RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16794/china-britain-threat

The UK’s new MI5 director, Ken McCallum, said that countries such as China and Russia were no longer focused just on traditional espionage activities, such as stealing government secrets, but also on targeting Britain’s economy, infrastructure, and academic research, while seeking to undermine its democracy.

China’s ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, later denied threatening the UK by making still another threat: “We make no threats, we threaten nobody. We just let you know the consequences. If you do not want to be our partners and our friends, you want to treat China as a hostile country, you will pay the price. That means you will lose the benefits of treating China as a friend.”

Meanwhile, Huawei’s plans to build a research center in Cambridgeshire are going ahead.

“[China’s] implementation strategy is to target elites in the West so that they either welcome China’s dominance or accede to its inevitability, rendering resistance futile”. — Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World.

In the UK, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg, the CCP has managed to “groom” British power elites to support Chinese interests, especially through the networking group the “48 Group Club”…. The group features members such as former ministers, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, five former British ambassadors to China, leading business people, directors of large cultural institutions and professors, as well as a number of highly ranked CCP officials, including several former Chinese ambassadors to the UK.

Much of Chinese influence on British campuses is done through the CCP’s Confucius Institutes, of which there are at least 29 in the UK, according to a February 2019 report on the topic by the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission.

“If the question is which state will be shaping our world across the next decade providing big opportunities and big challenges for the UK, the answer is China,” Britain’s new MI5 Director Ken McCallum recently told journalists. He added that Russia is currently “providing bursts of bad weather, while China is changing the climate”. McCallum said that countries such as China and Russia were no longer focused just on traditional espionage activities, such as stealing government secrets, but also on targeting Britain’s economy, infrastructure and academic research, while seeking to undermine its democracy.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16848/iran-ask-then-what

Reacting to the killing of Major-General Qassem Soleimani and Brigadier-General Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, regime “thinkers” promise “revenge” and suggest this could be done with a single deadly blow to the “enemy”…. Needless to say, when Khomeinists speak of “the enemy,” they mean the American “Great Satan” and its sidekick Israel.

Even Ghulam Esmaili, spokesman for Islamic Judiciary, has joined the armchair strategists by suggesting “the clearing out of America and Israel” with a “single blow.”

Launching the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Japanese high command also forgot to ask “what next?”.

[T]he Kayhan editorialist who urged the attack on Haifa… says because the Islamic Republic has “all US bases within range”, cowardly Americans won’t react to a destructive attack on Israel. And if they did, he says, Tehran could pour missiles against US bases in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, the US 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, the CENTCOM in Qatar, bases in Omani part of Musandam Peninsula. The editorialist believes the US would simply grin and bear each attack.

In the One Thousand and One Night tale of the princes of Serendip, all three have one desire: To achieve all their wishes with a single throw of the dice.

However, not confined to the world of oriental tales, that dream has dictated quite a few tragic, comical and tragi-comical events in history.

The latest appearance of the “one throw” theme could be witnessed in Tehran these days, where Islamic Republic leaders offer both tragic and comical versions of it.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16841/iran-al-qaeda

In addition, a trove of 470,000 documents, released by the CIA in late 2017, point to close ties between the Iranian regime and Al-Qaeda…. According to the documents, Iran also provided Al Qaeda with “money and arms and everything they need, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia.”

Eight of the 9/11 attack hijackers passed through Iran before coming to the US. Tehran provided funding, logistical support and ammunition to Al-Qaeda leaders, and sheltered several of them in exchange for attacks on US interests.

As sanctions against Iran were lifted during the Obama administration, it quickly became clear that those actions, instead, gave Iran’s brutality to its own people and its adventurism abroad a global legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. This newfound legitimacy and the lifting of sanctions generated billions of dollars for Iran’s military institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as for Iran’s militia and terror groups. Tehran used those revenues to expand its influence throughout the region, including in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. The expansion campaign proved to be immensely successful.

If Biden becomes the next US president and if he pursues the same policies towards Iran as former President Barack Obama, he will not only embolden this predatory regime, but also empower its allies, as well as terror groups such as Al Qaeda.

While the presumptive President-Elect Joe Biden is advocating for pursuing appeasement policies with Iran’s ruling mullahs as did his former boss, President Barack Obama, it should be noted he will be assisting a regime that has close ties not only to Shia militia groups but also to the terrorist group Al Qaeda.

Some people might attempt to convince you that Iran and Al Qaeda are enemies because the Iranian government is Shia and Al Qaeda is Sunni, but evidence shows strong collaboration between the two.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/12/10/after-destroying-hong-kong-democracy-china-turns-toward-taiwan-n1202427

China took full advantage of the world’s preoccupation with the pandemic they caused to destroy democracy in Hong Kong. Now that they have one major domestic problem solved, they are turning their attention to their biggest unfinished business: bringing Taiwan to heel.

In more than 70 years, Beijing has never wavered an inch in its insistence that Taiwan is a province of China. This has made for an interesting diplomatic dance by the United States, which technically recognizes Taiwan as an independent state but rarely treats them like one. Donald Trump sought to change that by selling arms to Taipei and thumbing his nose at China by sending high-level representatives of the U.S. government to the island.

China fumed and raged but did little to retaliate. But with the Hong Kong “problem” solved, China will now turn its full attention and focus its power on crushing the resistance to its rule in Taiwan.

Reuters: 

It’s not the final, titanic clash that Taiwan has long feared, with Chinese troops storming the beaches. Instead, the People’s Liberation Army, China’s two-million-strong military, has launched a form of “gray zone” warfare. In this irregular type of conflict, which stops short of an actual shooting war, the aim is to subdue the foe through exhaustion.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16833/turkey-islamist-justice

It has been 7½ years after Elvan was killed in what appears to be a direct shot in the face. The Turkish state is still trying to make sure that not a single officer will be punished for the tragic death of a 15-year-old boy.

Worse, there is no sign of accountability within the Turkish public administration system.

The dramatic, undeniable scene was captured by a photographer, Abdurrahman Gök who later posted the photos. Gök is now facing trial for potential links with terror groups and could get up to 20 years in prison.

What about the officer who shot Kurkut?… a serious crimes court in Diyarbakır acquitted the defendant, a police officer, known only by his initials, Y.S.

Justice, apparently, is too scarce a commodity for Turkish extremists who are often busy protecting Palestinian terrorists and accusing civilized nations of modern barbarism. The Australian story could be an example of modern barbarism…. but it has a fair ending. The Turkish stories of medieval barbarism in the 21st century do not.

Barely a week after he pledged judicial and democratic reforms, Turkey’s strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, typically rediscovered his Islamist self. He reminded the world, once again, how corrupt and hypocritical his understanding of universal justice is.

“We observe that the [Israeli] state terror against Palestinians goes on,” Erdoğan said in a speech in which he complained of injustice. “Arms up, Palestinian children are being murdered.”

A few days earlier, Erdoğan’s spokesman, Ibrahim Kalın, described the killing by the Australian Defence Force (ADF) of dozens of Afghan civilians as “modern barbarism.” The findings of a four-year inquiry by ADF indeed confirm Kalın’s description as barbarism: Junior soldiers were told to get their first kill by shooting prisoners, in a practice known as “blooding”; weapons and other items were planted near Afghan bodies to cover up crimes; and an additional two incidents could constitute a war crime of “cruel treatment.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/coercion-illegal-uk-katie-hopkins/

The British government once spent a lot of time denying there would ever be such a thing as an Immunity Passport in the UK. In fact, Cabinet Officer Michael Gove said there would never be a ‘vaccination passport’ in England earned by taking the COVID vaccine.

So it should come as absolutely no surprise to us, given the hypocrisy of politicians on both sides of the pond, to learn the UK will be issuing vaccination cards to everyone who has had the COVID ‘vaccine’ – and these cards must be kept on our person at all times.

Official images from the government show the card we will be required to carry. On the front, in large bold text, is the warning: ‘Make sure you keep this record card in your purse or wallet’.

My first thought is that these cards look remarkably easy to counterfeit and I better have a word with my mate Dodgy Dave down the docks to see if I can get my hands on one.

Isn’t it strange? We have never been given a card or required to carry one for any other vaccination or jab. Why is this COVID jab so different? Why do we need a card now?

The language used in this blatant infringement of our liberty is telling.

Foreign Office Minister James Cleverly has said millions of people in the UK will have their lives ‘unlocked’ by having the coronavirus jab and a card to prove it.

As soon as a politician starts using the words ‘unlocked’ and ‘freed up’ you can be certain the very opposite is true.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16840/terrorism-iran-europe

Now they [the Europeans] find themselves locked into what they know is a phoney and highly dangerous nuclear agreement that simply consigns confrontation with a nuclear-armed Iran to future generations.

They [the Iranian leadership] look at Europeans, as well as Americans, with contempt, as weak and decadent, lacking the courage or resolve to stick up for their own interests…. President Trump gave them pause for thought, especially when he ordered the death of Qasem Soleimani…. They have higher hopes of Biden, whom they expect to be more supine.

We can be sure the Supreme Leader has rejoiced at the results of his message: cowering in Europe, with only weak and token response, accompanied by a desperate, pleading assurance that the targets of his aggression are still his friends. If ever there was a lesson that appeasement fails and strength succeeds, surely this is it.

European governments must now show their own strength or face continued Iranian coercion — coercion that will be witnessed by malign actors around the world from Moscow to Beijing to Pyongyang, with obvious implications.

Can the Europeans really afford to allow such an egregiously hostile and manipulative regime as Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons?

Last month the trial began in Belgium of Assadolah Assadi and three other Iranians accused of planning a bomb attack in Paris in 2018. Since 2015 Assadi had been the most senior officer of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Europe, at the time operating under diplomatic cover at the Iranian embassy in Vienna. He is the first Iranian government official to be tried by an EU country for terrorist offences, despite numerous attack attempts on EU soil ordered by Tehran.