RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/claudia-rosett/2020/02/28/jimmy-lais-warning-about-china-n378733

Surely China’s Communist Party henchmen have enough on their hands, as they hustle to disappear outspoken bloggers, kick out Wall Street Journal reporters, and repurpose parts of the CCP’s vast machinery of surveillance and coercion to police President Xi Jinping’s “People’s War” on the deadly new coronavirus — which achieved ruinous breakout in Wuhan early last month, while China’s authorities were busy detaining and silencing the honest local doctors who tried to sound a warning. But when it comes to ramping up repression, there’s always time for more. On Friday, China’s satrap administration in Hong Kong arrested one of the city’s longtime leading advocates of democracy, 71-year-old newspaper owner Jimmy Lai.

Let’s be clear: Jimmy Lai is one of the world’s most clarion voices for freedom. In Hong Kong these days, that takes tremendous courage. Born in China, he came to Hong Kong at the age of 12, made his fortune in the garment industry, and in 1995 founded a pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily. Under British colonial rule, and under China’s increasingly heavy boot since the 1997 handover, Lai has argued the case for democracy, in person and in print, and turned out, again and again, to take part in peaceful protests. Earlier this month, Jimmy Lai published a superb op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, under the headline “China’s Facade of Stability,” spelling out that “the spread of the coronavirus has revealed a truth that poses a much greater risk to Mr. Xi: There is no cure for Chinese communism except the collapse of the party.” Noting that “Deception is China’s true rule of law,” and citing the silencing at a critical moment of the Wuhan doctors who tried to warn of the virus, Lai spelled out, “This is the problem now before the world: the rise of a Goliath-like China no one trusts.”

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2020/08/10/hong-kong-crackdown-200-police-raid-newspaper-arrest-beijing-critic-jimmy-lai-n770499

Hong Kong Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai was taken from his paper’s offices in handcuffs Monday morning in a raid involving more than 200 police.

Police reportedly took box after box of “evidence,” although it’s unclear what crime Lai might have committed aside from being in favor of democracy and speaking out against the authoritarian Communist government in Beijing.

Reuters reports:

Apple Daily’s Editor-in-Chief Ryan Law, who was helping film and comment on the Facebook live feed, could be seen rushing about the building as he tried to report on events breaking in his own newsroom.

“This is, I believe, the first time in Hong Kong that police have initiated a mass search on a media outlet like this,” he said, panting, as he scaled a back staircase with a colleague to get around the mass of police officers.

And:

Staffers said they asked police what legal grounds they had for entering. But these questions were largely ignored as more than 200 police streamed in, according to a live feed of the unfolding drama.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/08/defending-new-europe-from-old-europes-woke/

All but ignored on this side of the Atlantic, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán recently summed up one of the presidential campaign’s most critical and least-discussed issues—U.S. support for the frontline NATO states of Hungary and Poland against political assaults from their allies and ours in the European Union. Our national security is at stake in the outcome.

“American Democrats [and] the American Left, together with the elites of Western Europe,” Mr. Orbán observed, are working to impose their “world vision, choice of values and concepts—including . . . views on families . . . migration . . . work . . . unemployment—on countries that have a different thinking.” He meant Hungary and Poland. 

These countries, he continued, have been targets of the European Union’s “liberal [in the radical woke sense] imperialism,” that is, the EU’s hostility to what Americans would call socially conservative and economically populist governments that are, as Americans are, jealous of their sovereignty.

The strength of the NATO Alliance will turn on America’s choice on this question. Does the United States support the corrosive assault by what might be called “Big Europe” (Germany, France, and Eurocrats in Brussels) on “New Europe” (Hungary, Poland, and the continent’s other nation-state supporters)? Or should we help build up New Europe’s economic robustness and sovereign vitality, so these countries remain full and vibrant partners—for both the EU and us—in defending the still-challenged frontiers of freedom?

https://www.city-journal.org/confinement-in-covid-era-paris

During the many years that I worked as a prison doctor, never a day went by when I did not ask myself how I would react to imprisonment. “There but for the grace of God go I,” was a constant refrain in my mind, or, alternatively, Hamlet’s question to Polonius: “Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” Surely everyone has done something in his life that might justify imprisonment. I never dreamed, however, that 15 years after my retirement, I should experience a type of imprisonment, admittedly of a lenient kind, in Paris, not being allowed out of my small apartment for more than one hour a day—and then only with a permit, or laissez-passer. In just one respect was my imprisonment harder than the real kind: I was to have no visitors and no casual social contact.

I was surprised, working in prison, to discover that the type of person who one might imagine would find prison particularly awful was able to endure it with comparative ease, if not with pleasure, exactly. I mean people like me: doctors, professionals, and academics, who occasionally (and to my great embarrassment) ended up incarcerated. Surely, prison would be an insupportable torture to them, humiliated by their loss of status; forced into social promiscuity with people with whom they would not normally associate; experiencing constant noise that made concentration impossible; deprived of the sense of agency that, until then, they took for granted; and with little choice now as to what to eat, read, or do, and subject to the favor of men much less educated than themselves. Yet they settled in without special difficulty. They were not, as so many first-time prisoners were, subject to suicidal thoughts. In the cant phrase used by old lags to advise younger convicts, they “got their head down and did their bird.” In other words, they did not make themselves conspicuous to the authorities, complained little, and did not stand on their dignity.

Why were they able to adapt so well? Whatever the advantages—as well as sometimes the disadvantages—that education and intelligence might confer outside prison, on the “in” (as prisoners call it), they permitted the prisoner to distance himself from his own situation and to take an interest in the foreign country around him: for like the past, prison is a foreign country; they do things differently there, and difference has an interest in itself, even when it represents a worsening.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16328/algeria-france-history

Keeping alive the narrative of victimhood, successive Algerian leaders have tried to divert attention from their own shortcomings, not to say misdeeds.

Covering the 1990s troubles in Algeria, I was often told by Algerian politicians of all colors that all of their country’s troubles, including terrorism in the name of religion and police brutality, were due to French colonial rule. After a while… I suggested to Algerian interlocutors to fix a certain date up to which everything was the fault of the French but after that regard Algerians as responsible for their own troubles.

Should the writing of history be treated as a governmental project? French President Emmanuel Macron and his Algerian counterpart Abdul-Majid Tebboune seem to think so. They have ordered the creation of a joint commission to write the history of relations between the two countries since the French annexed that strand of North Africa in 1832.

Macron and Tebboune are not the first rulers to seek an officially vetted and approved narrative of our human story. However, their case is unique because other rulers just wanted to tell their side of the story while Macron and Tebboune demand a two-voices, presumably parallel, narrative.

There is one more difference between the old official histories and what we are likely to see this time. Old official histories were often presented with the modesty they merited as chronologies. And because they carried a heavy load of hagiography, they never pretended to be scientific. Macron and Tebboune, of course are not looking for props to build a cult of personality with. However, they may be seeking something even less dignified: the presentation of history in the colors of current, and necessarily transient, fads of political correctness.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16327/france-colonization

Asking the police not to give the name of killers is an attempt to hide the truth and prevent the public from knowing exactly who in France is committing these acts. Hiding the name shows a desire to appease the killers: when a killer has a Christian name, it is immediately printed on the front page.

“We only love what hates us, anything that destroys us is seen as great. There is a desire to destroy truth, history… We no longer teach the history of France and we no longer say what our civilization has accomplished. We only talk about our civilization to disparage it.” — Michel Onfray, Le Salon Beige, July 30, 2020 and YouTube, July 17, 2020.

“France is undergoing reverse colonization. Populations coming mainly from countries formerly colonized by France have settled in France without any intention of integrating. Most of them live in neighborhoods where the laws of Islam now reign and where imams spread hatred of France…. And in a gesture of submission, the French authorities say that hatred does not emanate from those who kill, but from those who want to react and say that we must put an end to assaults and murders. It is a suicidal attitude.” — Éric Zemmour, YouTube, November 22, 2016.

Lyon, the third largest city in France, July 20, 3 a.m. A middle-class neighborhood. A young woman walks her dog on a quiet street. A car arrives at high speed and crushes her dog. The driver stops, backs up, runs over the young woman and crushes her too. He goes forward again, at full speed, and drags her dead body half a mile. People awakened by the noise write down the license number of the car. The police officers who come to the scene are horrified. The young woman’s body was dismembered. A leg was found on one side of the street; the rest of her body was shredded. One arm was close to the body of her dog. The other was still holding onto the dog’s leash. Her name was Axelle Dorier. She was a nurse, only 23.

The French Department of Justice asked the police not to release the name of the killer. An anonymous policeman released it anyway on a social network site. The killer’s name is Youssef T. He was driving under the influence, without a license. The prosecutor charged him with “reckless murder”. He is in jail awaiting trial. He risks a maximum sentence of ten years. Residents of Lyon wanted to organize a peaceful march to pay tribute to the young nurse. They asked the government to get tough on crime. The young woman’s parents objected: they said they have “have no hatred” for the killer.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16309/iran-china-colony

The deal is a clear win for China; the $400 billion will be invested over 25 years, which is a small amount of money for the second-largest economy in the world. China will also have full authority over Iran’s islands, gain access to Iran’s oil at a highly discounted rate and increase its influence and presence in almost every sector of Iranian industry, including telecommunications, energy, ports, railways, and banking. China, incidentally, is the world’s largest importer of oil.

Even some of Iran’s politicians and state-owned newspapers have begun criticizing the deal. A headline in the Iranian newspaper Arman-e Melli, for example, surprisingly criticized the government: “Iran is not Kenya or Sri Lanka (to be colonized by China).”

The ruling mullahs are selling off the country to China, just as some African governments did. Beijing appears more than happy to make deals with dictators, ignore their human rights abuses and plunder their nations to advance its own global hegemonic ambitions.

A slogan in which Iran’s ruling mullahs have taken pride since they came to power in 1979 is: “Neither East nor West.” The Iranian regime has long boasted about its independence from both Western and Eastern powers. A new secret deal with China, however, appears to be giving Beijing significant control over Iran.

The 25-year secret deal, which looks like a colonial agreement, grants China significant rights over the nation’s resources. Leaked information reveals that one of its terms is that China will be investing nearly $400 billion in Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemicals industries. In return, China will get priority to bid on any new project in Iran that is linked to these sectors. China will also receive a 12% discount and it can delay payments by up to two years. China will also be able to pay in any currency it chooses. It is also estimated that, in total, China will receive discounts of nearly 32%.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/raising-muslim-kids-foot-soldiers-radhika-singh/

Just as the crowd of recovered Covid-19 patients takes a position for a picture, as victors who defeated the virus, a six-year-old among them jumps in joy, sloganeering, “Hum Modi ko Marenge.” It translates as, “We will kill Modi.”

Narendra Modi is the sitting Prime Minister of India. He was elected democratically in 2014, and again, in 2019. Being the non-conventional Prime Minister who didn’t emerge from the leftist coterie and didn’t pander to Islamists in the name of secularism, Modi was never a favorite of the liberals. His sentiments toward Muslims was no secret either. In the past six years, the silent majority learned to live with their elected chief being disparaged by the self-declared flagbearers of morality, who, claiming higher moral ground, had wished death upon the Prime Minister multiple times.

Up came a case that was a little different, though not unexpected. A six-year-old Muslim child’s entire family had tested positive for Covid-19 and were linked with the group Tabligi Jamaat that acted as super-spreaders in the initial stages of the pandemic in India.

After the members of this Muslim family were discharged from Index Hospital in Indore, India, they lined up for a photo-op. Since having recovered, they have become a success story. Doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and political leaders joined the family to congratulate them on their recovery.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16306/china-genocide-xinjiang

Crimes against humanity that meet the UN definition of genocide are being inflicted by Chinese troops on their Turkic Uyghur minority in the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Charges include torture, forced sterilization and hair shaved from inmates and made into commercial products. Last month, US Customs seized 13 tons of human hair and other “beauty products” worth approximately $800,000 “from Uighurs in camps.”

The most detailed description of the brutalities visited upon the Uyghurs by Han Chinese thugs was revealed by U.S.-based lawyer and Uyghur activist Nury Turkel, who claimed that Uyghur detainees in China have had fingernails pulled out, were subjected to electric shocks, and were sexually assaulted.

Uyghurs, many of whom were CCP regulars and members of Xinjiang’s intellectual elite, were once tolerated, but now are no longer trusted. Some, like the former President of Xinjiang University Tashpolat Tiyip, have been arrested and accused of being “two faced” betrayers of China. Many Uyghurs have been plucked from their families and forced to work in prison-like factories where they are becoming part of Xinjiang’s growing urban manufacturing class, producing items for companies that are suppliers for “international tech giants such as Apple and Lenovo.”

The Chinese Communist Party’s chairman, Xi Jinping, and his colleagues on the ruling Politburo, have, it seems, decided on the final solution for China’s ethnic Uyghur Muslims. All who have seen the internet drone footage in Xinjiang of hundreds of blindfolded, male prisoners, sitting in silence, hands tied behind their back while ringed by Gestapo-like guards must shudder at the similarity in China of masses of prisoners being marched off to concentration camps.

Crimes against humanity that meet the UN definition of genocide are being inflicted by Chinese troops on their Turkic Uyghur minority in the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Charges include torture, forced sterilization and hair shaved from inmates and made into commercial products. Last month, US Customs seized 13 tons of human hair and other “beauty products” worth approximately $800,000 “from Uighurs in camps.”