RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16611/afghanistan-women

That the U.S.-Taliban agreement signed in February promised a U.S. withdrawal of troops by May 2021, but did not address women’s rights, may signal a bad start.

Over the past 19 years and three administrations, U.S. support has made an undeniably significant contribution to improving the lives of Afghan women and girls. There is abundant evidence across the board — in women’s political participation, economic opportunities, education, and health.

Despite the “lessons learned” of the Promote boondoggle, the fact that women have gained a stronger voice and attained the remarkable progress they did, was due in large part to programs supported by the United States and our allies.

A great example is how Afghanistan has been able to rebuild an education system that had basically stopped functioning. In 2001, about 900,000 students were in primary school — almost all of them male. Today, more than 8 million students are in school, and though more must be done, nearly 40 percent of them are girls. The statistics tell the story. According to leading economist Larry Summers, educating girls “may well be the highest return investment available in the developing world.”

Some might regard these women as “exceptions to the rule” but in reality they are exceptional women who — thanks to US support — have worked long and hard to change the rules. And when they move forward, the rest of the world moves with them.

Continued U.S. investment in Afghan women and their families is the right and strategic thing to do — not just for Afghanistan but for our own national interests, those of our new allies in the region and for all of the Free World.

While the world watches the Afghan government peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar, the Trump Administration continues to roll out its signature initiative to advance the role of women in peace negotiations. Ironically, for the U.S. government and its noteworthy agenda on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), Afghanistan is where, as they say, the rubber meets the road. The world will know how serious the U.S. is about implementing WPS when we see how Afghan women fare in the coming months. That the U.S.-Taliban agreement signed in February promised a U.S. withdrawal of troops by May 2021, but did not address women’s rights, may signal a bad start.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/07/the-chinese-gutting-of-america/

Just as China has gutted America’s manufacturing base, it has gutted most of our nation’s foundational institutions.

When President Trump imposed import duties on a wide range of Chinese goods, we discovered just how reliant our nation had become on the communist People’s Republic of China for a wide array of manufactured and finished goods.  

A parade of American businesses petitioned the U.S. government to exempt some 13,000 different items from tariffs.

We are by now familiar with the empty factories across the country that once turned out auto parts, appliances, and consumer electronics, all shuttered by cheap imports from China. 

But who knew that the officially atheist nation whose regime persecutes people of faith prints most of the Bibles we read at home and in church? Our worship services depend on China.

Or that China produces the specialized drill bits used to extract oil and gas from the ground? Our energy industries depend on China.

And of course, the Chinese virus revealed just how dependent our health care had become on China.

But more than just these hard industries have been hollowed out. We see the same pattern repeated in academia, finance, media and government.

We have long regarded our institutions of higher education as the crown jewels of America, shrines of academic freedom and free inquiry as well as technical expertise. When they returned home, the story was that students from across the globe would carry the bedrock Western values inculcated by our universities and liberalize the world.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/turkish-president-erdogan-declares-jerusalem-has-hugh-fitzgerald/

Erdogan addressed the opening of the Turkish Parliament on October 1 with a ringing declaration that “Jerusalem Has Been Our City For Thousands of Years.” The “our” in “our city” seemed to refer now to the Turks, and now to the “Palestinian people.” The story is here.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Thursday implied that Jerusalem belongs to Turkey, referring to the Ottoman Empire’s control over the city for much of the modern era.

In this city that we had to leave in tears during the First World War, it is still possible to come across traces of the Ottoman resistance. So Jerusalem is our city, a city from us,” he told Turkish lawmakers during a major policy speech in Ankara. “Our first qibla [direction of prayer in Islam] al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are the symbolic mosques of our faith. In addition, this city is home to the holy places of Christianity and Judaism.”

The Turks were the colonial masters of Jerusalem for 400 years, from 1516 to 1917, ruling over Muslim Arabs, Jews, and Christians too. If those 400 years of rule means that “Jerusalem is our [Turkish] city,” then what should we say about Istanbul, which as Constantinople was for more than a thousand years the richest and most important city in Christendom? Jerusalem has been lived in continuously by Jews for the last 3500 years; the archaeological evidence of that Jewish presence in the city has been found at thousands of sites – ancient synagogues, homes, tombstones, wine-presses, oil lamps, pottery – much of it with Hebrew inscriptions, with more such evidence being uncovered by archaeologists every year. Does President Erdogan expect the Western world to overlook all that? When Jerusalem was the first qibla, for just a few years before 624 A.D., when Muhammad replaced it with Mecca, Jews had already been living in Jerusalem for more than 2000 years.

The Ottoman Empire ruled over Jerusalem from 1516 to 1917. Modern Turkey, its successor state, has long stressed its enduring connection to the holy city, regularly condemning Israel’s alleged efforts to “judaize” it and the US administration’s December 2017 recognition of it as Israel’s capital. Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel since the country’s founding, and the Jewish people have thousands of years of history in the city, backed up by extensive archaeological finds.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/big-promises-macron-bruce-bawer/

Beset by Communist riots, the China plague, and a campaign-season spike in Trump Derangement Syndrome, Americans have rarely been so disinclined to look abroad. But despite our stateside navel-gazing, life in Europe goes on, for better or worse. Take France.

Last Friday, French president Emmanuel Macron delivered what, on the face of it, seemed to be a remarkable speech on Islam. Macron, it will be recalled, has played both sides of the fence on this one. In 2015, while serving as Minister of the Economy, he described mass immigration as “an economic opportunity” – this at a time when French suburbs were packed with Muslims who were quite obviously a huge economic liability. Macron pointedly dismissed French voters’ concern about the nation’s failure to integrate newcomers: “This is not a subject on which we must govern by the polls,” he said. “History has shown that when we sometimes follow the will of the people, especially in difficult times, we are wrong.” Of course, immigration policy in Western Europe has never have anything whatsoever to do with the will of the people.   

Two years later, Macron remained sanguine, chiding those who “confuse terrorists with asylum seekers and refugees” – as if terrorism were the only problem created by the influx of Muslims into Europe. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16602/china-minorities-assimilation

The principal feature of the “assimilation” program in ethnic areas is the eradication of native languages as a medium of instruction. All courses in minority regions are now taught in Mandarin….

The accounts of the CCP’s ethnic purification campaigns should serve as warning to Chinese Christians that recent sporadic examples of state security officials removing crosses from church steeples might be prologue to a much more intense campaign to suppress Christianity in China.

The CCP under Xi’s leadership will not tolerate any force or institution that might serve as a rally point for Chinese citizens who might be opposed to the Communist regime, or even be an alternate source of admiration to it.

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping doubled down on his professed policy of ethnic assimilation on September 26 at a two-day party conference on Xinjiang.

In reality, the CCP policy in Xinjiang of “assimilation” resembles more the forced unity of cultural genocide. There is ample evidence that these same repressive policies are being applied in several other Chinese territories where ethnic minorities are prominent. Similar “assimilation” programs presently are being implemented in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China’s northeastern province of Jilin.

These “assimilation” projects were kept under wraps until they were abruptly revealed upon the opening of the new school year on September 1. The principal feature of the “assimilation” program in ethnic areas is the eradication of native languages as a medium of instruction. All courses in minority regions are now taught in Mandarin, the principal language of Han Chinese who comprise about 92% of the population.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-dialogue-with-pope-francis-11602026069?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

On Sunday Pope Francis released his encyclical Fratelli Tutti (“All Brothers”), meant to point a world reeling from Covid-19 in a more hopeful direction. Though ranging from war and nationalism to immigration and social dialogue based on “insult,” the document repeats his earlier indictments of capitalism. In particular he scores “those who would have had us believe that freedom of the market was sufficient to keep everything secure” after the pandemic hit.

The true answer to what ails us, he writes, is openness and dialogue. So in that spirit we would suggest that while the pope has many wise things to say, we’ve never met any market liberals who believe what Pope Francis attributes to them. Certainly Adam Smith—a professor of moral philosophy—did not believe the “dogma” that markets can “resolve every problem.” As Smith understood, the market depends on a rules-based legal order and the cultivation of virtues such as hard work, thrift, enterprise, and even what he saw as the religious virtue of benevolence.

In the wake of Covid-19, Pope Francis writes that the “fragility” of global capitalism has made the world more fragmented and unable to deal with the pandemic. But is that really true?

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/erdogan-seeking-to-relitigate-defeat-of-turks/91289/

Does it matter that Turkey appears to think that it can relitigate the outcome of World War I? That’s the question observers were forced to confront last week when its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, opened that country’s parliament with a speech about the status of Jerusalem.

The Islamist government Mr. Erdoğan heads is among the leading boosters of the Palestinian war against Israel’s existence, as well as an ally of the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. The Turkish leader’s remarks, though, weren’t framed as a response to American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or the peace and normalization agreements reached between the Jewish state and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Rather, he offered an argument that Jerusalem belongs to the Turks, rather than the Jews or the Arabs.

Neither Israel nor the United States is worried that Turkey will try to implement this absurd ambition. Yet the Erdoğan government’s recent moves, coupled with its outrageous statements, do call into question the Trump administration’s apparent belief that Turkey can or should be encouraged to continue on its present course.

The Jerusalem speech is — like Turkey’s alleged role in encouraging a renewal of fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and its aggressive attitude towards the efforts of Greece, Cyprus, and Israel to work together on natural gas exploration in the Mediterranean — a signal that can’t be ignored. Either Mr. Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden will need to be as focused on the threat from Turkey in the future as they are on Iran.

http://www.settimananews.it/informazione-internazionale/the-pope-pompeo-and-new-vision-of-the-world/

The recent visit of the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the Holy See in Rome was considered an attempt to drag Pope Francis into the American election. From the Holy See’s point of view, Pompeo tried to step into a controversy about the Catholic Church, where some American Catholics doubt the Pope’s “moral authority” for his choices on China and on many other issues, like the environment, concern about wild capitalism, or being open to areas traditionally considered non-Catholic.

Pompeo published an article critical of Francis’ policy on China on the American conservative Catholic journal First Things. But doubts about the Pope’s “moral authority,” especially if so bluntly expressed in a journal at times critical of Francis, in fact hardly belong to Catholic way of thinking, which strongly feels unity with the Pope. Pompeo’s criticism immediately sound “protestant,” as it ignores the role of the Pope, and therefore created a massive rally of the Church for the Pope and against outside criticism. Father Lorenzo Prezzi eloquently explained the feelings in Rome.

Yet this tiff may be highly misunderstood. There is no real difference in many of their concerns between the U.S. and the Holy See on China. Both are worried about growing repression in China, and about closure and an inward-looking spiral there. There is a difference of analysis, priorities, and options for solutions between the two, but it’s not like Washington is worried about China and Rome doesn’t think about it. The recent interview of the Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin also stresses these points.

It is however impossible and credibly unhealthy to think of having America and the Holy See toeing the same line. Dialectic between different positions is healthy and keeps everybody on his toes.