RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/netanyahu-at-un-parley-sounds-wake-up-call/91279/

Never let a United Nations milestone, if at a point of failure, go to waste. That may well have been the motto of Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu in addressing today the United Nations General Assembly via video from Jerusalem.

Ignoring well-worn analyses of the coronavirus crisis, Bibi instead went to his usual playbook — Iran. This time his target was the Islamic Republic’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah.

New Yorkers may have missed the U.N.’s annual gabfest — traffic in Manhattan moved freely — but last week the world body conducted the General Assembly’s annual debate. It’s been long envisioned as a special event this year, the organization’s 75th anniversary. The carefully planned pomp, however, was upstaged by the pandemic that forced heads of state to avoid traveling to New York — and, literally, phone it in instead.

Canned videotaped speeches were full of well-worn Covid warnings. Secretary General Guterres issued his by now familiar call on all to lay down arms and unite instead in the fight

against Corona, climate change, and other global maladies. Armenia and Azerbaijan must have missed the plea, as they launched a new war at the heart of Europe.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-road-to-hell-really?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIj

The number of MPs who are in potential revolt over the government’s Covid restrictions is apparently rising.

They protest that they aren’t being consulted and parliament is being sidelined over measures which threaten people’s liberties. 

The main focus of their ire is that these restrictions are being introduced through regulations made by ministers. This complaint is echoed by three briefings published by the Constitution Unit, the Bingham Centre and the Hansard Society.

Ministers are given powers under acts of parliament to make such regulations. They come into force immediately, with parliament able to approve them for up to 28 days.

Their instant application, which so concerns MPs, is precisely why ministers say they are needed: to combat the threat from the virus which develops and changes all the time and so needs the fastest possible interventions.

But the result has been a succession of stop/go/stop measures which are undoubtedly contradictory and confusing and have squandered public trust.

The MPs’ concern about their inability adequately to advise, warn or hold the government to account over mistakes it is making over the virus is understandable. Even Boris Johnson didn’t seem to know the answer, when he was asked today how his own rules on household mixing are supposed to apply in the north-east.  

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/26/the-message-of-irans-execution-of-a-wrestling-champion/

Last Saturday, despite a global outcry, the Iranian regime brutally executed a 27-year-old wrestling champion. Navid Afkari was arrested during peaceful anti-regime protests back in 2018. Amnesty International called the execution a “travesty of justice.” And the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sad it was “shocked” by the announcement.

A high-profile campaign around the world had been sparked to force the regime to stop the execution. That included the World Players Association representing 85,000 athletes worldwide, along with other major sports groups and athletes in Iran and around the world. But in the end, Afkari, who proclaimed his innocence until the end, was executed so hastily that the regime even robbed him of a final family visit.

In tape recordings and letters from prison, Akfari had explained some of the torture he had endured: “They put a plastic bag over my head and almost suffocated me. Using batons and other hard objects, they beat hard on my hands, abdomen, and legs. … They tied me forcefully and poured alcohol down my nostrils.”

Both of his brothers have also been sentenced to decades in prison after being tortured. Their grieving mother, Bahieh Namjoo, said in a video posted on social media: “They tortured my sons to confess against Navid. This was a sham trial. My children could not defend themselves.”

The Iranian people are facing devastating circumstances and are on the verge of rising up. Decades of endemic state corruption and economic mismanagement by state officials have left millions of Iranians struggling to make ends meet. In 2018 and 2019, millions in close to 200 cities called for democratic regime change.

That is precisely why the regime sentenced Afkari to not one, but TWO, death sentences. The regime wanted to send a message of intimidation to the rest of the population in order to prevent further protests in a very tense environment. But the execution actually sent the complete opposite message. It revealed the regime’s incredible fragility.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16554/china-taiwan-killing-americans

Beijing is sending aircraft near Taiwan “almost every day” and directing them to approach in all four directions.

“Hu Xijin is not just urging China to commence a war to murder millions of Taiwanese, he wants China to be able to kill millions of Americans as well.” — Richard D. Fisher, Jr., military analyst and senior fellow at the Virginia-based International Assessment and Strategy Center, Taipei Times, September 21, 2020.

China’s ruler, therefore, needs something to distract restive Chinese people as well as unhappy senior leaders. We may think that Xi Jinping should be cautious, but from where he stands, he now has incentives to start a crisis, especially if he thinks President Trump, seeking re-election, will not respond.

China, violating previous understandings, has been sending large numbers of fighter aircraft and bombers into Taiwan’s airspace this month.

At the same time, China’s ruling Communist Party is issuing threats. The flights of military aircraft are not warnings, the Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper stated in an editorial on September 18. “They are rehearsals on taking over Taiwan. What is needed is a political reason that can turn them into real battle to smash Taiwan independence forces.”

Fortunately, bad weather is coming. The November-through-January period is not conducive to conducting invasions across the Taiwan Strait. Nonetheless, China is clearly gearing itself for war.

Beijing calls the island “sacred” Chinese territory, but Taiwan has never been part of communist China, the “People’s Republic.” In fact, Taiwan has never been formally recognized as part of any Chinese state. People on the island, in survey after survey, overwhelming consider themselves “Taiwanese,” not “Chinese.”

Beijing nevertheless insists it has sovereignty over Taiwan, which formally calls itself the Republic of China. The People’s Republic has been sending planes near Taiwan’s territory to make a point.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16553/iran-qatar-turkey-hamas

Abbas has already damaged the Palestinians’ relations with some Arab countries by condemning the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain for signing peace treaties with Israel…. Now it appears that the Palestinians are also headed toward ruining their relations with Egypt because of Abbas’s decision to make peace with Hamas and appease Iran, Turkey and Qatar.

“Qatar has provided Hamas with more than a billion dollars since 2012… Qatar did not provide these funds out of a humanitarian standpoint and to help the residents of the Gaza Strip. The Qataris did so to help Hamas and its leaders and to enable Qatar to establish a foothold in the region.” — Egyptian writer Hashem al-Fahkrani, Al-Youm7.com, September 21, 2020.

“Those who believe that Hamas’s first goal is to resist Israel are mistaken. Its first and only goal is to receive money. Hamas’s slogan is: Loyalty to anyone who pays the most.” — Hashem al-Fahkrani.

Yet, the Palestinian leadership and the international community appear distinctly indifferent the looming danger of this newest axis of evil. For them, the only fate worse than death is normalization between the Arabs and Israel. Abbas has once again pegged his hopes and those of his people on entities that would obstruct the Palestinians and destroy Israel.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s continued rapprochement with the Iran-backed Hamas is jeopardizing the Palestinians’ relations with Egypt. Egyptian media outlets have resumed their scathing attacks on the Palestinian leadership in general, and the Islamist movement that has been ruling the Gaza Strip since 2007 in particular.

The Egyptian attacks came on the eve of a meeting in Turkey between leaders of Abbas’s Fatah faction and Hamas. At the meeting, held under the auspices of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Hamas and Fatah leaders discussed ways of ending their dispute and holding long overdue Palestinian presidential and parliamentary elections.