RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17112/china-crushing-hong-kong

The national security law not only carries sentences of up to life in prison, it also gives China jurisdiction to prosecute in mainland China violations of the law that took place in Hong Kong. It is now doing just that with 12 Hong Kong activists who attempted to flee to Taiwan by boat in August and were arrested at sea, ostensibly for crossing the border illegally. Extraordinarily, the national security law also applies to alleged violations committed by anyone, anywhere in the world.

In November, China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee passed legislation allowing Hong Kong’s government to oust elected politicians deemed insufficiently patriotic…. Preparing to participate in an election is now an act of subversion in Hong Kong.

Censorship is already widespread. The crackdown is evidently meant to spread even more fear to dissuade any protests and encourage self-censorship. In July… books by pro-democracy figures were removed from public libraries in Hong Kong for “review”….

Plans are underway to make buyers of prepaid SIM cards provide their real name and proof of identity, with false information punishable by 10 to 14 years in prison. It will give the police authority to demand personal data from service providers with or without a court warrant. It will make it impossible for activists to plan any anti-government activity without becoming known to the authorities.

The UK has said it will accept up to five million Hongkongers. Soon, however, even the ability to flee the country may become circumscribed. A new government proposal aims to give “apparently unfettered power” to Hong Kong immigration authorities to stop people, whether Hong Kong residents or not, from leaving the city….

The CCP is determined to crush Hong Kong and so far, it has been able to do so at practically no cost to China internationally.

The EU totally ignored human rights concerns it claims to profess. Several Western governments have condemned China’s actions with words, but so far, only the US has imposed sanctions on officials responsible for the crackdowns. It is important that these sanctions not be lifted.

Since China adopted its National Security Law in June 2020, Hong Kong’s government, under Chief Executive Carrie Lam, and China have sought to extinguish all opposition to Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and to eradicate Hong Kong’s core values. These include free speech, a free market economy, freedom of assembly and freedom of religious belief. Those rights were guaranteed in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, a UN-registered treaty. China voiced its contempt for that treaty as early as 2017. It said that it was a mere “historical document” without any significance.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/what_nicolas_sarkozys_conviction_means_for_us.html

A Paris court  has just found former French president Nicolas Sarkozy guilty of corruption and sentenced him to three years in prison, two of which have been suspended. The presiding judge said Sarkozy, who served from 2007-2012, used his position to peddle influence and violate state secrecy for political gain. Interestingly, the key evidence against the former president dates back to tapped telephone calls in 2014.

I am in no position to say whether this is an example of the rule of law being applied to the high and mighty or instead a selective prosecution and some form of political payback. I will note that Sarkozy is still influential among French conservatives and that his conviction hurts them. Also, he’s been out of office for eight years. 

My point in bringing this French matter up is not the Sarkozy’s conviction per se but what it might portend for the U.S. The hive’s vendetta against Donald Trump has been far from satisfied with the installment of Joe Biden as president. Trump is still extremely popular with the Republican base. And as his CPAC speech shows, the Orange Man is not going anywhere. Instead, Trump casts his shadow over the political dialogue in the country like no one else can. As such, he is a continuing threat to the globalists and the deep state. 

The groups that make up the hive fear and hate Trump with equal intensity. With Sarkozy’s conviction, they are dreaming of what might be possible in the U.S. They will reason among themselves that precedent has been broken in an advanced western country with the conviction and sentencing of a former head of state. What better way to take Trump off the board than to do something similar here? And to repeat, Sarkozy has been out of office for over eight years and the main evidence against him goes back to 2014. Yet still they went after him.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5

About two years ago I visited Cambodia. While there I wrote this January 2019 post, which focused on the “killing fields” genocide that swept Cambodia in 1975-79, during the rule of the Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot. In connection with my trip, I bought the Ben Kiernan history titled “The Pol Pot Regime,” which I have just now gotten around to reading.

Why my fascination with Cambodia in the day of the Khmer Rouge? It is one of the clearest modern instances of leftist/socialist ideology put into practice and then pushed to its logical conclusion. Highly educated elitists got taught a utopian vision of a transformed society with perfect fairness and justice, and they determined to impose that vision upon the backward and unlearned masses in their country. Then they came to power, and got the opportunity to carry out their plans. The circumstances in Cambodia were such that they could implement their plans with few to no constraints. We get to study the results. Any relevance to our current situation is for the reader to draw.

Kiernan’s basic approach is that he sought out and interviewed several hundred Cambodians who lived through the events and survived the genocide. The interviews took place starting after the fall of the regime (1979), through the 1980s and into the early 90s (the first edition of the book came out in 1996). This approach has obvious pluses and minuses. On the plus side, this is primary source, first hand information. On the minus side, the people available for interview were not randomly selected and have major gaps in their collective knowledge. Obviously, none of them were killed. If any of them were involved in the killings, they certainly don’t admit to it. Nor did any of the leaders of the regime submit to interviews, so there is nobody to offer testimony as to “here’s why we did it,” or “here’s what we were trying to accomplish.” Nevertheless, there is much to learn.

Here are the things that I find most interesting:

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17121/iran-rebellious-baluchistan

The mullahs had another reason to neglect the Baluch, a majority of whom are Sunni Muslims and deeply suspicious of a regime based on a militant Imamist ideology. During the past four decades, an accumulation of grievances has pushed the Baluch into a rebellious mood.

According to a study by the Ministry of the Interior, almost 30% of the death sentences that make the Islamic Republic the second nation with the highest number of executions in the world, after China, are passed on the Baluch, who account for 1.8% of Iran’s population.

Tehran faces a cash flow problem that has also led to cuts in stipends for Hezbollah, Hamas, and Bashar al-Assad.

Arrogance, ignorance, and repression are the main features of Tehran’s approach to what is a complex socio-politico-economic problem that requires understanding, compassion, and pragmatism, concepts that have no place in the mullahs’ lexicon. Their ineptitude has turned Baluchistan into a powder-keg.

“Like a battlefield!” This is how eye-witnesses describe the scene in Saravan after two days of violence on Monday and Tuesday during which an undetermined number of people lost their lives while local authorities briefly lost control of the city.

Tehran says two people died and five others were wounded. Local reports put the number of dead at 37 with dozens more injured. Because of the credibility gap associated with the regime and its opponents, and in the absence of normal journalistic coverage, it is hard to be sure about the figures. It is equally hard to know how the violence started.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/amnesty-internationals-position-on-navalny-is-unconscionable/?itm_campaign=headline-

No matter what the organization says, Alexei Navalny is indeed a prisoner of conscience in Putin’s Russia.

A mnesty International has stripped jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny of his “prisoner of conscience” status after the organization was “bombarded” with complaints highlighting some of his unseemly rhetoric from the past.

Navalny was nearly murdered by a nerve-agent attack last year, almost surely perpetrated by the Putin regime. His life was saved only after he was airlifted to Germany. Determined to return to Russia, Navalny flew back in January, at the same time releasing an investigation into the opulent lifestyles of Putin and other corrupt Russian oligarchs. Navalny was promptly arrested for violating the terms of his parole on an earlier sentence (for a trumped-up embezzlement conviction) by not checking in with a parole officer — from his German hospital bed, where he spent weeks in a coma. Initially held in a Moscow prison, he was recently moved to what is reportedly a “penal colony.”

Almost immediately after Amnesty labeled Navalny “a prisoner of conscience,” a concerted email effort by Putin allies was directed at the organization, pointing out some of the xenophobic statements Navalny made over a decade ago. Kremlin minions were deployed across social-media platforms spreading Navalny’s remarks regarding Muslims and immigrants, as well as a number of fake ones that fooled certain media outlets.

In response, Amnesty International quickly removed the “prisoner of conscience” designation, explaining, “we are no longer going to use the phrase ‘prisoner of conscience’ in regards to [Navalny] insofar as our law and policy department, having reviewed Navalny’s remarks from the mid-2000s, came to the conclusion that they meet the level of ‘hate speech.’”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17089/iran-appeasing-mullahs

Turkey and the European Union are on the same page when it comes to pursuing appeasement policies with the Iranian regime. How do the ruling mullahs of Iran repay the favor? Through assassinations and terror plots.

After the EU began pursuing ways of appeasing Iran, and after sanctions were lifted in 2015 due to the nuclear deal (which Iran never signed), Iran’s assassins and terror operatives ratcheted up their activities on the European soil.

Governments around the world need hold the Iranian regime accountable for its foreign adventurism and its reprehensible repression of dissent and peaceful protests at home. They must adopt a firm policy of expelling Iranian “diplomats” and intelligence agents like Assadi, who may be plotting further terrorist attacks. They also need to consider closing down Iranian embassies until Tehran halts its terror activities.

Turkey and the European Union are on the same page when it comes to pursuing appeasement policies with the Iranian regime. How do the ruling mullahs of Iran repay the favor? Through assassinations and terror plots.

This month, the Turkish authorities detained an Iranian diplomat, Mohammad Reza Naderzadeh, 43, for his role in killing an Iranian dissident, Massoud Molavi Vardanjani, in November 2019. Reportedly, the Iranian diplomat was a staff member in the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul and had forged travel documents for Ali Esfandiari, who orchestrated the assassination of Molavi Vardanjani.

The Iranian regime, it seems, targeted Molavi Vardanjani because of his social media campaign to expose corruption in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its elite Quds Force branch, and the theocrats’ military establishment. After serving as an intelligence officer for the Iranian government, he defected. “I will root out the corrupt mafia commanders…,” he wrote on social media. “Pray that they don’t kill me before I do this.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-than-100-girls-kidnapped-in-latest-nigerian-school-abduction-11614338957

Gunmen kidnapped 317 girls from a boarding school in northwest Nigeria, police said Friday, the latest in a rising tide of high-school abductions across Africa’s most populous nation, where kidnapping for ransom has become a lucrative industry.

Dozens of armed militants broke into the Government Girls Secondary School, Jangebe, in Zamfara state at around 1 a.m. Friday and began shooting before packing schoolgirls onto vehicles or walking them toward the nearby Rugu forest, which spreads over three states and hundreds of miles.

By morning, parents and community leaders were tallying the number of people missing. The Zamfara police said security forces, backed by reinforcements, were in pursuit of the abductors.

Samaila Umar was one of the parents who awoke to the sound of gunfire, but by the time he could reach the school campus the militants had abducted his 15-year-old daughter and 14-year-old niece.

“I couldn’t get to there to save her because the kidnappers were shooting everywhere,” he said. “The government must do all in its powers to bring back our daughters.”

Another parent Samaila Ismail, whose first daughter Asiyat was among those kidnapped, said when he reached the school he saw 55 girls emerge from the restroom where they had been hiding. “But I couldn’t find my daughter,” he said.