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WORLD NEWS

China Says Killing Americans over Taiwan is ‘Morally Justified’ by Gordon G. Chang

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.

The Dangerous New Iran-Qatar-Turkey-Hamas Alliance by Khaled Abu Toameh

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.

U.S. and China: Emerging Technologies and the Race to Control the Future by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16527/us-china-technology-race

Chairman Xi seems to want to secure a commanding lead in the emerging hi-tech disciplines to create a sense of inevitability about China’s rise to world domination.

Now, a Chinese physician and virologist, Dr. Yan Limeng, who fled China and is in hiding in the U.S., has said that China released the virus “intentionally” — perhaps, one surmises, as a way of torpedoing both President Trump’s prospects for re-election and his effort to alter trade deals that have favored China by $600 billion a year. Meanwhile, Twitter thoughtfully deleted Yan’s clearly important account.

Ominously, China appears to be doubling down on its effort to checkmate the West’s capability to use space-based systems during conflict. If China can successfully blind U.S. systems by offensive cyber operations or outright destruction of U.S. systems by anti-satellite attacks, the war-fighting advantage currently possessed by the West can be annihilated.

The costs to the US of falling behind could well prove catastrophic.

The United States is in a “Tech War” with China, the victor will control the global dissemination of information. The winner will also write the world’s rules and standards for emerging technologies in the digital economy.

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping threw down the gauntlet to the U.S. in a May 2017 speech, where he outlined the plan for establishing a Chinese-supervised “Digital Silk Road.” President Xi realizes that the information dimension of modern war is bound up with China’s apparent overall objective of unseating the United States as the leader of the existing liberal democratic world order.

Xi seemingly wants to secure a commanding lead in the emerging hi-tech disciplines to create a sense of inevitability about China’s rise to world domination. The U.S. still has the time, talent and resources to secure a victory over China in this contest for global leadership, provided that the U.S. has the will, self-discipline and flexibility to institute a total societal mobilization over decades.

Why There’s No Peace With the Palestinians A sobering look at the Palestinians’ ultimatum on the “Right of Return.” Joseph Puder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/why-theres-no-peace-palestinians-joseph-puder/

In the recent historic Abrahamic Peace Accords (August 13, 2020), which established full peace and diplomatic relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain, signed at the White House by U.S. President Donald Trump, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bahrain, Dr. Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, and Minister of Foreign Affairs for the United Arab Emirates, Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyani, the issue of “Right of Return” was not brought up.

One of the principle issues that prevents peace between Israel and the Palestinian-Arabs is the “Right of Return to Israel” of Palestinian refugees. The visionless Mahmoud Abbas, and his cohorts in the Palestinian Authority (PA), lack the vision and humanity to end the plight of the descendants of Palestinian refugees, by ending the illusion of the “Right of Return.” Now more than 72 years following the 1948 War of Independence for Israel, and “Nakba” for the Palestinians, most all of the original refugees have died. Still, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is demanding the return of their third or even fourth generation descendants to Israel. However, the refugees were not only on the Arab side. More Jews became refugees than Arab-Palestinians as a result of being kicked out of the Arab states, where they resided long before the Islamic invasion. Conversely, many of the Palestinian refugees were relative newcomers to Mandatory Palestine.  They migrated to Palestine for jobs Palestinian-Jews created during the Mandatory period. While the Jewish refugees from the Arab countries were fully assimilated into Israeli life, Arab refugees were deliberately relegated to refugee camps and left in miserable conditions. If Israel would agree to the “Right of Return,” Israeli Jews would become a minority in the Jewish state, defeating the very purpose of Israel, namely, a home for the Jewish people in their historic homeland. It would simply be a suicide pact for the Jewish state.

An Antiterror Opportunity in Sudan The country deserves to be delisted as a state sponsor of terrorism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-antiterror-opportunity-in-sudan-11601333982?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The fact that Sudan’s leaders are openly discussing the normalization of relations with Israel shows how much the northeast African nation has changed since the downfall of dictator Omar al-Bashir. The Trump Administration’s diplomacy is pulling Khartoum closer to the West, but it needs help from Congress.

Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok took office last year after widespread protests brought about the old regime’s end. He shares power with unsavory figures but has managed to repeal draconian Islamic laws and give civil society some breathing room. The government has promised elections in 2022, and Mr. Hamdok wants to improve ties with the U.S. before his term ends.

The prime minister’s position is fragile. Many Islamists want him gone—he survived an assassination attempt this year—and the generals who toppled Mr. Bashir aren’t excited about democracy in Khartoum. But Congress can improve Mr. Hamdok’s standing, and give the country’s struggling economy a boost, by removing Sudan from the state sponsor of terrorism list.

The U.S. made the designation in 1993. Mr. Bashir hosted al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden at the time and gave them a free hand to plot mayhem around the region. After decades of isolation, the country has turned around and already qualifies for removal. Washington has tied the change to a $335 million compensation package for victims of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

UAE: Iran’s aggressive policies made Arabs look at Israel

https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/09/27/uae-irans-aggressive-policies-made-arabs-look-at-israel/

“The more strategic the Israelis look at these relationships, the more doors will open to them,” says UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash. Normalizing ties with Israel “was strategically good for the UAE, will make it have more of a global presence.”

The United Arab Emirates didn’t need peace with Israel to counter Iran, a top UAE official said Friday, but he said Iran’s aggressive policies over three decades alarmed many Arab countries and made them look at their relationship with Israel “with fresh eyes.”

UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash acknowledged at a virtual briefing on the sidelines of the equally virtual UN General Assembly’s annual meeting of world leaders that this may not have been Iran’s intention. But its actions had an impact in the region, he said, though he wouldn’t speculate on whether other Arab countries would follow the UAE and Bahrain in establishing relations with Israel.

“The only thing I want to say is the more strategic the Israelis look at these relationships, the more doors will open to them,” Gargash said. “If they look at it very `transactionally’, I think that it is not going to send a very good omen for normalizing relations with many of the Arab countries.”

Gargash said the UAE’s message to Israel is to “look at these opportunities and build strategically, and think long term rather than short term” – and prove wrong the countries who say that because of the Israeli political system its decision-makers think only tactically.

France: More Terrorism, More Silence by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16550/france-terrorism-silence

This brand of extremism has also managed to transform many European citizens into prisoners, people hiding in their own countries, sentenced to death and forced to live in houses unknown even to their friends and families. And we got used to it!

“[T]his lack of courage to follow in Charlie’s footsteps comes at a price, we are losing freedom of speech and an insidious form of self-censorship is gaining ground.” — Flemming Rose, Le Point, September 2, 2020.

“To put it simply, freedom of speech is in bad shape around the world. Including in Denmark, France and throughout the West. These are troubled times; people prefer order and security to freedom.” — Flemming Rose, Le Point, August 15, 2020.

On September 25, in Paris, two people were stabbed and seriously wounded outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo, where 12 of the satirical magazine’s editors and cartoonists were murdered by extremist Muslims in 2015. The suspect, in police custody, is being investigated for terrorism.

The accused murderers in the 2015 attacks are currently on trial in Paris.

Shortly before the knifing attack, on September 22, Charlie Hebdo’s director of human resources, Marika Bret, did not come home. In fact, she no longer has a home. She was evicted after serious and concrete death threats from extremist Muslims. She decided to make her “exfiltration” public for French intelligence to alert the public to the threat of extremism in France.

“I have lived under police protection for almost five years”, she told the weekly Le Point.

“My security agents received specific and detailed threats. I had ten minutes to pack and leave the house. Ten minutes to give up a part of one’s life is a bit short and it was very violent. I will not go home. I am losing my home to outbursts of hatred, the hatred that always begins with the threat of instilling fear. We know how it can end”.

Bret also claimed that the French Left abandoned the “battle for secularism”.

Raymond Ibrahim : An “Unimaginable Nightmare”: The Abduction, Rape, and Forced Conversion of Christian Girls in Egypt

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16552/egypt-christians-abduction-rape

“One of the strategies they used to gain the girls’ trust was for the kidnapper, a Muslim man, to tell the Christian girl he loved her and wanted to convert to Christianity for her. They would start a romantic relationship until, one day, they would decide to ‘escape’ together. What the girls do not know is that they are actually being kidnapped.” — Former Egyptian human trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017.

“The kidnappers receive large amounts of money. Police can help them in different ways, and when they do, they might also receive a part of the financial reward the kidnappers are paid…. In some cases, police provide the kidnappers with drugs they seize.” — Former Egyptian trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017

“If all goes to plan, the girls are also forced into marriage with a strict Muslim. Their husbands don’t love them, they just marry her to make her a Muslim. She will be hit and humiliated. And if she tries to escape, or convert back to her original religion, she will be killed.” — Former Egyptian trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017.

“There are countless families who report that police have either been complicit in the kidnapping or at the very least bribed into silence. If there is any hope for Coptic women in Egypt to have a merely ‘primitive’ level of equality, these incidents of trafficking must cease, and the perpetrators must be held accountable by the judiciary.” — From “‘Jihad of the Womb’: Trafficking of Coptic Women & Girls in Egypt,” a report by Coptic Solidarity.

The kidnapping, sexual abuse and forced conversion of Christian women and girls in Egypt — a “particularly vulnerable group to exploitation” that is quietly living an “unimaginable nightmare” — is rampant, with no signs of easing up. This is the finding of a report published on September 10, 2020 by Coptic Solidarity, an international organization based in Washington D.C., that works to promote equal citizenship rights for Egypt’s Christian minority.

In its 15-page report, “‘Jihad of the Womb’: Trafficking of Coptic Women & Girls in Egypt,” Coptic Solidarity documents “the widespread practice of abduction and trafficking” and estimates that there have been “about 500 cases within the last decade, where elements of coercion were used that amount to trafficking,” according to the UN’s own definitions, particularly per its “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children.”

According to Coptic Solidarity:

“The capture and disappearance of Coptic women and minor girls is a bane of the Coptic community in Egypt, yet little has been done to address this scourge by the Egyptian or foreign governments, NGOs, or international bodies. According to a priest in the Minya Governorate, at least 15 girls go missing every year in his area alone. His own daughter was nearly kidnapped had he not been able to intervene in time.”

The report offers 13 separate case studies. Victims range from teenage girls, to newlywed and pregnant young women, to married women with children. Most of the victims disappeared in one of two ways: either they were publicly kidnapped, often by being forced into a car while traveling to school, church, or work; or — especially true for teenage girls — they were lured into relationships with young Muslim men who promised them the world, until, that is, they realized they had been duped. According to a former Egyptian human trafficker:

“[O]ne of the strategies they used to gain the girls’ trust was for the kidnapper, a Muslim man, to tell the Christian girl he loved her and wanted to convert to Christianity for her. They would start a romantic relationship until, one day, they would decide to ‘escape’ together. What the girls do not know is that they are actually being kidnapped. Most of the time they will not marry their kidnapper, but someone else.”

The ‘Nevertheless’ Club and the World by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16551/cfr-javad-zarif

The tweet contains interesting indicators to how [the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard] Haas tries to dodge the issue. He presents Afkari’s killing as a judicial “execution”, enabling Zarif to say “well, you have executions in some states of the US as well.”

In November 1938, a few days after Kristallnacht, the French ambassador to Berlin Robert Coulondre reported the event to Paris, describing the savagery in the heart of Europe, concluding that “nevertheless [néanmoins in French] one should understand German grievances against the Jews.”

[I]n his expose at the CFR meeting, Zarif repeated the same claims, not to say lies, that he has been dishing out to the illustrious audience for years. And it seems that they gobbled it up with the same appetite as before. To hoodwink his audience, Zarif never used the term “Islamic Republic” and pretended that “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei doesn’t exist. Nor did he talk of Islam and Tehran’s strategy to “export the Islamic Revolution” to the whole world, including New York where the CFR is located.

Portrayed by Zarif, the Khomeinist regime is a peace-and-love enterprise where the judiciary is independent, all freedoms are respected, and the strategic aim is to establish peace and harmony across the globe. There are no political prisoners in Iran. Tehran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas is cultural and the Iranian presence in Syria is only advisory, at the invitation of the Syrian government. There are, of course, no American and other foreign hostages in Iran. If there is trouble in the Middle East it is the fault of the United States. OK, not of good Americans like John Kerry and Barack Obama but of people like Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.

For the past few years, hosting the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif, has developed into an annual ritual of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). This year, however, CFR’s invitation to Zarif raised a storm of protest beyond the bubble in which American foreign policy junkies play games, indulge in fantasies, and address their principal task, which is fund-raising.

Toward a Transformational Peace in the Middle East by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16538/middle-east-transformational-peace

Both Arab countries and Israel will benefit immensely.

Palestinian leaders are suddenly discovering that, as the Arab saying goes, “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on” – possibly without them.

“We [realists] understand that only defeat will convince Palestinians like Mrs. Ashrawi, and through them Iranian, Turkish, Islamist, leftist, fascist, and other anti-Zionists, that the century-plus conflict is over, that Israel has prevailed, and that the time has come to give up on futile, painful, and genocidal ambitions.” — Daniel Pipes, Middle East Scholar.

If President Trump is able to continue following the bold, unconventional path he has traced, he will most likely succeed where all his predecessors have failed. What he has accomplished already — in less than four years, with so many forces determined to undermine him… is extraordinary.

“Trump has done more for peace in the Middle East in four years than any other American President in seventy-two years.” — Meyer Habib, member of the French National Assembly, i24 News, September 14, 2020.

On September 15, two peace agreements with Israel and known as The Abraham Accords – one with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and one with Bahrain, and — were made official at a White House ceremony. President Donald J. Trump spoke of a “historic breakthrough” and a “previously unthinkable regional transformation”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu added that the world is witnessing “the dawn of a new Middle East “.

The agreements, which come 26 years after the last peace treaty, between Jordan and Israel, mark a further step towards the integration of Israel in the region.

The UAE and Bahrain are the first Arab countries to recognize Israel without requiring any concession from Israel (Netanyahu said that the extension of Israeli sovereignty to parts of Judea-Samaria and the Jordan Valley was suspended, not canceled) and without any American financial contribution involved.