RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16223/good-riddance-who

China was malicious, and there is plenty of evidence of planning.

“Whether WHO can reform effectively is directly tied to the accountability issue,” wrote Dr. Xiaoxu Sean Lin, former lab director of the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, to Gatestone. The structure of the organization defeats accountability he argues, because its leaders report to many member states and therefore to no one. As a result, unacceptable conduct goes unpunished.

To make matters worse, the WHO is a UN body, and the UN is composed of some of the world’s most malign actors. Accountability in such an organization is extremely unlikely as long as China, for instance, is considered a legitimate participant in issues of global concern, such as public health.

America should have forced a review of the WHO years ago, but the religion of multilateralism dies hard. We can be sure that the forces of “one worldism” will be working with Director-General Tedros to keep the U.S. in his organization.

No, President Trump, abandoning a dangerous organization, is giving the world a chance to succeed and save lives.

A tearful Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Thursday pleaded for international cooperation in the fight against the coronavirus. “The COVID-19 pandemic is a test of global solidarity and global leadership,” said the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO). “The virus thrives on division, but is thwarted when we unite.”

At the same time, Tedros publicly thanked Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president Liberia, for agreeing to serve as co-chairs of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.

It is no surprise the embattled Tedros has been active in recent days. He has, after all, begun what is a long-term campaign to keep his organization going. The Trump administration gave formal notice to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday that the United States was withdrawing from the WHO. The withdrawal is scheduled to take effect July 6, 2021.

The withdrawal may never happen, however: Tedros is not the only party mobilizing to prevent the WHO’s biggest contributor from leaving. Joe Biden, sitting on a long lead in the polls, tweeted he will reverse the withdrawal “on my first day as President.”

Nonetheless, President Donald J. Trump’s decisive action was justified, furthering the interests of both America and the global community.

Why? The WHO was complicit with China in the spread of the coronavirus around the world and is not capable of meaningful reform.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/iran-ukrainian-jetliner-shootdown-miscommunication-alignment

A report released Saturday by Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization blames the shootdown of a Ukrainian jetliner on a misaligned missile battery and miscommunication between troops and their commanders.

The report comes months after the Jan. 8 crash near Tehran that killed all 176 people on board. Authorities had initially denied responsibility but changed course days later after Western nations presented extensive evidence that Iran had shot down the plane.

The report signals a new phase in the investigation into the crash, as the aircraft’s black box flight recorder is due to be sent to Paris, where international investigators will finally be able to examine it. It also comes as public opinion remains low over Iran’s government as it faces both crushing U.S. sanctions and vast domestic economic problems.

The shootdown happened the same night Iran launched a ballistic missile attack targeting U.S. soldiers in Iraq, its response to the American drone strike that killed Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan. 3.

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/24382/as-night-descends-on-hong-kong-the-un-raises-no

CHINA’S DRACONIAN new national security law for Hong Kong took effect on July 1. The arrests began at once.

Police in riot gear swarmed the Causeway Bay shopping district, firing pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets into a crowd of Hong Kong residents protesting the legislation. They deployed water cannons to disperse the marchers and drown out their chants. At least 370 people were arrested, including a 15-year-old girl. Under the new law, anyone convicted of “acts of secession, subversion of state power, terrorist activities, and collusion with foreign or external forces” — i.e., of openly dissenting from China’s totalitarian control — faces a potential maximum sentence of life in prison.

No less insidious than what the new law allows Chinese authorities to do to dissidents — warrantless searches, secret trials, seizure of assets — is the censorship it is driving Hong Kongers to impose on themselves. Many activists have deleted their social-media accounts. Writers have asked websites to take down their published articles. Demosisto, the most prominent pro-democracy youth group, has disbanded. Libraries are pulling books critical of China’s communist government.