RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-escape-to-america-shows-the-price-of-dissent-in-south-sudan-11595545759?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

I arrived safely in Washington Thursday after a harrowing journey from Nairobi, Kenya. I was forced into hiding after receiving word several weeks ago from senior government officials in South Sudan that President Salva Kiir had ordered the National Security Service, led by Gen. Akol Koor Kuc, either to abduct me from Kenya or murder me.

I knew this was no idle threat. Previously, I had been a political prisoner in South Sudan, convicted in a show trial for “disturbing the peace” and sentenced to two years in prison. My real offense: daring to criticize Mr. Kiir’s failed leadership. In January 2017, two other dissidents were abducted from Nairobi and murdered, leading the U.S. to impose sanctions on six South Sudanese officials.

I’m grateful to President Trump and the U.S. for providing refuge to me, my wife, and our three young children. While the South Sudanese government has always claimed it works within the bounds of the law, I disagree. My story is only one example of Mr. Kiir’s cruelty. He has never had to face the voters of independent South Sudan, working instead to build a powerful and repressive security apparatus with one mission—to keep him in power. The U.S., which has engaged in concerted diplomacy and invested more than $12 billion in humanitarian assistance since the country’s independence in 2011, must insist on free elections. South Sudanese should vote no later than December 2021, with appropriate precautions for Covid-19 and monitoring to ensure that the vote is fair and transparent.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/turkey-retreats-from-modernity-11595545661?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

This Friday marks the end of Turkey’s experiment with secular modernity. That’s when regular Islamic religious services begin at Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia. The 1,500-year-old structure had served as a museum and symbol of Turkish tolerance until President Recep Tayyip Erdogan decreed the change earlier this month.

The Hagia Sophia has a dizzying history. It originally was built in 537 as the central cathedral of what would become Greek Orthodox Christianity. Ottoman Turkish Muslims conquered the Greek-speaking Christian Byzantine Empire and converted it into a mosque in 1453. But in 1934 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of modern Turkey, decreed Hagia Sophia would become a secular museum.

The symbolic meaning of the recent reconversion cannot be overestimated. Atatürk sought to substitute a secular, West-facing identity for Turkey’s traditional Islamic religious roots, which he saw as backward. A big part of that program was turning Hagia Sophia—for centuries a visual metaphor of Muslim triumphalism—into a museum. This had encouraged tourism and facilitated research by Western and Westernized scholars.

But Atatürk’s ambitious nationalism also created a Muslim monoculture. Millions of Greek Orthodox Christians and Armenian Christians had lived in Ottoman Turkey at the start of the 20th century. Genocide before and during World War I forced “population transfers” during Atatürk’s early presidency, and overt discrimination since then has reduced Turkey’s Armenian population to about 60,000. Only some 2,000 Greeks remain.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/07-08/the-central-european-kulturkampf/

It is my good fortune that I currently live on the Buda side of the Danube in Pasarét, a name that supposedly combines the Serbian word paša and the Hungarian rét (meadow). The nomenclature Pasarét was actually “invented” in 1847 when many names of city regions were Magyarised. The folk etymology suggests a reference to Abdurrahmán Abdi Arnaut, the last pasha of Buda, who died in the reconquest of the city by the Habsburg armies in 1686. It is (in retrospect only, of course) rather a romantic notion that the rotund Turkish pasha would have taken his summer ease here in the former royal hunting grounds, no doubt enjoying the twelve delicious varieties of Hungarian pear so rhapsodically described by the seventeenth-century Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi. Some four hundred years later, the pasha’s meadow has become a pleasant and elegant residential district of the capital.

It has been a lovely spring here and lockdown has enabled one to enjoy Pasarét’s leafy avenues lined with what Yeats called the “great blossomer” (flowering chestnut), ash, sycamore, black poplars shedding their white pollen, sprays of white hawthorn and the acacia that produces Hungary’s wonderfully aromatic honey. The adjacent gardens of pre-First World War villas have been a riot of colour provided by wisteria, Japanese cherry, elderflower, blushing almond trees and magnolia. The birds are back and our family of red squirrels has been emboldened to resume death-defying circus runs along the telephone wires. With few exceptions May has been idyllically warm and sunny, often with a refreshing light breeze, but the streets have been surrealistically empty of humankind.

However, like Coleridge, I have been imprisoned in my lime-tree bower. Not, of course, because Hungary is the all-but-prison Left-liberals would have us believe, but due to the coronavirus lockdown. The country is beginning to emerge from the outbreak—at the time of writing (late May) there have been over 3600 cases and more than 473 deaths. The fatality rate (12.9 per cent) looks high, but there has been little testing, so it is reasonable to assume that the number of infections is actually very much higher. About 50 per cent of deaths have been persons over eighty years of age, almost all with “underlying health problems” (a medical euphemism for the assumption that many would have died rather soon in the natural course of events). Neighbouring Austria, a country with a similar population but four times the reported cases, currently has a fatality rate of only 3.9 per cent. Independent monitors have nevertheless accepted the Hungarian Health Minister’s statement that overall the country is in the bottom third sector in terms of coronavirus impact. This relatively good outcome (Poland seems to be another case in point) is insufficient to attract media attention, which has instead focused with venom on the decision passed through Parliament to allow the government emergency powers to act by decree.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/23/hong-kong-is-the-new-east-germany/

Accepting three million Hong Kongers should not pose a huge burden to the five core Anglosphere countries. Right now, they need all the help they can get.

In a fierce but very typically British exchange, BBC editor Andrew Marr grilled the nonchalant Chinese ambassador to Britain, revealing amateur drone videos showing chained people boarding a train flanked on both sides by black-armored troops. In a time when Department of Homeland Security agents are decried by the U.S. speaker of the House as stormtroopers for defending federal properties, videos from China show what a genuine totalitarian system looks like.

A full city full of people is staring down the threat of Chinese force. Three weeks after Beijing imposed a new draconian national security law on Hong Kong, China has established a “national security education” base in the neighboring mainland city of Shenzhen to “re-educate” Hong Kong students who are deemed insufficiently patriotic. As the London Times reported:

The centre is charged with helping pupils from Hong Kong and from Macau to ‘enhance their constitutional and national awareness through education,’ according to Xinhua, the official news agency. Du Ling, a senior party official in Shenzhen, said the base would ‘plant seeds of national identity and patriotic spirit in the hearts of more Hong Kong and Macau youth.’

Beijing also touted teen-aged party apparatchiks who were quoted saying why this facility was important because “youth years are formative,” and Hong Kong youths need “correct theoretical guidance.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/it-looks-like-the-czech-republic-might-get-a-second-amendment/

Well, sort of.

Following the Velvet Revolution, the newly formed Czech Republic passed a law legalizing the purchase of a firearm for citizens without criminal records. Although the former Czechoslovakia had a rich history of firearm production, under fascism and Communism personal ownership was largely forbidden.

Once the Czechs joined the European Union in 2004, the nation was bound to the EU’s stringent rules governing gun ownership. After the Charlie Hebdo terror attack in 2015, the first inclination of the EU was to make it even more difficult for citizens to defend themselves. The resulting European Firearms Directive placed new constraints — including an effective ban on most semi-automatic rifles — on member states, which were all expected to comply by 2019.

The only country to challenge the edict was the Czech Republic. And last year, it lost a case before the European Court of Justice. But ever since the European Firearms Directive passed, conservatives have been attempting to add the right to bear arms as one of the “fundamental human rights and freedoms.” It now looks like it may happen.

A few years ago, the amendment passed through the lower house of the Czech parliament but was stopped in the upper house. The proposed language read as so: “The right to defend one’s own life or the life of another person with a weapon is guaranteed under the conditions laid down by law.”

Since then, the center-right Civic Democratic Party has won a majority in the Czech Senate. And this week, the Czech government unexpectedly announced it would endorse the plan to add the language. The amendment now needs a 60 percent supermajority in both chambers to become — somewhat appropriately — only the second amendment to the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16262/iran-buclear-bomb-sprint

It cannot… be a surprise that Iran is still sprinting toward deliverable nuclear weapons with the very uranium enrichment technology permitted by the 2015 agreement. While the U.S. Senate was told the deal would halt Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weaponry, the deal only camouflaged the mullahs’ ambitions to acquire it.

Worse, when the deal’s provisions were to sunset this decade, Iran would have been free to acquire full nuclear capability without pretending it was not.

China is buying time for Iran. Perhaps China believes that its presence in the region will persuade the United States to show “restraint.” The United States should not take the bait.

The prospects ahead are possibly dark. A change in US administration may likely see a return to the JCPOA, an end to sanctions and maximum pressure, and an Iranian sense of having won a major struggle with the “Great Satan.” That is not a prospect America’s allies want to accept. The United States should not risk waiting, either.

In 2013, Danny Danon, Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister, warned that Iran was speedily moving to develop advanced centrifuges that will enable it to enrich uranium needed for nuclear weapons within one month. “We have made it crystal clear ,” Danon said, “Israel will not stand by and watch Iran develop weaponry that will put us, the entire Middle East and eventually the world, under an Iranian umbrella of terror.”

This concern was shared by the United States and thus, in 2015, a nuclear agreement — the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA) — was made between the United States, along with Russia, China, France, Great Britain and Germany, and supposedly Iran, which never signed the deal. Ostensibly Iran would give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons and the U.S. would withdraw its economic sanctions.

Iran, of course, had no intention of giving up its pursuit of nuclear weapons; contrary to what JCPOA supporters claimed, the Iranians, even under the JCPOA deal, could continue pursuing their quest for nuclear capability. This “loophole” was clear especially after it was revealed the Obama administration had conceded that Iran had a right to enrich uranium, which is not required for “peaceful” nuclear energy.

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/hopes-are-rising-for-no-deal-brexit-as-europe/91198/

With weeks before the United Kingdom meets its self-imposed deadline to reach a midsummer trade deal with the European Union, Britain is on course for a “clean break” Brexit. “UK Close to Abandoning Brexit-EU Deal, Will Likely Leave Bloc Fully in December,” booms Breitbart London. “No deal Brexit likely,” begins a headline in the Express. “EU can’t even agree with themselves!” concludes a headline in the EuroWeekly.

It’s unlikely, though, that purist Brexiteers will be dancing in the streets just yet — never mind that government restrictions to prevent spreading the coronavirus curtail such public celebrations. Once bitten, twice shy. Prime Minister Theresa May and her supplicatory approach to Brussels disabused freedom-loving Conservatives that their party was with them. Even Boris Johnson, with better bonafides than Mrs. May on the Brexit file, has been known to wobble on the imperative of independence.

Even now, with Brexit the law of the land, our breath is bated. Britain, after all, remains under EU jurisdiction until the end of the year — paying membership dues and subject to the European Court of Justice until either a UK-EU trade deal is inked or the UK severs all links and trades with the EU according to World Trade Organization rules.

Still, there is light at the end of the tunnel. While the British negotiating team assembled following the 2016 referendum had a chequered reputation (seemingly taking its orders from Brussels and laying down the law to London), the current contingent is less in thrall to EU bureaucrats. Thus the chances are waxing for a “clean break.”

UK negotiator Oliver Lewis refuses to be played and is not afraid to speak out for his country’s sovereign rights, several times clashing with his EU counterpart, Michel Barnier. Likewise, Dominic Cummings, the PM’s principal advisor deep in Downing Street, cannot be cowed. At least not on the Brexit file. Mr. Cummings was a chief strategist for the successful “Vote Leave” campaign and has lost none of his combative spirit.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/chinese-communist-party-xinjiang-coverup/

S hocking drone video footage of blindfolded Uighur prisoners being herded onto trains went viral this past week. The clip, which originally surfaced in September 2019 and which analysts confirmed was filmed in China’s Xinjiang region, has elicited comparisons to the Holocaust and calls to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Similarly eerie incidents abound. On July 1, 2020, U.S. customs agents seized a 13-ton shipment of beauty products made of human hair that originated in Xinjiang. As evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s conduct increasingly seems to meet the criteria for genocide set out in the Genocide Convention, CCP officials have attempted to deny clear-cut evidence, such as this video, in one case going as far as threatening to sue researchers. However, in an international environment increasingly wary of Beijing’s ambitions, this is a self-defeating strategy that has only galvanized international action.

While the U.S. government has spoken out against the “political re-education” camps in Xinjiang for a couple of years — imposing some visa restrictions in 2019 — and although knowledge of the camps has been commonplace outside of China for three years, minimal concrete action followed. But the tide started to shift this summer, as Beijing subjected itself to increased scrutiny with an increasingly assertive coronavirus-era grand strategy. The U.N.’s human-rights mechanisms started to turn its attention to China — a group of independent experts penned a letter calling for “renewed attention” to be directed to the situation in Xinjiang. A few days later, a top China scholar published a groundbreaking report showing that Uighur birthrates have plummeted in the past year — the result of government policy of forcibly administering birth control to Uighur women, in addition to injecting some with unknown substances that seem to have resulted in sterilization. Many observers have already applied the term “cultural genocide” to the situation in Xinjiang, but the June report added heft to the case for dropping that qualifier. The images circulating this week will add momentum to that push.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced a new set of sanctions on four CCP officials for their involvement in the Xinjiang human-rights abuses, an overdue move that had been delayed by trade negotiations. The Commerce Department followed that on Monday with sanctions on eleven companies for involvement in forced-labor supply chains. Meanwhile, an international coalition of legislators has vowed to push for action on Xinjiang, and just this past weekend, U.K. foreign minister Dominic Raab accused Beijing of “gross and egregious” human-rights abuses during a television interview. Raab’s comments follow a slate of other actions by the British government in a new, hawkish turn on its China relations. While Raab stopped short of a genocide accusation, these actions together mark a significant change in policy. No doubt, the U.K.’s souring attitudes toward Beijing are the result of the sharp downturn in China’s relations with liberal democracies that has been accelerated by the coronavirus, but the startling images out of Xinjiang have also created more public awareness and pressure to act.