as a partner in stabilizing Libya, finding a future for Syria and helping keep the mullahs on leash.

You don’t deal with an adversary, even a troublemaker, the same way you do with an enemy.

[T]here are enemies who, like the bug in a Voltaire short story, are suicidal; they prefer to attack and die rather than live to make peace.

George Shultz always advised against taking on two powerful challengers at the same time, even though the US needed to plan for simultaneously fighting two major wars.

When Joe Biden started his presidency with the slogan “diplomacy is back!” some wondered what that meant in terms of a coherent foreign policy. Diplomacy, as every sixth-grader knows, is one of the many means needed to implement a policy. On its own, it is either an academic conceit or another name for charade. In the past week or so we have observed diplomacy, as practiced by the new administration, both as a conceit and a charade.

As a conceit, it appeared in the headline-catching slogan “America is back in the Paris Climate Accord” launched by Washington. Now, however, we know that the “return” is so full of “ifs and buts” that even the French, initially applauding loudly, are beginning to wonder whether they have been sold a bill of goods. Another example was furnished by the tedious scrimmage over the “nuclear deal” with the mullahs in Tehran.

President Biden had hinted at a quick return to the path traced by his former boss Barack Obama. Based on that assumption, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab imagined a scenario that would lead to defanging the mullahs with a lasting solution to the 42-year old “Iran problem.” Now, however, we know that Raab may have jumped the gun as the Biden team are still wondering what to do about a deal that Robert Malley, the diplomat in charge of the dossier, has described as defective.

In the broader scheme of things, these two examples may do little harm.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17202/erdogan-turkey-islamic-superpower

Erdogan was promoting his global campaign of victimization by “Islamophobia”, while in fact it is the critics of extremist Islam who are in danger and frequently killed.

In the Caucasus, Turkey has just supported the Azerbaijani war against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh in order to create a Turkish Islamic corridor between Azerbaijan, Turkey and other Muslim countries.

“It began in 1989 with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie: no Western country reacted except with words – as if they thought a verbal spell might work!…. The battle lost in Armenia is the first of a war waged in the West against the Judeo-Christian civilization”. — Michel Onfray, Reveue des deux mondes, February 1, 2021.

While the new sultan extends his influence to Syria, Libya and the Caucasus, he also extends it to the Mediterranean. For pacifist Europe, that sea only exists when it comes to bringing in migrants.

“What the Turkish regime is doing is using its diaspora as a Trojan horse.” — Michel Sifaoui, europe1.fr, February 7, 2021.

In Turkey under Erdogan, school textbooks have been rewritten to refer to Jews and Christians as gavur, “infidels.” Earlier Turkish textbooks referred to the members of the two religions as the “people of the Book”…. The curriculum adopts an anti-American stance, and shows sympathy for the motives of ISIS and al-Qaeda. — Report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), March 2021.

“We are a large family of 300 million people from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China”. — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Minval.az, October 18, 2018.

“It was a very special day, July 24 [2020],” said France’s leading expert on Islam, Gilles Kepel.

“It was pilgrimage time to Mecca and, due to the pandemic, no one was there! It was the anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne, the origin of modern Turkey within its current borders. Erdogan was about to twist the arm of the secular Ataturk, who had turned the old Hagia Sophia basilica into a museum that he had donated ‘to humanity’. Erdogan… turned it back into a mosque”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17148/lessons-middle-east

If appointing Antony Blinken as Secretary of State was enough to reassure Israelis and Saudis, the designation of Robert Malley as special envoy to Iran only rekindled their concerns. Malley was not only involved in the conception of the JCPOA, he was “kicked off of Obama’s first presidential campaign after reports emerged he had met with members of the Hamas terror group,” and has reportedly asked that Hamas be included in talks in the future. Senator Tom Cotton tweeted that the appointment was “deeply troubling… Malley has a long track record of sympathy for the Iranian regime & animus towards Israel. The ayatollahs wouldn’t believe their luck if he is selected.”

The Israeli government, whose secret service has managed to demonstrate Iran’s willingness to acquire nuclear weapons, also warned: “The deal gave Iran a highway paved with gold to build the critical infrastructure for an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs. That deal gave Iran the resources to significantly escalate its aggression and terror across the Middle East.”

Far from the memory of the too numerous wars that have marked the Middle East, the temptation is strong to think that diplomacy should replace force, and that a good negotiation, even if it means coming out a loser, is better than a conflict. This is more or less the philosophy that seems to inspire the “not so new” American administration, such as that for former US President Barack Obama.

Former President Donald J. Trump, for his part, had no doubt learned some lessons from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and more from the miserable double-cross offered by Hitler to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, which would lead, a year later, to the Second World War. Daladier and Chamberlain were so opposed to the use of force that they preferred to sacrifice Czechoslovakia to Nazi appetites rather than stand firm while there was still time. The rest, unfortunately, is well known.

Other have been inspired by the Roman general, Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus: “Si vis pacem, para bellum” — If you want peace, prepare for war.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17195/iran-houthis-celebrate-biden

By removing the Houthis from the terrorist list and cutting off US support to confront the militia group, the Biden Administration has emboldened and empowered the Houthis and given them a free pass.

That is most likely why the Houthi terror group has ratcheted up its missile attacks. More than 40 drones and missiles were reportedly launched by the Houthis at Saudi Arabia in the month of February alone.

In spite of the mounting evidence of crimes committed by the Houthis, the Biden Administration decided to hand an undeserved political victory to Iran’s regime. Let us hope that the Biden Administration reconsiders, and stops rewarding Iran for its malign behavior as well as jeopardizing the strengthening peace and stability that has finally been taking off throughout the Middle East.

The Biden Administration has completely reversed the former administration’s firm policy on the Houthis in the Yemeni civil war.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels, also known as Ansarallah, as a “foreign terrorist organization” in January 2021. The move was intended to hold the terror group accountable, as Pompeo clarified:

“These designations will provide additional tools to confront terrorist activity and terrorism by Ansarallah, a deadly Iran-backed militia group in the Gulf region. The designations are intended to hold Ansarallah accountable for its terrorist acts, including cross-border attacks threatening civilian populations, infrastructure, and commercial shipping.”

But after less than a week in office, the Biden administration began reviewing the designation and revoked the designation of Yemen’s Houthis as a terrorist group.

Why would the Biden Administration remove a militia group, which commits crimes against humanity, recruits, injures and kills children, from the terrorist designation? According to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2020:

“Since September 2014, all parties to the conflict have used child soldiers under 18, including some under the age of 15, according to a 2019 UN Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts on Yemen report in 2019. According to the secretary general, out of 3,034 children recruited throughout the war in Yemen, 1,940—64 percent—were recruited by the Houthis.”

https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/26/largest-ever-incursion-chinese-air-force-near-taiwan/

Reuters is reporting that the Chinese air force sent another incursion of military aircraft near the island of Taiwan today. This has become a somewhat routine occurrence lately but today was a bit different because of the size of the incursion.

Twenty Chinese military aircraft entered Taiwan’s air defence identification zone on Friday, in the largest incursion yet reported by the island’s defence ministry and marking a dramatic escalation of tension across the Taiwan Strait…

It marked the largest incursion to date by the Chinese air force since Taiwan’s defence ministry began disclosing almost daily Chinese military flights over the waters between the southern part of Taiwan and the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands in the South China Sea last year…

The presence of so many Chinese combat aircraft on Friday’s mission – Taiwan said it was made up of four nuclear-capable H-6K bombers and 10 J-16 fighter jets, among others – was unusual and came as the island’s air force suspended all training missions after two fighter jet crashes this week.

From the moment the Biden administration took office, China has been rattling its air force saber over Taiwan. Then there was that not-so-subtle warning from a military spokesman that “Independence Means War.” What’s significant about this latest action is that China is clearly escalating the situation. That’s worrisome because our own military leaders have been warning recently that China clearly has the annexation of Taiwan in its sites.