RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://civicrm.unwatch.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=1889

Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer

As member states targeted Israel at the 45th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer took the floor to give credit to Iran’s escalating aggression, sponsorship of terror, and subversion across the Middle East for achieving the impossible: convincing Arab nations to abandon “ardent, age-old antagonism, to open unprecedented new relations with Israel.”

Mr. Chair,

They said it could not be done. They said it was impossible. 

But after the latest remarkable advances toward resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, the world must acknowledge and say to the Islamic Republic of Iran: You did the impossible.

For decades, Arab states and Israel fought each other in wars, while the Arab League enforced a global economic boycott of the Jewish state. Whatever happened, the Arab states would always blame Israel.

But since around 2006, this began to change. And if anyone most deserves the credit, it’s Iran.

If not for Iran’s escalating aggression across the Middle East; if not for its sponsorship of wars and terror through Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other proxy militia in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Gaza; if not for Iran’s subversion in other countries, like the terrorist plot by the Qassam Suleimani Brigade just uncovered this week in Bahrain, Arab nations might never have concluded that the greatest threat to their security is not Israel, but, on the contrary, that both Arabs and Israelis face a common and increasingly dangerous threat: the hatred, terror and war fomented by Iran.

Indeed, if not for Iran’s aggression, imperialism and terrorism, it is impossible to imagine that so many Arab nations would be abandoning ardent, age-old antagonism, to open unprecedented new relations with Israel.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17014/russia-putin-navalny-protests

Navalny has been in and out of Russian jails more than ten times since 2011, when he first became the face of Russian opposition to Putin and coined the phrase that the ruling United Russia party was “the party of crooks and thieves”.

“We came up with this investigation, while I was in intensive care, but we immediately agreed that we would release it when I returned home, to Russia, to Moscow, because we do not want the main character of this film to think that we are afraid of him and that I will tell about his worst secret while I am abroad.” — Alexei Navalny, YouTube video, “Putin’s Palace”, January 19, 2021.

Thousands demonstrated — and were arrested by police armed with stun guns and batons — this weekend as well, voicing anger over falling living standards, shrinking political freedoms, “corruption, a skewed court system” and a political system that is rigged before “another round of fraudulent elections,” possibly this spring and no later than next fall.

Putin, ironically, may largely have himself to thank. If it had not been for the arrest and jailing of Navalny, the current protest movement might have remained dormant.

Aleksei Navalny, opposition leader, anti-corruption activist and fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, returned to Russia on January 17 after recovering for five months in Germany from having been poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, Novichok. It was an event widely reported to have been an assassination attempt by Russian state agents.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/chinas-terrifying-return-to-maoism/

A recent report out of the U.K. reveals Beijing’s full-scale, wide-ranging assault on individual liberty in almost all its aspects.

O ne of the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans agree is that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has turned back toward Maoism. Xi Jinping’s regime is committed to eradicating the merest possibility that someone might have an independent thought.

The economy remains a socialist-market hybrid, while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made little effort to limit personal autonomy except where politics intrudes. However, just a hint of ideological disobedience now brings down the full weight of a vast domestic-security regime that spends more money than the People’s Liberation Army.

There are no easy policy answers for Washington. Repression is an essential part of today’s Chinese political system. It’s how current officials, starting at the top with Xi Jinping, retain their power, perquisites, wealth, status, and everything else that sets them apart from normal people. If there is an existential interest for the Chinese state, it is maintaining repression. The regime isn’t going to yield, irrespective of sanction, since its elites prefer power to anything else.

Violations of human rights are the norm in the PRC. In practice, civil liberties, free speech, and political freedom simply don’t exist there. China has essentially returned to the era of Mao Zedong, one of the CCP’s founders, who emerged atop the party after unceasingly brutal power struggles that shaped the party’s evolution.

The rungs on the CCP ladder were slippery indeed, as many once-dominant figures missed a step, plunging into the political netherworld below. Even Mao’s rise was sometimes interrupted. But he mixed determination, skill, and ruthlessness and ultimately outshone his rivals. He famously announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China in Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949, and was responsible for virtually every brutal step taken by the CCP in its early years.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17007/iran-gaza-weapons

Instead of storing medicine and vaccines, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are busy storing rockets and explosive devices.

The Palestinian terror groups that moan about a crippling economic crisis in the Gaza Strip somehow always seem to find enough money to purchase, smuggle or manufacture weapons.

In addition, Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups have frequently violated the laws of war by firing rockets from within populated areas.

It is important to stress that Hamas is planning to participate in the election while continuing to store weapons in residential areas in the Gaza Strip.

Had the explosion in Bet Hanoun been caused by Israel, international media outlets would have been falling over themselves to shout about another Israeli “war crime.” Perhaps it is time to heed the postings…. that call out the true enemy: Hamas, PIJ, and other Palestinian terrorist groups.

As many in the international community express more and more concern about the economic and humanitarian crisis in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, the Palestinian terror groups there seem less and less concerned about improving the living conditions of their people.

These groups, specifically Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), are not doing anything to secure vaccines against COVID-19 for the two million Palestinians living under their rule in the Gaza Strip.

Instead, Hamas and PIJ are continuing to do what they have proven themselves experts at doing: prepare for war against Israel and endanger the lives of innocent civilians, Israelis and Palestinians alike.

In preparing for war, the two Iranian-backed groups are manufacturing and smuggling various types of weapons, including rockets and explosive devices, that they plan to use in their attacks on Israel. Instead of storing medicine and vaccines, Hamas and PIJ are busy storing rockets and explosive devices.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/28/the-nature-of-the-chinese-threat/

It is almost impossible to describe adequately how absurd the partisan abrasions of American politics appear after listening to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s virtual address earlier this week to the inevitable World Economic Forum at Davos. A more unlikely setting could not be imagined: Davos is a dingy, cold, little town inhabited by grumpy German Swiss with inferior hotels and restaurants and one of the few benefits of the coronavirus pandemic is that Davos is now virtual and the rigors of its Spartan, humorless, relentless globalism may be moderated somewhat by the comforts of home. 

The industrious founder and head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, is deservedly making a considerable fortune from his imaginative brainwave from some 50 years ago of inviting prominent people to address groups of other prominent people and pocket huge fees from the wealthy for the privilege of listening to and “networking” with other swells. He continually bootstrapped himself up decade after decade. I watched as foreign ministers gave way to prime ministers as delegation heads and the prime ministers to presidents. At my last attendance, about 20 years ago, I was astonished to see at Zürich airport, the nearest to Davos, Air Force One, and the official aircraft of the presidents of Russia, Brazil, France, and of the prime ministers of India, Canada, and a number of other important countries. I was invited because I was the head of a reasonably prominent newspaper company, and I must admit I conducted some useful business and met many interesting people there. 

Klaus Schwab’s own remarks, however, including in introducing the Chinese president on Monday, remind us forcefully of what a mighty fraud globalism has become. 

Acknowledging this takes nothing from Schwab’s achievement. And he is a perfectly agreeable and justly successful man. But the globalist message is to invoke a conjured planetary obligation to submit to arbitrary requirements of sustainability that are not based on any conclusive or even persuasive evidence of the ecological damage allegedly wrought by carbon emissions. The global order to which we must all strive, Klaus and all of his serried ranks of prominent speakers tell us, is a monochrome, implicitly anti-theistic, world-communal quest for the submergence of all nationalities, all civilizations more complex than folkloric trappings, all substantial variances in national and even personal standards of living, and with all power concentrated in the hands of an admittedly loquacious but undoubtedly authoritarian elite of international regulators and behavioral monitors. 

It is a gradual and comparatively painless enactment of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and other fictional conjurations of human uniformity, though certainly not the totalitarian horror described by Orwell, Koestler, or Kafka. But it is no societal day at the beach either.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/off_to_a_bad_start_putin_schools_biden_with_one_phone_call.html

According to Russian news service Ria Novosti, on Tuesday, the presidents of the Russian Federation and the United States, Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden, held a telephone conversation.  During the conversation, Biden and Putin agreed to a five-year extension of START-3, until 2026, “100% on Russian terms, without additions, in the form in which it was originally signed.”  As a result of the call, the authorized Duma committees were ordered to urgently take the necessary steps to extend START-3.  On that same day, Putin submitted to the State Duma a bill on the ratification of START-3 through 2026; it immediately passed.  Putin’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov enthused that “START-3 is being extended on Russian terms, for 5 years, without any conditions or additional requirements, without attempts to change the START verification regime, without those, in our view, absurd and unacceptable aspirations of the previous administration to make sure to draw the PRC [China] into this process without fail.”

Biden ran on a platform that was endorsed by the entire American security and foreign policy establishment. The platform stand was to rebuild international multilateralism, taking no actions without coordination with our allies. Trump was routinely condemned by the establishment for insisting on the “America First” approach in foreign policy. Biden’s promise of multilateral cooperation with allies didn’t last a week. Indeed, he showed even more disregard for America’s NATO allies than Trump ever did. Biden’s phone call to Russian President Putin was his first serious test of foreign and security policy; he flunked. In the course of that one phone call, he casually agreed to a five-year extension of the New START Treaty, a treaty that originally took months to negotiate.

On Tuesday afternoon January 26, C-SPAN broadcast Biden’s press briefing on Racial Equity, held in the White House State Dining Room.  Following his remarks, he ceremoniously signed four related executive orders.  After signing the fourth, Biden stood up abruptly and made to leave the room.  On his way out, a young reporter could be heard calling out, “Mr. President, what did you talk to Mr. Putin about?”  Over his shoulder Biden tossed back the quip, “You! He sends his best.” — and hightailed it out of the room before he could be pinned down with having to explain what he and Putin said during the call.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/01/russia-biden-office-positive-shifts-took-place-us-daniel-greenfield/

Awkward.

The Democrats and their media spent four years falsely accusing President Trump of being a Russian agent even while he was running against Reset Button Hillary. Biden ran on a promise to crawl back into Russia’s scam arms control treaty for five years with no preconditions. 

The Russians had been begging President Trump to at least extend it for one year. The Trump admin was offering it with a lot of conditions.

In his first phone call with Putin, President Trump blasted the START treaty as a bad deal that gave Moscow a free ride. 

The Trump administration was skeptical of New START, arguing that it had allowed Russia to build up advanced nuclear systems that aren’t constrained by the treaty. Trump’s arms control envoy, Marshall Billingslea, had also insisted that China be brought into the arms control process. Billingslea attempted to negotiate a shorter-term extension of New START, paired with a freeze on all nuclear warheads and a commitment to broaden future talks to include other nuclear powers. 

What was Biden’s position?

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2021/01/28/iran_tests_the_new_administration_658182.html

On 18 January, Iran detained businessman Emad Sharghi, preventing his alleged attempt to “flee” the country.  Sharghi, a dual Iranian-American citizen who works for a UAE-based aviation brokerage firm, has been harassed by Iranian authorities in the past, and was imprisoned previously in 2018.  In November 2020, Sharghi was convicted without a trial of espionage by Abdolqasem Salavati, a controversial Iranian judge who has convicted numerous dissidents.  Salavati is part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Courts system, a parallel judiciary that handles cases relating to regime security.  Established in 1979, the Revolutionary Courts have overseen numerous domestic purges, acting akin to the Soviet Union’s NKVD-operated secret court system during the 1930s.  Although Sharghi was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison in November and arrested in December, he was soon released on bail.

Considering the direct control the regime holds over the Revolutionary Courts system and the mullahs’ record of involvement in U.S. presidential elections, it is likely that high-level decision-makers in the Islamic Republic ordered Sharghi’s arrest.  Moreover, his conviction occurred within a week of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh’s assassination. Fakhrizadeh was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps brigadier general and physicist who oversaw Iran’s nuclear program.  Coupled with the assassination of IRGC General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, Fakhrizadeh’s death demonstrates a significant degree of penetration into Iran’s security system.  Sharghi’s U.S. citizenship and arrest, therefore, is a direct message to the United States, much like Iran’s missile strike against a U.S.-used Iraqi airbase was after the Soleimani killing.