RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16929/eu-china-investment-deal

“It is a massive strategic blunder at a time when President Biden will be seeking to put together an international partnership of liberal democracies to deal with the bullying loutish behavior and assault on our international rules by Chinese Communists.” — Former Hong Kong Governor Lord Patten, Daily Mail, January 7, 2021.

“We should not be seeking to contain China but to constrain the Chinese Communist Party.” — Former Hong Kong Governor Lord Patten, Daily Mail, January 7, 2021.

“It is naive to believe that China will respect the agreement it has signed. It is naive to ignore the geopolitical implications of doing a deal with China right now. And it is naive to think that the darkening political climate in Beijing will never affect life in Brussels or Berlin.” — Gideon Rachman, Financial Times.

“The EU Commission’s haste to partner with Beijing despite its grotesque human rights abuses has removed a fig leaf. Some European officials and commentators liked to claim that the Trump Administration was an impediment to even deeper transatlantic cooperation. Now it is plain to all that this isn’t about President Trump. It’s about key European officials. Look in the mirror.” — Former Deputy U.S. National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, Twitter, December 30, 2020.

“Beijing’s disregard for international law in Hong Kong is serving as a catalyst for a change in alliances — both Britain and Europe have serious choices to make.” — Johnny Patterson, Director of Hong Kong Watch.

The European Union has negotiated a controversial trade deal with China. The pact has been widely criticized because European leaders, in their apparent rush to reach an agreement, have sacrificed their professed concern for human rights on the altar of financial gain. Indeed, precisely one week after the deal was signed, China launched a massive crackdown on democracy activists in Hong Kong.

The so-called Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), concluded on December 30, was negotiated in great haste by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel. Other EU countries were excluded from the negotiations. Merkel, under pressure from China, reportedly wanted an agreement at any cost before Germany’s six-month EU presidency ended on December 31.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16881/egypt-european-union

Earlier this month, Egypt’s military killed 15 Islamist terrorists in Sinai. The army said that since July 22, it has eliminated 77 terrorists as part of Egypt’s efforts to combat terrorism at all of the country’s strategic borders.

[Egyptian political analyst Dr. Abdel Azim] Ramadan said that the European Parliament’s anti-Egypt resolution indicates the presence and remarkable activity of the Muslim Brotherhood lobby inside European Union bodies, including the European Parliament.

“Why does the European Parliament give itself the right to evaluate others? The resolution, aiming to put pressure on Egypt, is in itself opportunism and a clear violation of human rights.” — Egypt’s Coordination of Youth for Parties and Politicians, Youm7.com, December 19, 2020.

[Prominent Egyptian media personality, Ahmed] Diab accused the Europeans of turning a blind eye to human rights violations in Turkey…. “All the enemies of the Egyptian state were happy with this unacceptable resolution.” he said.

Egyptians fear that the jihadi terrorists will interpret the European Parliament’s resolution as a green light to continue their terror campaign to overthrow the Sisi government and bring the Muslim Brotherhood back to power. What is certain, meanwhile, is that the resolution is being celebrated by Egypt’s enemies — not a good sign for the future of the war on terrorism.

Egyptians from across the political spectrum have expressed outrage over the European Parliament’s December 18 resolution calling for restrictive measures against Egypt for its “human rights violations.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16901/turkey-israel-premature-optimism

It would be childish to believe that the man whose political formation was based on a militant expanse of anti-Zionism as raison d’être was not anti-Israeli, but had merely been under the influence of advisors who no longer hold sway. Erdoğan is anti-Israeli today as he was 40, 30, 20 and 10 years ago.

In August, The Telegraph revealed that Ankara had granted citizenship and passports to “senior operatives of a Hamas terrorist cell” …. Also in August, Erdoğan met in Istanbul with Hamas’s senior military leader, Saleh al-Arouri, and senior political leader, Ismail Haniyeh.

These are not blurred memories from distant past…. They follow an ideological pattern of hostility along religious lines. They do not make Erdoğan a reliable partner for peace.

As a matter of fact, none of the reasons why Erdoğan preferred to steer otherwise friendly relations between Turkey and Israel into where they stand today has disappeared. Without their disappearing for good, a reset will remain but a sweet wish.

It has been more than a decade since Turkey and Israel, once strategic partners, broke up badly, with an angry Ankara passionately vowing to isolate Israel internationally. It has also been exactly four years since the two countries decided to give peace a chance once more and appointed ambassadors. They would have to pack up and leave after 17 months of trying to put things back together again.

The decade of animosity between Turkey and Israel, clearly a choice of Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has produced exactly the opposite of what Ankara had hoped would happen: The Abraham Accords produced a landmark opportunity for peace in the Middle East. Israel’s former Arab foes have lined up to end hostilities, one after the other, while Turkey, oddly, criticized the establishment of diplomatic ties between the Arab world and Israel, having apparently forgotten that it already had diplomatic relations with Israel since 1949.

The United States and seven other countries recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, while Turkey campaigned for the “Palestinian capital Jerusalem.” Israel built a geostrategic alliance with Cyprus and Greece while Turkey’s tensions with the Hellenic states escalated exponentially. Turkey’s ties with fellow Muslim countries such as Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates sank from one nadir to another. Eventually, Turkey became the first country in the world that was officially sanctioned by Russia, the U.S. and the European Union. Turkey’s “isolate Israel” hysteria has practically turned Turkey into a monument of self-isolation.

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

While we bemoan the events of the past year, the 90-million strong Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can rightfully celebrate a good half-century.  Since the Cold War, it has been a foreign policy goal of Mao Zedong and his successors to get America to lower its defenses and do the dirty work of empowering the People’s Republic.  All we got in exchange were diplomatic smiles, successive presidential courtships, and the promise of liberalism from a country that refuses to savor a drop of it. 

At age 67, China’s president and general secretary Xi Jinping is a dyed-in-the-wool communist despot who hides his connivances behind an immotile and disarming smile. Today, from aircraft carriers and ICBMs to shirts and face masks, China has stripped our government, private sector, and research institutions of its most precious intellectual property.  Much of it was simply there for the taking, surrendered in the hope of distributing and weakening Soviet military power across two fronts, or to advance an American government or corporate overseas interest.  Some of it has been expropriated slow and methodically from inside America through classic spycraft, sexspionage, and other extortionate plots for recruitment.  United States senators Eric Swalwell and Diane Feinstein, Hunter Biden, and perhaps the Biden family en masse, offer both unwitting and witting examples, respectively, of their triumphs.

The Democrat establishment and its media hacks have turned a blind’s eye to the wholesale infiltration of the CCP into our social order.  Wall Street has been long complicit in these Machiavellian intrigues, always willing to bootlick a regime that holds business opportunities and investments hostage to continued displays of friendship and the occasional ask for a White House intervention.  Years of fingerpointing at the Russians and chasing ghostly Bolshevik plots has diverted our attention and allowed China to slither in the back door and pillage our economy and security on an industrial scale.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/we-need-keep-schools-open-katie-hopkins/

As I sit here in my kitchen three days before the official start of the new school year, not a single member of my family knows what they are supposed to be doing next week.

Of course my husband and I know the things we have to get done — shifts for work already on the fridge, calls all scheduled in the calendar, and the other stuff of life stacked up like the ironing pile, reminding me there is no good reason to be sitting on my sofa.

But my children have no sense of what their lives are supposed to look like next week, or when they should show up for school, or whether their schools will be shuttered altogether.

If we turn on the news, the top story is the Teachers Unions angrily bellowing at the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to shut everything down completely. He just caved to their demands in London and closed the few remaining primary schools he had tried to keep open.

Dr. Mary Bousted, joint head of the National Education Union (which has more than 450,000 members), called for all primary and secondary schools to be closed. She said, “What is right for London is right for the rest of the country.”

All very well Mary, but shouldn’t it be about what is right for our kids?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16906/george-kurdahi-lebanon-peace

When someone with George Kurdahi’s weight and stature openly states that it is up to the Arab countries to decide whether they want to make peace with Israel, this sends a message to millions of Arabs that the idea of establishing relations with Israel may not be a bad one after all.

This, needless to say, is a refreshing change, especially because it is coming from a country such as Lebanon, which is effectively ruled by Hezbollah and the mullahs in Iran.

“If the weapons [of Hezbollah] undermine the State of Lebanon and are an obstacle to the return of many Arabs to Lebanon, then there needs to be re-examination of the situation. Hezbollah must reconsider its positions so that we can ensure a prosperous future for Lebanon.” — George Kurdahi, one of the Arab world’s most influential TV presenters, YouTube, December 26, 2020, Lebanon.

Kurdahi may have “shocked” his audience by speaking out in favor of peace with Israel and by criticizing the Palestinians and Hezbollah. His words, however, hardly surprised those who read and listen to what many Arabs in the Gulf have been saying about the Palestinians and Hezbollah, as well as peace with Israel.

These Arabs also have a clear and powerful opinion of Hezbollah: a manipulative and murderous terrorist group that serves as proxy for the mullahs in Iran and poses a real threat not only to Israel, but to Lebanon and other Arab countries as well.

George Kurdahi is one of the Arab world’s most influential TV presenters. On December 26, 2020, he surprised many of his fans by stating that Arab countries are entitled to normalize their relations with Israel.

The Lebanese-born Kurdahi, ex-host of the Arabic version of the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” also angered many Arabs and Muslims by criticizing the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization and the Palestinians. Until recently, Kurdahi was considered a supporter of Hezbollah and an opponent of relations with Israel.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16913/morocco-israel-peace

“30 years is long enough to place ballot boxes.” — Sami Gailani, blaming the UN for the conflict in the Western Sahara that had been frozen for 30 years; Euronews; November 17, 2020.

“There is no Sahrawi people as there is a French, American or Moroccan people,” stated the political scientist Alexandre Greenberg. “The only institution that claims to represent the Sahrawi people is the Polisario Front, a Marxist guerrilla group armed by Algeria.”

Through these agreements, stemming from the Trump doctrine, which redraw the map of an Arab world more united in the face of Iranian threats and Turkish ambitions, a modern myth is shattering — that of “international law” represented by the false omnipotence of the United Nations.

The agreement forged by His Majesty King Mohammed VI and the United States is a feat of great statesmanship — a firm diplomatic triumph for peace in the Middle East.

In December 2020, Morocco became the fourth Arab-Muslim country — after the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan — to announce the normalization of relations with Israel, including direct flights from Tel Aviv to Rabat.

The relationship between the two countries has long been rooted the large number of Jews who had lived in Morocco before and after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Moroccans who immigrated to Israel in the two decades following its establishment became one of the most important components of the new state’s population. Today, they and their descendants comprise nearly one million people, whom Morocco’s King Mohammad VI can consider distant supportive sympathizers.

Unlike Algeria and Tunisia, whose successive governments have never considered opening negotiations leading to the recognition of Israel, Morocco, under the aegis of its sovereigns, is the only Arab country whose constitution formally recognizes Judaism as a referent of identity, alongside Muslims and Christians.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/01/02/irans-president-just-said-trumps-life-will-end-in-a-few-days-n1300591

U.S. troops suspect that Iran may attempt to take revenge on President Donald Trump for the death of Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani on the anniversary of the airstrike that killed Soleimani. This week, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani sent a cryptic warning to Trump, gloating about Trump’s loss in the 2020 election and warning that the American president’s life “will end” in “a few days.”

In a speech during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Rouhani warned, “As I said after the martyrdom of Martyr Soleimani, I emphasise again that if you cut off Martyr Soleimani’s hand, we will cut off your leg from the region and we will continue the resistance until that day.”

“One of the effects of this stupid and disgraceful act was that Trumpism ended and in a few days, the life of this criminal will end and he will go to the dustbin of history, and we are very happy about this and we believe that the period after Trump will be a better condition for regional and global stability,” the Iranian president added, according to an Iranian government official English translation of the remarks.

While it is possible Rouhani meant that Trump’s political life will end, the official Iranian translation suggests the president was referring to Trump’s physical life.

Rouhani’s remarks came just as Iranian officials had pre-emptively blamed Trump for a confrontation that had yet to occur. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused President Donald Trump of attempting to fabricate a pretext to attack Iran before incoming President Joe Biden replaces him. Such an accusation seems rather suspicious.

“Instead of fighting Covid in US, [Trump] & cohorts waste billions to fly B52s & send armadas to OUR region. Intelligence from Iraq indicate plot to FABRICATE pretext for war,” Zarif claimed on Twitter Thursday.