RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16686/nigeria-killing-christians

In just the first four months of 2020, Fulani herdsmen and other terrorists “hacked to death … no fewer than 620 defenseless Christians,” and engaged in the “wanton burning or destruction of their centers of worship and learning.”

How have formerly simple and unarmed Fulani herdsmen managed to kill, since 2015, nearly twice as many Christians as the “professional” terrorists of Boko Haram….?

“Since the government and its apologists are claiming the killings have no religious undertones, why are the terrorists and herdsmen targeting the predominantly Christian communities and Christian leaders?” — The Christian Association of Nigeria, International Centre for Investigative Reporting, January 21, 2020.

“Why are you killing Christians?” US President Donald J. Trump apparently shocked his Nigerian counterpart, Muhammadu Buhari, by asking this question the first time they met in the White House in April 2018. The Nigerian president admitted this, according to a September 8, 2020 report, toward the end of a recent talk with his cabinet members:

“[W]hen I was in his office, only myself and himself, with Allah as my witness, he looked at me in the face and said ‘why are you killing Christians?’ I wonder, if you were the person how you would react? I hope what I was feeling inside did not betray my emotion…”

He should not have been shocked. Several international observers characterize what Nigerian Christians experience not just as “persecution” but as a “pure genocide.”

Since 2009, “not less than 32,000 Christians have been butchered to death by the country’s main Jihadists,” according to a May 2020 report. Hundreds more have been killed since then. Earlier this year, Christian Solidarity International issued a “Genocide Warning for Christians in Nigeria” in response to the “rising tide of violence directed against Nigerian Christians and others classified as ‘infidels’ by Islamist militants….”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijings-covid-recovery-isnt-so-enviable-11603393097?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

Few myths are proving so durable in our pandemic age as the notion that China has somehow cracked the coronavirus code. It hasn’t.

The argument proceeds in two steps. The first is to assert that Beijing’s authoritarian approach to mass lockdowns, followed by intrusive testing and tracing, defeated the virus in a way almost no democratic government has managed. This might be true, but it is also meaningless. It does little good to argue in favor of Chinese methods to control a pandemic when a democratic society would by definition find that authoritarianism a cost not worth paying.

More interesting is the second prong of the Beijing-beats-the-world myth: the economy.

We’re supposed to believe that China’s success in suppressing the virus has facilitated a phenomenal economic recovery—and, by extension, that our economies would be growing again too if only we had batted down Covid-19 as efficiently. The claim was bolstered this week by more good news from Beijing’s statistics gnomes, who reported gross domestic product increased by 4.9% in the third quarter compared with the same quarter last year. China is set to be the only major economy that manages to grow this year.

This might even be true. Chinese economic data are notoriously, oh, what’s the word I’m looking for . . . fake. Headline GDP numbers tell you less about the real state of the economy and more about the Communist Party’s political preoccupations and goals. Still, there is substantial evidence that the Chinese economy is growing to some extent. Important and harder-to-fudge measures such as industrial production and retail sales have improved in recent months.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-arab-israeli-peace-cascade-11603494933?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Middle East failures contributed to Republican defeats in 2008 and Democratic defeats in 2016. If Donald Trump loses in 2020, it will be for different reasons. The U.S.-brokered deals normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states are a highlight of his Presidency, and on Friday the White House announced Sudan would join the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in ending its diplomatic boycott of the Jewish state.

These moves have been utterly confounding to Obama Administration alumni. They were certain that a pro-Israel foreign policy would inflame the Arab world, and that Mideast progress depended on accommodating the regime in Iran. In fact, Israel is the region’s chief source of stability and Iran its main source of terror and mayhem, and the Trump Administration treated them accordingly.

It has paid off. The first peace announcement came in August between Israel and the UAE, which had been working together covertly to beat back Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf. Next came Bahrain, another Sunni Gulf monarchy threatened by Shiite Iran.

The agreement by Sudan, a North African country of more than 40 million, to normalize Israel ties shows that the peace cascade goes beyond the Persian Gulf and could extend across the Arab world. Sudan’s leadership has been moderating, and the Trump Administration recently negotiated a tentative agreement for Sudan to compensate victims of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/beheaded-infidels-vs-fear-islamophobia-raymond-ibrahim/

An 18-year-old Muslim man beheaded a school teacher in France last Friday for showing cartoons of Islam’s prophet Muhammad to his students, in the context of discussing free speech and expression.

Some weeks earlier, another Muslim man killed an American citizen in Pakistan for also committing “blasphemy.”  The murdered man, Tahir Naseem, was actually being tried for blasphemy in a court room—which carries a maximum death penalty—when Faisal Khan, 15, walked in and opened fire on him.  While Khan “broke the law” by essentially jumping the gun, Pakistani law itself is sympathetic to the vigilante’s view that blasphemy is a crime, punishable by death.

In France, there is no blasphemy law and freedom of speech is or was once deemed an essential right of all citizens.  In this sense, then, the government of France, unlike the government of Pakistan, would obviously not hold Samuel Paty, the beheaded teacher, guilty of any blasphemy.

And yet the effective differences between France and Pakistan, within the context of these two crimes, seem to end there: while Pakistan and many other Muslim nations uphold Islam’s blasphemy laws, France and other Western nations pretend that Islam has no blasphemy laws.   After all, to acknowledge that Islam does indeed call for the punishment and death of blasphemers against Muhammad—to say nothing of any number of other “problematic” sharia stipulations, such as death for apostates—is to be “Islamophobic.”

In short, whereas Muslim nations like Pakistan actively affirm and uphold Islam’s blasphemy codes, Western nations like France passively acquiesce to them by pretending they don’t exist and therefore need no addressing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/anti-semitism-todays-europe-joseph-puder/

The legacy of anti-Semitism in Europe is a long and painful one.  It had its culmination in the Holocaust.  Today, while Europe’s democratic governments profess their intentions to combat anti-Semitism, the influx of millions of Muslim migrants from throughout the Middle East has intensified the residual anti-Semitism embedded in the subconscious of many Europeans.  The European-born Muslims, along with the migrant newcomers, were honed on hatred of Jews thanks to the media and mosque indoctrination in their native lands. The Middle East Muslim migrants have additionally brought along with them a deep hatred for Israel.  In Europe today, anti-Semitism has been normalized on the streets if not in governmental bureaus. European governments are now worried that their native Jews might be fleeing the continent as a result of increased levels of anti-Semitism, especially when Covid-19 is plaguing Europe, and Jews have become ready scapegoats. The European Union (EU) governments in particular, are concerned that should Jewish life in Europe end, it will show that Europe has not learned the lessons of the Holocaust.  

An EU poll of European Jews from across Europe published in January 2019, showed that 89% of those surveyed said that anti-Semitism had significantly increased in the last five years.  The EU poll sampled 16,395 Jews in 12 EU countries. Yet, in a separate EU survey under the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency, the conclusion arrived at was that Jews were “subjected to a sustained stream of abuse.”  38% of those surveyed said that they were thinking of emigrating out of Europe because the continent was no longer safe for Jews.  In the last decade, thousands of French and British Jews left for Israel.

The Jewish future in Europe is bleak.  A recent poll by the London-based Henry Jackson Society think tank found that 44% of British Muslims believe in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The poll also indicated that forty-seven percent of Muslims with a college degree back the “dual loyalty” canard against British Jews. Even more seriously, however, are the growing incidents of physical and verbal attacks on identifiable Jews by Muslims.  In fact, for each of the past three years, the U.K has reported the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents ever recorded.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-capital-note-what-to-expect-from-chinas-19th-party-congress/

Welcome to the Capital Note, a newsletter about business, finance and economics. On the menu today: China’s 19th Party Congress, vaccine diplomacy, insider trading from home, and a look at the Microsoft antitrust case.

What to Expect from China’s 19th Party Congress Entering the fifth plenum of the 19th Party Congress next week, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has much to celebrate: Beijing appears to have emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic with less scarring than its international competitors. The International Monetary Fund reports that China will be the only major economy to grow this year, thanks in large part to a surge in exports of personal-protective equipment and other manufactured goods.

Yet Beijing’s short-run successes have deepened structural economic imbalances that will likely handicap its long-run economic goals. For years, the Chinese leadership has attempted to transition from an export-driven manufacturing economy to a domestic-demand-driven service economy. After its last Party Congress, the CCP released a five-year plan emphasizing domestic consumption and entrepreneurship as the pillars of sustainable economic growth.

Those reform efforts have seen limited success: Household consumption remains below 40 percent, far lower than the 60 percent average in the developed world. Meanwhile, the Chinese economy remains overleveraged, with an overall debt-to-GDP ratio as high as those in advanced economies. The recent surge in exports, while a boon to GDP growth, also reveals an economy that has failed to gain sustainable footing.

Chinese president Xi Jinping is now advocating “dual circulation,” described as “a new development pattern that takes domestic circulation as the main body with domestic and international circulation reinforcing each other.” In a July speech, Xi said that trade tensions and slow global growth meant that China would need to modernize “the domestic industrial and supply chains, vigorously promote technological innovation, accelerate research on key core technologies, and create new advantages for future development.”

It sounds a lot like what Chinese policymakers have been saying for the past decade. In 2007, Premier Wen Jiabao acknowledged structural weaknesses in the then-booming Chinese economy, describing it as “unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” After the 2008 financial crisis, CCP rhetoric focused on harnessing its burgeoning middle class to ween itself off exports.

12 years later, the Chinese economy is yet more unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated, and unsustainable. The forthcoming five-year plan will call for reforms to boost consumption and entrepreneurship, but if recent history is any indication, it won’t usher in meaningful structural changes.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16663/vatican-china-religious-persecution

Perhaps the most stinging criticism in Pompeo’s article was his having pointed out the marked contrast in the Vatican’s current position on Communist China with the Holy See’s moral witness which helped liberate Central and Eastern Europe from communism in the late 20th century.

The pope, according to Cardinal Zen, is being manipulated by his advisors. Cardinal Charles Maung Bo… is another outspoken opponent of the Vatican’s “opening” to China. Cardinal Bo, who has vilified the Communist Party of China for its “moral culpability for the COVID Virus pandemic,” also has declared that “the CCP is a threat to the whole world”…. U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke… no doubt added to the Holy See’s indigestion.

Possibly the most abrasively received comment came at the close of Pompeo’s article in First Things where he reminded the Vatican of the Apostle John’s counsel that “the truth will set you free.”

In the 1980s, the uncompromising condemnation by the sainted Pope John Paul II and President Reagan of the USSR’s “Evil Empire” helped tear down Moscow’s “Iron Curtain.” Maybe the victory of the Americans in the Cold War is not to the liking of Pope Francis. Is it really his intention to “undo all of the good work that the great John Paul II did in pursuit of human freedom and dignity?”

US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s September 30 – October 1 visit to the Vatican was a diplomatic profile in courage. Despite the Pope’s refusal to meet the U.S. Secretary of State, Pompeo repeated his warning to the Holy See that if it goes ahead with plans to renew the 2018 Sino-Vatican Agreement, it will compromise the Catholic Church’s moral authority. Pompeo also urged the Vatican to live up to its mission of defending human rights in China, where Catholics churches and shrines are being destroyed and priests imprisoned, and also urged the Pope to reconsider renewing the secret agreement with Beijing, which permits the Communist Party of China (CCP) to have a key role in appointing Catholic Bishops in China.

The Vatican has refrained from any condemnatory comment on the CCP’s persecution, incarceration, torture and forced labor of millions of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang Province, and has remained silent about Beijing’s contravening its pact with Hong Kong to honor “one country, two systems” until 2047. China has violated the civil rights of Hong Kong’s citizens.