RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17566/truth-is-buoyant

First published in 1989, [Paul Kennedy’s] book, “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers,”… should be required reading in Washington.

Against this battering from Beijing, the Biden Administration seems to be sleepwalking. In response to the CCP’s military expansion journalists say our defense budget will be – in essence – flat, at best.

While these mistakes, missteps, and missed opportunities are early in Biden’s term, the Chinese also know the proverb that “Truth is buoyant” – it will surface at some point and become obvious to all. When it does, will America still have the means to preserve its security and freedom?

History reminds us that great nations have been brought down when their leaders failed the ultimate test – one that requires unwavering courage, insightful vision, and resolute patriotism.

Historian Paul Kennedy writes in his book “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers” that empires able to bring superior economic and technological resources to bear invariably win the pitiless fight for global power. First published in 1989, his book is not only relevant today but should be required reading in Washington.

One has to wonder if anyone currently in the Biden White House is familiar with Kennedy’s research; it spans the centuries, from Spain’s undisputed leadership in the 1500s to the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. It is a roadmap that leads readers straight to the gates of Beijing where the present communist leadership has harnessed enormous economic power, a growing arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, and a surveillance technology of its population that Stalin and Hitler could only dream of.

Current satellite imagery has revealed the stunning news that Communist China is building what defense analysts believe are more than 100 new silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

This action cannot be taken as an isolated decision: Communist China has dramatically increased its military strength – from an ocean-going navy to new stealth fighters to an aggressive space program. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also seem to think nothing of allowing spent boosters to fall back to earth wherever they may. Meanwhile Hong Kong’s democracy is being strangled while international media has exposed how China seeks to crush their Uighur minority in sprawling prison camps.

China’s global shadow is only lengthening. This autumn will mark the second anniversary of a COVID virus from Wuhan whose actual origin inside China is still being debated by a global health organization that lacks both the means and political will to actually access the data that would reveal the truth.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17522/russia-putin-navalny-law

Tatiana Stanovaya, a political analyst at Carnegie Moscow, “told CNN the law threatens not only opposition politicians but ordinary Russian citizens.”

“The law is part of a larger campaign against anti-regime behavior in Russia… The battlefield has become much larger, now even a Russian citizen who participates in protests, retweets an opposition post or donates to opposition groups, face the risk of prosecution.” — Tatiana Stanovaya.

Russia’s decision to crush all political opposition seems a clear indication of how Putin fears Navalny and his influence over the Russian electorate….

A number of Russian opposition politicians have already been barred from taking part in elections or were persecuted for their support for Navalny or other pro-democracy groups.

“The process was held behind closed doors, and I myself did not participate in it. Even though we demanded it, I was not even invited.” — Alexei Navalny, Instagram, as reported by CNN, June 10, 2021.

The Russian courts are a “laughingstock.” — Alexei Navalny, Instagram, as reported by courthousenews.com, June 10, 2021.

On June 4, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning “individuals designated as ‘extremists’ from running for public offices.”

There is little doubt that the legislation signed by Putin is aimed largely at opposition leader Alexei Navalny, now in prison, and whoever supports him. According to CNN:

“The law prevents members of ‘extremist’ or ‘terrorist’ organizations from standing in elections for a period of three to five years… Founders and leaders of designated groups will not be able to run for elected office for five years… Employees or financial supporters of court-ruled extremist and terrorist organizations will be banned from running for office for three years.”

Five days later, on June 9, Navalny’s “Anti-Corruption Foundation,” (FBK) and “Citizens Rights Protection Foundation” were declared by the Moscow City Court to be “extremist” organizations. According to CNN:

“The court ordered that FBK be liquidated and its property transferred into the ownership of the Russian Federation, according to a statement from the Moscow City Court’s press service.

“The court also banned the activities of Navalny’s regional political offices around Russia, which has mobilized protests in the past…”

The court’s decision, subject to immediate execution, “also banned the activities of Navalny’s regional political offices around Russia” which have upheld Navalny’s “smart voting strategy” to support candidates not from Putin’s party and which have organized protests in the past.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17567/eu-north-korea-welcome-iran-president

By handpicking a mass murderer to be president, the Iranian regime is sending a strong message to the Iranian people and the world that it will not respect human rights.

How could a leader of a democratic country congratulate a mass murderer?

The people of Iran, like those of Hong Kong and now Cuba, have been struggling and fighting to change their regime, while European governments and leaders of democratic countries — including the current administration in the United States — have basically been sending a message to the people: We do not care about your aspiration for justice, rule of law and human rights; instead we are going to partner with your authoritarian leaders.

Europe’s leaders have also been totally disregarding calls by human rights organizations to investigate Iran’s mass murderer mullah — who will also most likely be the next Supreme Leader of Iran.

“That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran….. The circumstances surrounding the fate of the victims and the whereabouts of their bodies are, to this day, systematically concealed by the Iranian authorities, amounting to ongoing crimes against humanity. — Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, June 19, 2021.

It is indeed shameful, and a blow to the people of Iran and advocates of human rights and democracy, that European governments and leaders of democracies are joining North Korea to congratulate Iran’s mass murderer president — and wishing him success!

The leaders of the European Union, who preach about human rights and democracy, are not only turning a blind eye to the Iranian regime’s handpicking of a mass murderer, Ebrahim Raisi, to be the next president; they are also now joining North Korea in congratulating the ruling mullahs and their new President Raisi.

Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen, issuing a message congratulating Iran’s new incoming president, stated that he is “confident” friendly relationships between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Austria would continue. “In his message,” wrote the Islamic Republic News Agency, “…. he wished success for president-elect Raisi and said that his country, as the host of multinational negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal, is ready to make any cooperation. He expressed hope that the Vienna talks will yield fruit in the near future.”

How could a leader of a democratic country congratulate a mass murderer? What kind of message is he sending to the Iranian people who boycotted the elections and called on the international community to investigate the new mullah president?

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/frau-merkels-farewell/91582/

One thing to watch for as Chancellor Angela Merkel makes her various farewells is her famous eye roll. It is the tic that, on occasion, discloses the impatience and exasperation and intelligence that lurks behind her lugubrious visage. It is brilliantly lampooned — immortalized, even — by comedienne Tracey Ullman in a sketch in which, at the mention of Donald Trump, she rolls her eyes so forcefully that she flips over backwards.

We hoped that Frau Merkel’s eye roll might make an appearance in, say, her press conference yesterday with President Biden. We were disappointed. She stood there lugubriously without the eye roll as Mr. Biden shrugged off the fact that Germany had shrugged off America’s objections to Berlin going ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Russia. “Good friends can disagree,” Mr. Biden burbled.

We met Ms. Merkel only once, in 2003, at a small breakfast in Berlin. It was off-the-record, but we don’t think it would be inappropriate to say that she exuded a kind of intelligence that we greatly admire. She is — like the founding president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann — a chemist by training; plus, she grew up in communist East Germany. So she understands the way the world works in both a political and physical way.

At the time we felt that it would be easy to underestimate her. She acceded to the chancellorship in 2005 in an election in which neither her Christian Democrats nor the incumbent Social Democrats won a majority and both claimed victory. Neither was successful in finding a coalition with the small parties. In a move that astonished us, the two major parties agreed to make a government with Frau Merkel as chancellor.

In that government, the outgoing leftists initially held important ministries — including foreign affairs and finance. It would be like, say, President Trump giving major cabinet posts to Hillary Clinton’s camarilla. We figured Frau Merkel wouldn’t last long. In the event, she’s now in her fourth government and will step down later this year as the second-longest serving chancellor in the history of the Federal Republic.

Yet, we found her years in office to be disappointing. Her economic adviser during the campaign was famously for a flat tax. It stirred in us the idea that President Bush could make Steve Forbes, a tribune of the flat tax, his ambassador in Berlin. Frau Merkel, though, shrank from making so radical a stand as the flat tax, and the potential to really change and excite Europe seemed to wane even before she took office.

President George W. Bush clearly has great affection and regard for her, and talked about it — including the shoulder massage — in an interview the other day at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. We thought, though, that Frau Merkel made a mistake in taking so much offense, as she did, at President Trump. He was right on almost every critique he made of Germany and the Europeans, and she bears a portion of the blame for the failure to find a partnership.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17557/palestinian-leaders-deceiving-americans

The Palestinian Authority does not want the world to know that it has a law that prohibits the sale of property to the Israeli “enemy.”

This is the same Palestinian leadership that is now telling the Biden administration that it is keen on resuming the peace process with Israel.

It is also safe to assume that the Congressmen are not aware of the Islamic religious decrees banning Muslims from even attempting to engage in such deals [selling land to Jews].

The Congressmen do not know about these matters because the mainstream media in the West rarely reports about the apartheid policies of the PA leadership, including the ban on selling properties to Jews.

Abbas knows that if he makes such concessions, he will never enjoy the privilege of being buried in a Muslim cemetery, according to the ruling of his mufti and Islamic religious bodies.

In the meantime, Abbas has no problem telling the Biden administration and members of the Congress what they like to hear (about a peace process with Israel and the so-called two state solution) in order to receive US financial aid.

Abbas will take the money while at the same time his security forces are chasing Palestinians who do business with Jews.

A Palestinian man was sentenced on June 30 to seven years in prison with hard labor after he was convicted of attempting to sell land to Israeli Jews. The man, whose identity was not revealed, was sentenced by a Palestinian Authority (PA) court in the West Bank city of Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinians.

“The Ramallah Court of First Instance, represented by Judges Ramez Jamhour, Ramez Musleh and Amjad al-Sha’ar, issued a ruling convicting the defendant of attempting to carve out part of the land of the State of Palestine in favor of the enemy,” the PA’s official news agency Wafa reported. “He was sentenced to 7 years in prison with hard labor.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/13/cuba-the-collapse-of-another-socialist-utopia-lets-hope-so/

Like an unwatched pot suddenly violently boiling over, Havana and other cities have erupted in defiant protests by Cubans fed up with living in their perpetually depressed tropical police state. True to form, the Castroite regime has already reflexively cracked down on the protests with brutality.

Cubans weary of being treated like animals without rights took to the streets, shouting “Freedom!” “Down with the dictatorship,” and, most pointedly, “Down with communism!” In some cases, protesters carried American flags. This was not an isolated demonstration: According to the Spanish-language data site Inventario, some 63 cities and towns were roiled by demonstrations on Sunday through early Monday.

Here in the U.S., some on the left initially tried to portray this as Cubans being upset over COVID-19 infections and a lack of vaccines. A State Department spokesperson styled it as Cubans “exercising their right to peaceful assembly … about rising COVID cases/deaths & medicine shortages.”

“We call for calm and condemn any violence,” Julie Chung, acting assistant secretary for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, tweeted Sunday.

Nice try. To begin with, Cubans don’t have a “right to peaceful assembly,” nor any other real enforceable rights. All their rights depend on the government’s willingness to grant them. As for the demonstrations, the reasons plainly went well beyond a mere “medicine shortage.” Watch videos: You’ll see it has nothing to do with COVID-19.

Saying we “condemn any violence” is a joke. The Cuban people have lived under perpetual threat of actual violence committed by the Communist regime for 62 years.

In fact, the demonstrations were an outpouring of rage and disgust with the ongoing failures of communist rule. Videos of average Cubans standing in front of Communist Party headquarters, chanting “Cuba isn’t yours” and calling for President Miguel Diaz-Canel to step down, shows they aren’t afraid.

Cuba’s government responded as expected: “The communist dictatorship … started cracking down on the protests, allegedly inflicting violence on the unarmed protesters and cutting off internet access,” wrote the Daily Wire.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17555/palestinian-terrorism-jew-hate

For decades, most articles on the Middle East have portrayed Israel in a negative light, not as a democracy under constant threat. Willfully or not, they promote Jew-hate. Hamas is often described as a “Palestinian militant group,” almost never as a terrorist organization.

Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005. All the same, Israel is accused of imposing a “blockade” on the coastal strip — without a mention that everything necessary for the residents of Gaza is allowed, or that what is being blockaded are deadly weapons. Also never mentioned is the extreme brutality of Hamas operatives towards their own residents of Gaza, who are all Arabs, or that the Palestinian Authority still supports and finances terrorism. The Palestinian Authority’s rewards and incentives for murdering Jews are also always left out.

On June 24, The New York Times published yet another biased report: “Gaza’s Deadly Night: How Israeli Airstrikes Killed 44 People”. The Times stated that “on May 16, Israeli airstrikes destroyed three apartment buildings, decimating several families”. It never noted that Hamas had attacked Israel, that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, or that Israel invariably warns residents in advance about buildings set to be destroyed, to provide time for the residents to leave rather than be injured or killed.

On May 18, when Israel was being subjected to some of the 4,000 missiles fired at it by Hamas, French Prime Minister Jean Castex… announced that he was “worried about the fate of the civilian populations in Gaza”. He did not even touch on what Hamas and Iran are planning for Israel’s population.

London. May 23. An organization called The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign organized a protest against Israel. 180,000 people turned up. Placards compared Israelis to the Nazis, and black flags of jihadist movements, accompanied by cries of “Allahu Akbar”, fluttered alongside the Palestinian flags. “Israel, the new Nazi state”, some read; and “Nazis are still around, now they call themselves Zionists”. This kind of comparison is now common among many in Europe who also seem sympathetic to Marxism, in which there always has to be an “oppressor” and “oppressed”, never a “win-win” or a “making the pie bigger.” Do these new Marxists, who compare Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, to the Third Reich and the Zionists to the Nazis, really not know what the Nazis did to six million Jews, or what Communists and Marxists today, in China, Russia, Cuba, or Venezuela, are still doing to their own citizens?

The protesters in London shouted openly anti-Semitic slogans. One demonstrator, Tariq Ali, a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review, addressing the crowd, implied that the Jews deserve a second Holocaust: “They have learned nothing from what happened to them in Europe. Nothing”. Another man exhibited a drawing of Christ carrying the cross, along with the words: “Do not let them do the same thing again”. A few days earlier, when a convoy adorned with Palestinian flags drove through a Jewish area in North London, shouts from loudspeakers included “Free Palestine”, “F**k the Jews”, “F**k their daughters”, “F**k their mothers” and “Rape their daughters”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17564/biden-iran-feeding-crocodile

Have the Biden administration and the European Union already forgotten the disastrous outcome of appeasing the mullahs in 2015…? US President Barack Obama pledged at the time that he was “confident” the deal would “meet the national security needs of the United States and our allies”.

Throughout that time, the EU and the Obama administration not only initiated and expanded appeasement policies, they made unprecedented concessions in an attempt to dissuade the ruling mullahs from their internal and external aggression. The US and the EU met the Iranian mullahs with generosity and flexibility every step of the way.

After sanctions against the mullahs were lifted, instead of bringing peace and curbing Iran’s malign behavior at home and abroad, those appeasements… generated billions of dollars in revenue for Iran’s military institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as for Iran’s militia and terror groups. Tehran used that influx of revenues to expand its influence throughout the region, especially in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq.

Iran’s aggressive expansion campaign proved immensely successful. The Iranian-armed Houthis ratcheted up efforts to cause death and destruction in Yemen, and Hezbollah escalated its involvement and control of large swathes of Syrian territory. The region also saw a greater propensity for Houthi rocket launches at civilian targets in Saudi Arabia, the deployment of thousands of Hezbollah foot soldiers in Syria, and the constant bombardment of southern Israel by Iranian-funded Hamas rockets.

The present Western strategy is no different from enriching the Nazi Germany during WWII or Soviet Russia during the Cold War. For the rogue state, concessions and appeasements mean weakness. It would have been so much less costly in life and treasure to stop Hitler before he crossed the Rhine.

Winston Churchill famously warned against appeasing the aggressor: “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear — I fear greatly — the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar, ever more loudly, ever more widely. It will spread to the South; it will spread to the North.”

History has repeatedly proven that appeasing a rogue state only emboldens and empowers it. Nevertheless, the Biden administration and the European Union appear determined to pursue this dangerous policy of appeasement against a regime that chants “Death to America”, that plots to push the US out of the Middle East, that is committed to uprooting and replacing Israel, and that is, according to the US Department of State, one of only four state sponsors of terrorism, as well as a leading violator of human rights.

All the same, on July 2, sanctions against three Iranians were lifted under Executive Order 13382. These individuals had also been sanctioned by the previous US administration for their involvement in advancing Iran’s ballistic missile program.