RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17471/china-dominate-near-earth-space

Communist China seems not only to be directly challenging the US lead in space exploration; its space plans also appear to include an ambitious military dimension, much of whose contents look as if they are controlled by the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). These PLA programs include a vast array of counter-space weapons systems designed to degrade or destroy US space assets.

Even if there are areas where the US and Chinese space programs could serve universal concerns… sadly, it would seem foolhardy to cooperate on any program with the CCP. It has not made a secret of its intent to unseat the US as the world’s leading superpower… within the next 15-30 years. It has already declared war on the US; the US just seems not yet to have read the memo. China seems to be trying to maneuver a surreptitious surrender, by undermining the US from within, accompanied by the threat of a costly, high-powered war. Unfortunately, many in the US seem to be complying.

Meanwhile, in America, we appear busy with diversions — educating our children to hate our country; allowing our government to torpedo our economy by killing growth and launching a ruinous debt; disabling our energy supply while boosting that of our adversaries; exploding our taxes while making us support countless illegal migrants — that are enabling Communist China to fulfill its dream: enfeebling America to take control not only of “near-Earth” space but everything under it as well.

Communist China’s Space Program is demonstrating that it is on a trajectory possibly to surpass the US in the military and scientific exploration in our solar system. China is planning a space spectacular to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party on July 23, 1921. Today, June 17, China launched a three-astronaut crew who will inhabit the command module of its soon-to-be-completed Tianhe Chinese Space Station. This planned human launch follows the June 10 multiple satellite deployment from Northern China’s Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. One of these satellites is designed to track near-earth asteroids.

As early as the mid-1950s, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong declared, “We too will make satellites.” Following that declaration, China aggressively began to compete with both the former Soviet Union and the United States in space — an ambition seemingly energized by China’s desire to develop a nuclear bomb and the means to deliver it. China’s Space Program, called the “Two Bombs, One Satellite” project, was from its inception, placed under the aegis of the CCP’s Central Military Commission, thereby underscoring the military orientation of its activities in space.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/16/election-2021-in-iran-where-murderers-still-rule/

On June 18, the mullahs in Iran will hold their presidential “elections.” It’s almost universally accepted that genuine elections are anathema to the ruling religious dictatorship. This year, if the International Criminal Court were to do its job, the candidates would essentially be called in to form a police line up. They are a who’s who of mass murderers, international terrorists, thieves and embezzlers.

The frontrunner is Ebrahim Raisi. I first saw him when I was being tortured as a young woman in the 1980s — as I was pregnant.

Let me set the context first. For the Iranian people, Raisi’s name is synonymous with the 1988 massacre, when it is estimated that at least 30,000 political prisoners were brutally murdered in prisons across Iran simply for promoting democracy After Raisi announced his candidacy this month, young Iranians took to social media in protest and the hashtag “1988 Henchman Raisi” (in Farsi) quickly started to trend.

In 1988, the 28-year-old Raisi became a notorious member of the “Death Commissions,” appointed by former Supreme Leader Khomeini, to round up thousands of political dissidents in prisons. The majority of those killed, including teenage girls and pregnant women, expressed open support for the main democratic opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

Amnesty International has called it an ongoing crime against humanity because the regime dumped the bodies in unmarked mass graves and has been covering up the evidence ever since. Last year, several top United Nations human rights officials called for a long overdue international probe into the 1988 massacre.

Now, one of the main perpetrators is running for president. After all, this is a regime that is at war with the Iranian people.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17468/germany-failed-hezbollah-ban

In retrospect, Germany’s much-vaunted Hezbollah ban appears to have been little more than a publicity stunt aimed at silencing critics of the German government’s pro-Iran foreign policy.

Hezbollah has effectively evaded the ban by transferring many of its activities to charities and cultural centers controlled by Iran.

Iran’s main base of operation in Germany is the Hamburg-based Shiite Imam Ali Mosque and the associated Islamic Centre of Hamburg (Islamisches Zentrum Hamburg, IZH).

“Like all pro-Iranian institutions, IZH is based on the model of the Islamic state of Allah and the ideas of the 1979 revolution with the aim of expanding and Islamizing the entire world. Western values, liberal ideas or the free democratic basic order are in contradiction to this. Due to the history and the animosity between Iran and Israel, the teachings of IZH have a strong anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli attitude.” — Annual Report for 2020, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, Hamburg branch.

“Although it contains ‘democratic’ elements, this doctrine does not serve to establish the rule of the people, i.e., democracy, but rather to establish the rule of Allah, whose ‘guardians’ are Shiite Islamic scholars. Therefore, Hezbollah spreads an extremist Islamist ideology and represents a threat to the constitutional order.” — Annual Report for 2020, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, North Rhine-Westphalia branch.

“For Hezbollah, Germany represents a space for logistical and financial support services. Although its supporters in Germany are well networked internally, they are not very visible to the outside world because they are careful not to be openly connected with Hezbollah.” — Annual Report for 2020, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, Rhineland Palatinate branch.

“One gets the impression that no one has really tried to completely shed light on and smash the structures of Hezbollah in Germany.” — German MP Benjamin Strasser.

The Hezbollah ban was in fact a compromise measure between German lawmakers who wanted to take a harder line against Iran and those who did not. As a result, the ban fell far short of a complete prohibition on Hezbollah and was apparently aimed at providing the German government with political cover that allowed Germany to claim that it had banned the group even if it had not.

One year after Germany banned Hezbollah from operating on its soil, the Iran-backed, Lebanon-based Shiite terrorist group’s presence in Germany is stronger than ever.

In the twelve months since the ban entered into effect, Hezbollah’s propaganda and fundraising activities in Germany have continued apace; the number of its followers in the country has increased; and the Hamburg mosque which serves as Iran’s main base of operations in Germany has gained in influence.