RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-calls-for-brotherhood-amid-covid-19-pandemic-11601806766

“Pope Francis’ major targets include what he calls the dogma of neoliberal economics and its promises of trickle-down prosperity. “The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom,” he writes. He calls for strengthening the United Nations and other multilateral structures to rein in a globalized economy beyond the power of nation states to regulate.”

ROME—Pope Francis offered his prescription for a host of ills plaguing societies around the world, including poverty, terrorism and racism, in a major document written in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Fratelli tutti” (“Brothers, all”), released by the Vatican on Sunday, is only the third time Pope Francis has written an encyclical, one of the most authoritative genres of papal writing. The 43,000-word text echoes some of the major themes of his social teaching, including the rights of migrants and the poor, with a special urgency inspired by Covid-19.

“Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egoistic self-preservation,” the pope writes. “If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators, partly as result of the dismantling, year after year, of health-care systems.”

But he writes that the experience of the pandemic also offered hope in the examples of ordinary people—cleaners and supermarket workers as well as doctors, nurses and priests—who risked their lives to keep society going: “They understood that no one is saved alone.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/china-seeks-greater-control-over-united-nations-international-organizations/

As the U.N. approaches a century of existence, its chief challenge will be to grapple with authoritarian attempts to remake it from within.

D uring the U.N. General Assembly opening debate last month, the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to assume greater control over international organizations was on full display.

This year, “UNGA Week,” as the high-profile general debate of the assembly is called, took place primarily over video conference, and the in-person gatherings that make up the bread and butter of U.N. diplomacy prevented many important interactions. No matter for the Chinese delegation: In addition to general secretary Xi Jinping’s address to the Assembly, he participated in a side event on the U.N.’s 75th anniversary, and other Chinese foreign-affairs officials participated in other meetings throughout the week.Xi set the tone of the Chinese delegation’s message. Sadly, it’s been accepted by too much of the U.N. system, and by some smaller states that have yet to awaken to the brutality of the Chinese regime. As the U.N. turns 75 this year, the CCP made its case for why the country it rules over is a leading defender of the multilateral order. “When in competition, countries should not breach the moral standard and should comply with international norms,” Xi said, during his UNGA speech. “In particular, major countries should act like major countries.”

The CCP, of course, is gaslighting the world, and the authoritarian regime’s grip on international organizations is perhaps the biggest threat facing the principles laid out in the U.N. Charter. “How China Is Taking Over International Organizations, One Vote at a Time” was the title of a Wall Street Journal front page article this past Thursday morning. The piece described precisely what the headline suggests it would: the Chinese government’s co-optation of U.N. organizations, often by coercion, over the past several years.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16589/global-concerns

Colonel Richard Kemp is a former British Army Commander. He was also head of the international terrorism team in the U.K. Cabinet Office and is now a writer and speaker on international and military affairs.  From a briefing to Gatestone Institute on July 29, 2020.

Now, I believe, the US is taking measures to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from dominating the world, stealing American secrets, further imposing their system on the US and benefiting from US trade in a way that they do not allow the US to benefit…. People realize this is an evil, dark regime that many people have been deluded about for many years. People are now realizing their error…. I only hope that we, in Britain, in Europe, and in the US and other countries, are able to do that more in earnest.

Another thing that is coming into question is that we — in my view foolishly — have plans to allow China to construct a series of nuclear power stations in Britain. We hope that Britain will review these plans and stop them from happening.

The situation with Lebanon and Hizbollah is all tied up with Iran. Hezbollah is a creation of Iran, directed by Iran and funded by Iran. It is basically an extension of the Ayatollah’s right arm…. If the current US administration were to lose the election, there would probably be a policy similar to what the previous administration had, with every effort made, probably, to try and resurrect the nuclear deal. This action would certainly help enable Iran to have nuclear weapons.

The ICC are also trying to investigate Britain for war crimes in Iraq — as well as the US for war crimes in Afghanistan. Of course, it is the usual three suspects, Britain, US, and Israel, they firmly have in their sights…. The International Criminal Court is no longer a legal body. It is now a political body. It has turned itself into something it was never intended to be.

There are a few global concerns that affect us all. The first is the current situation with Iran and its various ramifications. The second, connected with Iran, is the current situation in Lebanon, with Hezbollah in particular, which is also in Syria.

The next is the International Criminal Court, from which we are imminently expecting a decision that could have a potential impact on Israel as well as on the rest of us.

Iran, I believe, is under enormous pressure right now — the greatest pressure since the creation of the Islamic Republic during its Islamic Revolution back in 1979.

The leaders of Iran, the Ayatollah and the various others who run the country, are doubtless deeply worried about the survival of their regime. Regime survival for them is, of course, everything. Keeping their flame alive in Iran is the number one imperative of all that they do. To maintain that regime, they carry out large numbers of extreme activities both there and around the world.

First, their economy is reeling in a great depression with little sign of hope, due mainly to the United States’ “maximum pressure” campaign.

The US has imposed severe sanctions on Iran and also encouraged other countries not break those sanctions, and, in some instances, to take their own measures against Iran. These strictures have caused Iran an enormous problem.

They follow, of course, the repudiation by the current US administration of the dreadful Iran nuclear agreement, the JCPOA, which was supposedly intended to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear armed state, but which actually paved the way for Iran to become a fully nuclear-armed state.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16539/eu-iran-human-rights-abuse

“One day, I heard screams, shouting, and pleas for help in the police department…. I witnessed two officers who were dressed in unofficial uniform cursing and hitting Navid with batons and metal pipes with no mercy. They would tell him: ‘the truth is whatever we say, will you write what we are saying or not?’ Navid was… begging: ‘please, stop, please don’t hit me, I didn’t do anything.’ He covered his head with his arms. And one of the officers, whose name I later learned was Abbasi, hit Navid with such strength that Navid let out a gut-wrenching scream and fell unconscious”. — Witness to the torture of Iran’s wrestling champion, Navid Afkari, who was reportedly tortured into a false confession, then hanged.

Iran’s leaders most likely wanted to make an example of the highly respected wrestler, to impose fear in society, and send a strong message to the people that anyone who dares to protest can face severe consequences.

Did they hear about the four teenagers who will have their fingers amputated as a punishment for stealing, also, according to them, after being tortured until they “confessed”?

The European Union, in empowering a regime that is torturing and executing protesters and political prisoners, is making itself complicit in these crimes against humanity. Instead, the EU needs immediately to join the US in putting pressure on the mullahs and holding them accountable.

The European Union is openly siding with the ruling mullahs of Iran and attempting to scuttle US efforts to pressure the rogue regime to stop. Britain, France and Germany, on September 18, told the UN Security Council that the EU is strongly committed to ensuring the continued lifting of sanctions against the Iranian government. The three European powers added that, as far as they were concerned, even if the United States reimposes all sanctions, their UN sanctions relief for Iran would continue beyond September 20.

The EU has also been helping Iranian leaders to evade US sanctions through a payment mechanism labeled as INSTEX (Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges), which is designed to permit European firms and corporations to continue doing business with the Iranian government in spite of US economic sanctions against Tehran.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-new-york-times-publishes-a-defense-of-the-hong-kong-crackdown/

The New York Times published an op-ed by Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing politician widely known for her ambition to become chief executive of Hong Kong. The piece is entitled “Hong Kong Is China, Like It or Not.” (She seems to like it.)

Ip, a longtime apologist for Chinese Communist Party control over the city, led the charge on anti-subversion legislation that spurred mass protests in 2003. What does she think of democracy? “Adolf Hitler was returned by universal suffrage, and he killed 7 million Jews,” she said at the time.

So naturally, the Times is publishing this esteemed figure, whose comments on an issue of international concern are apparently more reliable than what a sitting U.S. senator has to say. As far as the implications of Ip’s argument are concerned: The Chinese government’s crackdown in Hong Kong has obliterated the remaining freedoms that its residents once enjoyed, and provided it a thin veneer with which it targets free people everywhere, including U.S. citizens. But don’t expect much outrage from the NYT’s newsroom about this piece.

It’s a PR coup for the dictatorship that’s snuffed out the remaining elements of democratic governance in the city. The only reasonable argument for publishing it would have been to expose the CCP’s aims — but these are already widely known.

Still, Ip’s defense of Chinese power is startlingly blunt. The op-ed is an unabashed statement of China’s aims in Hong Kong. It’s helpful that Ip says the quiet parts out loud [emphasis mine]:

To some, the new national security law is especially chilling because it seems simultaneously vague and very severe. But many laws are vague, constructively so. And this one only seems severe precisely because it fills longstanding loopholes — about subversion, secession, local terrorism, collusion with external forces. One person’s “severe” is someone else’s intended effect.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16576/erdogan-abbas-palestinian-authority

What we are witnessing is an Arab autocrat (Abbas) seeking the help of a Muslim autocrat (Erdogan) in holding “free and fair” elections. Abbas, it seems, is confident that Erdogan’s observers would rubber-stamp the results of any Palestinian election to ensure that the PA president emerges victorious

Now he [Erdogan] has a chance to use the Palestinian elections to try to bring his Hamas friends to power after getting rid of Abbas.

“It is terrifying that Abbas speaks as if he lives in another world. Is there a Palestinian interest in attacking the US administration, even if this administration takes unfair positions against the Palestinians? Is there a Palestinian interest in referring negatively to the peace accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain? There is a Palestinian need to return to reality. There is a Palestinian need to come to terms with the truth.” — Khairallah Khairallah, Lebanese journalist and political commentator, al-Arabiya, September 29, 2020.

On September 21, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas phoned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and requested that Turkey send Turkish observers to monitor Palestinian elections, if and when they are held.

The phone call came as Turkey hosted a meeting between Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction and the Iran-backed Hamas movement. At the meeting, the Fatah and Hamas reportedly agreed to hold long overdue elections for the PA presidency and parliament, the Palestine Legislative Council (PLC).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16524/iran-emp-nuclear-attack

The US and its allies need to do everything possible never again to be caught in a state of unpreparedness.

The Congressional EMP Commission estimates that, given U.S. current unpreparedness, within one year of an EMP attack that causes a nationwide blackout… up to 90 percent of the U.S. population could perish from starvation, disease and societal collapse. An EMP attack, therefore, would confer upon Iran an “assured destruction” capability against the United States.

The Congressionally created EMP Commission assesses that North Korea already has super-EMP nuclear weapons and the capability to deliver them…. Iran may also already — or soon — have the capability to deliver an EMP attack.

“By sending a military satellite into space, Iran now has shown that it can target all American territory; the Iranian Parliament had previously warned [the U.S.] that an electromagnetic nuclear attack on the United States would likely kill 90 percent of Americans.” — Iran’s state-controlled Afkar News.

The formal end of the UN arms embargo — at the end of September 2020 — could provide Iran with even more missile and nuclear technology possibly from Russia or China.

“Iran should be regarded by national security decision makers as a nuclear missile state capable of posing an existential threat to the United States and its allies… The fact of Iran’s ICBM capability and their proximity to nuclear weapons necessitates that Iran be regarded as a nuclear missile state — right now.” — William R. Graham, Henry F. Cooper, Fritz Ermarth and Peter Vincent Pry, Newsmax, February 1, 2015.

The Islamic Republic of Iran may soon have the capability, if it does not already, of carrying out electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks against its enemies. Such an attack involves exploding a nuclear warhead some 30-400 miles above the United States, for instance, and unleashing a downward electronic pulse that can destroy the (currently unprotected) infrastructure. That would include such as critical electronic systems in virtually all civilian systems: food manufacturing and supply chains, automobiles, airplanes, trains, elevators, communications and the US electric grid — actually, just about everything on which a modern country relies.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/sep/28/abraham-accord-makes-iran-d

Think of Iran as a lobster body with two pincer arms.

The north pincer is commonly referred to as the “Shiite Crescent,” stretching from the body across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean Sea. It is both a “lid” on Iran’s primary enemies Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel and a wedge between Sunni Turkey and the Sunni Arab States. The southern pincer stretches from the body through the Persian Gulf and under the Arabian Peninsula with a Houthi-led war on the Saudis from Yemen in the heel of the boot, and from there stretching Iran’s influence up the Red Sea along the coasts of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia. And about 18 miles across the Bab el-Mandeb Straits from the U.S. base in Djibouti.

Attention has been rightly and happily focused on the Abraham Accord agreements between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates witnessed by the United States and openly encouraged by other Gulf States and Arab countries. But those changes in the politics of the southern pincer make Iran more desperate and more determined to control the northern one.

But not without pushback. From someone.