RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16240/china-exercises-taiwan-invasion

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is currently staging a military exercise across from the Taiwan Strait that looks as if it plans to culminate in an amphibious assault on an island in the South China Sea.

China also doubtless took stock of the free world’s obliging passivity the past few weeks as Beijing seized Hong Kong. Not one country lifted a finger to stop them. The move is in violation of China’s 1997 Joint Declaration with the United Kingdom to maintain “one country, two systems” until 2047.

China’s Communist leaders should not miscalculate that the US is too immersed in domestic distractions to defend Taiwan militarily against any possible plans to threaten the island’s sovereignty.

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is currently staging a military exercise across from the Taiwan Strait that looks as if it plans to culminate in an amphibious assault on an island in the South China Sea. Taiwan’s military — evidently fearing, with good reason, that the exercise may be a cover for an actual Chinese plan to seize another island in the region, Pratas (Dongsha), claimed by both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan — has declared a state of emergency. The PLA exercise also looks as if it is preparing China’s air, naval and marine assets required for an invasion of Taiwan.

In 1996, China initiated a similar crisis in the Taiwan Strait by staging an amphibious assault military exercise. After President Bill Clinton deployed two powerful US aircraft carrier-led battle groups, China discontinued its aggressive posture toward Taiwan. Strategic analysts judged that the Chinese decision was the fruit of a realistic assessment that it could not overcome the US ability to defend Taiwan.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), under current Chairman Xi Jinping, appears to be threatening war in a renewed effort to bring Taiwan under Communist Chinese control. The CCP considers Taiwan to be a Chinese province, an integral part of the mainland that ultimately must rejoin it, and the only remaining part of China yet to be returned after the Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949. For China, it is unfinished business from 70 years ago. China has isolated Taiwan by requiring that all countries who want to have normal diplomatic ties with China must have no state-to-state links with Taiwan. Although the US consents to this diplomatic requirement, it also continues to provide Taiwan with weapon systems, enabling the island to defend itself against any Chinese invasion. US President Donald J. Trump recently authorized the latest sale of US weapons — including advanced heavy torpedoes — to Taiwan. Trump, earlier in his tenure, also approved the sale of anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, Abrams tanks, and F-16 fighter jets.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/iran-jails-christians-then-holds

“War is deceit,” according to a statement attributed to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, and the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran were taking notes. After stepping up the persecution of Christians and even carrying out raids and arrests against them, Iranian authorities paused long enough to unveil, with great fanfare, a “scholarly” book about “Islamophobia” in the United States. Yes, that’s the real problem – and the American establishment media will nod along in agreement.

Evangelical Focus reported Tuesday that agents of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) “arrested at least twelve Christians, in a coordinated operation that took place in three different cities. The first arrest took place on 30 June, in Tehran, when ten intelligence agents raided the home of a Christian convert where there were around 30 Christians gathered.”

The agents recorded that raid, but at a certain point they turned off their cameras and began abusing the Christians, who were finally handcuffed, blindfolded, and taken away in a van with blacked-out windows. They were taken to their homes, where the IRGC agents searched for Christian material and beat some of them, along with some of their family members, including some who had not converted to Christianity.

Evangelical Focus noted: “It is believed that, in both raids, the agents were helped by an informant, who had infiltrated the group of Christians within the past few months and gained their trust.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/south-asia-heads-islamic-hydra-are-scattered-terry-bishop/

The so-called peace deal between the U.S. and Afghanistan never addressed an important fact: the powers-that-be ignored all the players in the game, somehow missing an endless supply of terrorists who are all heads connected to the same body.

In a post 9/11 interview, Osama bin Laden told Al-Jazeera television correspondent Tayseer Alouni that “all the Muslims are brothers.” Following this statement, he explained that a training camp established by Abu Ebeida El-Banashiri for mujahideen fighting against the former Soviet Union became known as al-Qaeda (the base). As far back as the late 1980s, these “sons of the nation” were considered “brothers in Islam from the Middle East, Philippines, Malaysia, India, Pakistan and as far as Mauritania,” he revealed. And it is this aged, subtle point which remains quite relevant — and often-overlooked — today.

The version of al-Qaeda dating back to the Soviet-Afghan War era is not the same al-Qaeda of today, as many have failed to recognize. In February 1998, the transnational Salafist organization was reformed at the World Islamic Front (WIF) by five prominent Islamic leaders: Osama bin Laden; Ayman al-Zawahiri, emir of the Jihad Group in Egypt; Ahmed Refai Taha of the Egyptian Islamic Group; Mir Hamzah, secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan; and Fazlur Rahman, emir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh.

The WIF was comprised of at least 14 international pro-jihad organizations, including Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Chechen Jihad Group, the Islamic Jihad Group (Egypt), the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba, North Caucasian Jihad Group, the Turkistan Islamic Movement, the 055 Brigade (the Shadow Army), Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (Afghanistan), Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (Pakistan), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (Afghanistan), Sipah-e-Sahaba (Pakistan), Uyghur Jihad Groups (Western China), and the Taliban.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16230/hagia-sophia-turkey-supremacism

Why now? Erdoğan possibly thought the move could reverse the ongoing erosion of his popularity due, among others, to a looming economic crisis. All the same, it appears to be wrongly timed, as presidential and parliamentary elections are three years from now and Turks are notorious for not having a good memory. Praying at the Hagia Sophia Mosque will not turn a hungry man into a happy man.

“This is against the Quranic commandments… Prophet Mohammed never converted a Jewish or Christian house of prayer into a mosque.” — Cemil Kılıç, Muslim theologian, t24.com.tr, July 12, 2020.

An Islamist leader decides to convert a monumental cathedral into a mosque, and his fans, are spilling out hatred against Jews. This is Turkey’s new normal.

According to his fans and political allies, Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, conquered Istanbul for the second time when he signed a decree to convert the monumental Hagia Sophia cathedral in Istanbul, built in 537, into a mosque. With that logic, he became the first statesman who conquered a city that already belongs to his country.

“First, you should fill Sultanahmet (Blue Mosque, Istanbul) … This is a plot, this is sheer provocation,” Erdoğan told a crowd as recently as in March 2019 when party fans demanded the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque. He was right. Most of Istanbul’s nearly 3,000 mosques (one mosque per 5,000 population) do not attract crowds. Sixteen months later, Erdoğan changed his mind.

In this theater-like play, he said the supreme court would decide on the fate of Hagia Sophia. Under a constitutional amendment in 2010, Erdoğan won the authority to appoint all members of that court, the Council of State. Erdoğan said he would respect the court’s verdict in “whichever direction it comes.”

And, unsurprisingly, the verdict came in the direction Erdoğan wanted: On July 9, the Council of State decided to void a cabinet decision, signed in 1934 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, designating Hagia Sophia as a museum, in a show of respect for Christianity. Only an hour after the verdict was announced, Erdoğan signed a decree for the conversion into a mosque of the monument on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/hong-kong-christians-fear-reprisals-chinese-communist-party/

The restrictions under which they may practice their faith increasingly resemble those of their coreligionists living in the mainland.

Hong Kong’s Christians fear reprisals from China’s Communist Party. A national-security law was passed on June 30 by China’s Standing Committee, superseding Hong Kong’s legislature. For China’s Communist Party, this measure was necessary to guarantee stability after more than a year of protests in Hong Kong. The new law ends the region’s autonomy and the hope that the demands of pro-democracy protesters will be met any time soon. Christians who participated in the demonstrations now believe that they will be targeted if they don’t toe the party line.

In mainland China, Christians who defy the Chinese government’s attempts at control of their churches reportedly face persecution, arrest, and detention. Underground churches are destroyed and crosses burned. Translations of the Bible must be approved by China’s Communist Party and often modified to meet its demands. In Hong Kong, however, Christians enjoyed religious freedom guaranteed by the region’s legal independence, which provided its citizens basic rights including freedom of expression and religion. Christians, more than 10 percent of Hong Kong’s population, held peaceful rallies during the protests by singing hymns to affirm their faith. Thousands took to the streets, and many Protestants and Catholics united to defend a common cause with pro-democracy protesters.

The national-security law in Hong Kong now prohibits secession, sedition, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces. Those terms are so broadly defined that they can be used arbitrarily to prohibit any form of dissent. What worries religious minorities, and Catholics and other Christians in particular, are the law’s collusion and subversion and clauses.

The sedition clause effectively prohibits Christians from criticizing the Chinese government. Before the national-security measure was passed, many Christians in Hong Kong had spoken out against injustices in mainland China. “Now, many refrain from voicing any concerns toward issues that can be defined as ‘state secrets,’” a Catholic lawyer who works in a financial-regulatory body told me. Like others quoted in his article, she asked for anonymity, for fear of reprisals.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/latest-racists-white-rape-victims-muslims-raymond-ibrahim/

The widespread notion idea that, whenever the races clash only minorities can ever be victims, is hardly limited to the recent protests/riots in America.  Elements of such thinking often appear in other, especially bizarre contexts.

For example, British women, including actual rape victims, who draw attention to the phenomenon of “Asian” (Muslim Pakistani) sex grooming gangs, are also under attack by the “woke” establishment.

Recently in the UK, Sarah Champion (pictured above), a Labor politician and MP for Rotherham (the epicenter of sex grooming), was accused of “fanning the flames of racial hatred” and “acting like a neo-fascist murderer.”  Her crime?  She had dared to assert that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.”

The same elements accusing Champion of being a “murderer” also characterized the UK’s anti-extremism program, Prevent, as being “built upon a foundation of Islamophobia and racism.”

A few weeks earlier, an article titled, “I was raped by Rotherham grooming gang—now I still face racist abuse online,” appeared.  In it, a British woman (alias, “Ella”) revealed that her Muslim rapists called her “a white c*nt, a white wh*re, and a white b*tch,” during the more than 100 times she was raped in her youth by the Pakistani grooming gang.

“We need to understand racially and religiously aggravated crime if we are going to prevent it and protect people from it and if we are going to prosecute correctly for it,” she said in her recent interview: 

Prevention, protection and prosecution—all of them are being hindered because we are neglecting to properly address the religious and racist aspects of grooming gang crimes….  It’s telling them that it’s OK to hate white people.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-way-to-curb-chinese-intimidation-11594680594?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Facebook, Google and Twitter announced this month that they will refuse to comply with customer-information requests from Hong Kong authorities until the companies review the implications of a new Chinese security law designed to suppress dissent in the territory. If the tech companies don’t cave in, it will be a rare instance of Western businesses standing firm against Beijing’s intimidation.

Corporations typically kowtow, fearful of losing access to China’s massive market. International airlines, including American, Delta and United, changed their websites so that Taipei isn’t listed as being in Taiwan. The general manager of the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets apologized for tweeting an image that read “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” Mercedes-Benz apologized for an English-language Instagram post that included an innocuous quote from the Dalai Lama. The Big Four accounting firms issued statements criticizing Hong Kong protests after some of their employees took out an ad supporting them.

Using its economic power to pressure Western corporations is a key element of Chinese statecraft. The Communist Party keenly appreciates that Western entities are far more credible than Chinese government or media. China scrutinizes statements by Western companies, focuses on those that are even mildly critical of its behavior, and threatens them on social media with economic retaliation and blacklisting.

Such threats often appear to emanate from private Chinese citizens. But given the government’s heavy censorship of Chinese social-media platforms, they inevitably bear the party’s imprimatur. Moreover, the Chinese government almost always backs up the statements attributed to its citizens, waging a joint campaign, so that the language of these “private” complaints tracks Communist Party propaganda.

Beijing also attempts to suppress authentic Chinese voices critical of its human-rights abuses. One of us (Ms. Lin) represented Canada in the Miss World 2016 finals in Washington. The London-based Miss World Organization—most of whose sponsors are Chinese companies—isolated her from the media during the pageant and threatened to disqualify her after she was seen speaking informally to a Boston Globe columnist. The ban on her contact with journalists was ameliorated only after intense public pressure.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/07/after-turning-hagia-sophia-mosque-turkeys-islamist-daniel-greenfield/

The outcome was inevitable.

The fake Reichstag coup that so many western nations fell for closed the door on any kind of independent authority in Turkey. All that remains is Erdogan, its insane Islamist tyrant, and his fantasies of rebuilding the Ottoman Empire. 

The reconquest of the Hagia Sophia was a crucial step in that direction. 

The process was meaningless because Erdogan now wholly controls the courts. Judicial decisions are Erdogan’s decisions. And Erdogan made it clear that the hijacking of the historic church is just one step in a larger plan for Islamist expansionism targeting other Islamic “holy” sites that had once been under Ottoman control.

Like Jerusalem.

“The revival of Hagia Sophia is the harbinger of freedom of Al-Aqsa and the footsteps of Muslims emerging from the era of interregnum,” the Turkish president said late Friday, referring to the mosque in Jerusalem that many Muslims consider under occupation.

Al-Aqsa is the Islamic occupation mosque in Jerusalem that had been planted as a symbol of the Islamic conquest over the holiest site in Judaism. The similarity to what Erdogan had just done was obvious.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/turkeys-new-mosque-monument-western-decline-bruce-thornton/

Last week Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that on July 24 Hagia Sophia, for a thousand years one of Christendom’s most storied and significant churches, will once again become a mosque. So far, the remnant of established Christianity has been silent. But this affront to the faith that is one of the pillars upon which the West was founded reveals how damaging has been the historical amnesia and appeasing double-standards that have compromised our response to the challenge of Islamic jihadism.

Until recently Turkey had been a poster-boy for the dubious globalist consensus that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism are the destiny of all humanity, including Muslims. In 1923 founder Kemal Atatürk created Turkey to be a modern Western nation-state, with religion separated from the secular government. He abolished the caliphate, closed Islamic courts, gave women equal rights in divorce and inheritance, allowed them to vote, restricted sharia to religion, and secularized education for females as well as males. In 1934 Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum, part of Atatürk’s program to recognize Turkey’s pre-Muslim history and strengthen Turkey’s modern global identity and prestige.

But over the years it took the military to maintain this modernizing, secular program in the face of the more traditional and conservative Muslim masses and their discontent. Starting as mayor of Istanbul in 1994, Erdoğan became their champion, and as president has abandoned Atatürk’s democratic, secular program: He has jailed more journalists than any other country, and built 17,000 new mosques. Nearly a century of efforts to reconcile Islam with liberal democracy are failing under Erdoğan’s incremental Islamization. Turning Hagia Sophia back into a mosque is an important sign of his success, and a gesture of defiance of the “rules-based international order.”