RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/03/understanding-and-misunderstanding-china/

The Hong Kong protesters should demonstrate to us once and for all that the Chinese are not genetically conditioned, compliant and quietist “yellow ants”, as many in the West still assume. Nor must we forget 1989 when young freedom protesters surrounded a Statue of Liberty on Tiananmen Square. About one million Beijing residents from all walks of life, including numerous party and union officials, demonstrated for reform and greater freedom. Most remarkably, Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Communist Party of China after a long career in the Party elite, addressed the crowds on the square. He advocated freedom of the press and freedom of association, free markets and parliamentary democracy. Could a leader like that again one day emerge from the bosom of the CPC?

Of course, earlier generations of Chinese had to knuckle under to survive, buy a decent apartment and give their children a good education. Many still do. But many of their children and grandchildren now have attained middle-class living standards or better, together with the education and knowledge which come with that. More and more Chinese—in the PRC and the diaspora, including in Australia—now aspire to civic, economic and political rights. And they are prepared to stand up for their liberties.

During my visits to the PRC over the past forty years, I have seen a pervasive shift from unquestioning compliance and the pursuit of narrow material aspirations to demands for individual freedoms. Many Chinese now complain about the oppressors in Beijing and the surveillance state. “It takes the authorities a mere seventeen minutes to know exactly where everyone is at the moment,” they joke. “China is so poor at soccer because the national team consists of players with money to bribe the selectors,” you are told. Ordinary folk one meets decry openly the blocking of Google, Wikipedia and YouTube by online censorship—and show you how to circumvent the ban. America-based, Mandarin-speaking bloggers, whose political comments are critical and often well-informed, have hundreds of thousands of tech-savvy, VPN-enabled followers in the PRC. Their blogs often attract a hundred times the number of viewers that the PRC’s main broadcaster gets.

The professors and students of Shanghai’s Fudan University, whose charter contains the motto “freedom of thought”, but who have been officially instructed to drop it, now defiantly sing their campus anthem daily, extolling “freedom of thought and academic independence”. Many in the rapidly growing middle class speak admiringly of the individual freedoms they have observed in the West during holiday trips or semesters of study.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/06/coming-migrant-wave-set-to-exact-consequences-in-europe/

The Obama era, it is often falsely suggested, was one of “no corruption” and a “strong multilateralism” on the international stage where Atlanticism held sway and challenges to U.S.-led western liberal democratic order were easily neutralized. Then, we were assured, the policymakers at the U.S. State Department and their like-minded allies at Langley had everything under control.

This is the impression left by a horribly biased media on both sides of the pond, still raging at the audacity of hoi polloi who dared not only to elect the unpalatable Donald Trump as president of the United States, but who also saw to it that Brexit be seen through to the end.

Upon closer inspection, one will note that Afghanistan continues to be a raging quagmire, with the Taliban threatening what little is left of the U.S.-backed Afghan National Army. Presidential candidate Joe Biden promised everyone way back in 2012 that U.S. forces were on the way out within months. This is America’s longest historical conflict, soon to break the two-decade milestone should current peace talks collapse (a very safe bet).

Libya, where the United States “led from behind” (as per President Obama), continues to be ravaged by civil war between various tribal and jihadi factions. Muammar Gaddafi’s removal was sold as an easy “pick off” but Obama’s legacy (and to be fair, the legacies of the UK’s David Cameron and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy) is one of modern-day slave markets, a destroyed economy, an annihilated society, and a continuing migrant crisis for which Europe continues to foot the bill.

And as they are paying the price for Obama’s Libya policy, Europe is still paying the price for his Russia policy. Wrenching Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit has been presented as a victory for liberal democracy and the Western-led global order against an “authoritarian” and “revanchist” Russia.

What could have been the biggest strategic victory of Obama’s foreign policy instead descended into a stalemate whereby a horribly corrupt rump Ukraine has exposed all sorts of shady practices and practitioners, ranging from Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort to the clearly corrupt Hunter Biden. The steadily increasing sanctions regime leveled at Moscow and key Russians by the United States had the added effect of harming European business interests, leading to resentment among both German and French manufacturers. Ukraine’s conflict continues to fester as an open wound, with resolution still far off in the distance.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15670/china-coronavirus-lies

“The epidemic has exposed this country completely in its corruption, bureaucracy, information control and censorship.” — Phillip Wu, a freelance writer in Beijing, The Guardian, March 1, 2020.

Then there are many instances of journalists and activists who told the truth, but who were arrested or “vanished”. The Chinese regime is now even announcing plans to publish a book in six languages about the outbreak that portrays President Xi as a “major power leader” with “care for the people”.

Italy’s main fatal mistake was trusting China’s regime. Instead of checking everyone — Chinese or Italian — returning from China since January, Italy kept its borders open. We are now dealing with tens of thousands of Italians under quarantine….

The idea that the coronavirus might be related to Wuhan’s virus research laboratory is considered by some a “conspiracy theory”, yet China’s refusal immediately to accept help from the US Centers for Disease Control understandably arouses suspicion.

“On current course, China is liable to do significant damage to the rest the world, by accident or intent,” wrote columnist Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal on January 29.

“The Chinese Communist government increasingly poses an existential threat not just to its own 1.4 billion citizens but to the world at large”, wrote the noted historian Victor Davis Hanson on February 20.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/06/how-bad-is-antisemitism-in-europe-surveys-suggest-its-rampant

Hesitating to dub strangers antisemites is wise, especially based on limited information. But the blatant bigotry on parade in Europe underscores that open antisemitism has come roaring back.

The Belgian city of Aalst celebrated this year’s Carnival with grotesque displays of overt antisemitism. Revelers mocked the Wailing Wall, with some dressed as ants in Hasidic hats and others as Nazis. That theme continued in Campo de Criptana, Spain, where Carnival participants dressed up as Nazis and concentration camp prisoners, flanked by chimneys.

The blatant bigotry on parade underscored that open antisemitism has come roaring back. What’s less certain is how many people are fueling that resurgence. Pew Research and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) surveys have approached that question, but it’s easier to ask than to answer.

Calculating that number requires not only a good definition of antisemitism (like International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition) but also a clear understanding of why we’re even asking. Do we want to know where Jews can most comfortably live as visible Jews, most easily assimilate, or simply live in safety, free of physical attacks?

European Attitudes About Jews Are Changing For Worse

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/showdown-building-as-un-court-targets-us-gis/91042/

An international prosecutor, Fatou Bensuda, was advised Thursday by a panel at Hague that she should go ahead and investigate alleged war crimes committed by Americans in Afghanistan. It’s a shocking development.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the International Criminal Court panel’s ruling “a truly breathtaking action by an unaccountable political institution masquerading as a legal body.” It is, but what to do?

In a little noticed address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last week, Senator Ted Cruz urged an American push at the United Nations Security Council to ban ICC investigations against Israelis, Americans, or citizens of any other non-member of the Hague-based court.

According to the Rome Statute, which governs the ICC — a global trial venue for war crimes and crimes against humanity — it has no jurisdiction over countries that have not joined its 123 member states. So non-members like America, Israel, China, Russia, and India are off limit. Or are they?

When the court started functioning in 2002, I made a bet with a friend, an avid universal jurisdiction supporter, that despite non-membership, Americans and Israelis would early on end up in the dock. I lost that bet, but only because I thought such ICC prosecutions would be launched right off the bat.

In the early days, the court went after alleged war criminals in places like Darfur, Congo, Burundi, and the Central African Republic. A few years ago, however, several African countries contended there’s a racist pattern against their continent and threatened to renounce their ICC membership. Political pressures grew on Ms. Bensouda, the Gambian-born ICC prosecutor, to land more visible non-African fish.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15682/europe-erdogan-blackmail

Turkey would apparently like to see more progress in the talks to grant it admission as a full member of the European Union…. Erdoğan would most certainly like the West overlook his massive democratic deficit, and to help Turkey secure even more dominance over the Greek islands off its coast, as well as its claims on the gas fields beneath the eastern Mediterranean.

Erdoğan needed to find a non-Russian adversary to attack, to distract Turkish anger away from him and toward a different chosen target. What better target than the EU, with which most Turks have a love-hate relationship? Opening Turkey’s border gates and flooding Europe with migrants would be sure to please the average Turk….

Europe, unfortunately, to protect its liberty and sovereignty, needs to fight back. It must refuse to accept Erdoğan’s hostages…. If the first groups in this mini-exodus from Turkey face a serious blockade rather than warm and welcoming locals, potential migrants would be discouraged from taking such a perilous trip. What Greece alone could achieve, without help from the EU, would be limited….

Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has threatened Europe several times with “sending millions of refugees your way.” Turkey would apparently like to see more progress in the talks to grant it admission as a full member of the European Union. At the moment, these membership negotiations have stalled. He may also wish for Western support — from the EU, the United States and all of NATO — for his ideal architecture to install Turkey in northwest Syria.

As Turkish servicemen were recently killed in Syria, with direct Russian military involvement, it is probably safe to assume that the support Erdoğan is seeking, both directly and indirectly, is “support for a NATO ally against Russian aggression”. In addition, Erdoğan would also most certainly like the West overlook his massive democratic deficit, and to help Turkey secure even more dominance over the Greek islands off its coast, as well as its claims on the gas fields beneath the eastern Mediterranean.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/fighting_the_muslim_reconquest_of_europe_on_the_greeceturkey_border.html

As Americans remain riveted to the corona virus and the nauseating vicissitudes of the Democrats’ battle to choose a presidential nominee — a choice now apparently winnowed down to the Marxist or the moron — this writer’s thoughts once again are drawn to events in Europe. The critical situation now unfolding day by day on the Greek-Turkish border may at first seem of minor concern to America, but in fact it’s a critical part of the overall struggle by patriots on both sides of the Atlantic to preserve Western Civilization.

The same forces working here to dissolve American civilization through mass migration and deliberately inculcated cultural self-loathing are busy in Europe pursuing the same goal by identical means. And the same traditional, patriotic segment of the population, guilty of the crime of loving their civilization and wanting to preserve it, resists cultural dissolution in both Europe and America. The commonality of the struggle is striking.

European patriots, however, face worse odds. Their governments are more ruthless in condemning patriotism and love of country (who knew those feelings made one a Nazi?), and Europeans’ history of submission to authority, and consequent ingrained passivity, make them less inclined to risk social condemnation to save themselves.

Consider the events unfolding on Europe’s eastern border with Islam:  

Over the last week to ten days, the Islamist 21st century Sultan on the Bosporus, Recep Erdogan, has abrogated Turkey’s 2016 Agreement with the European Union, under which the Turks committed to preventing a repetition of the 2015 mass migration of Muslim migrants into Western Europe. During the 2015 fiasco, welcomed by German Chancellor Merkel, at least one million “refugees” (read “economic migrants”) from the Middle East and elsewhere streamed into Germany (hence, into all of Europe), following a route that crossed Turkey, the Greek-Turkish border, the Balkans and Austria. By today, the number in of Muslim newcomers in Germany has metastasized, through “family reunification” and continuing migration, to at least two million, with all the vast increases in criminality and sexual assaults, widespread overt loathing of European culture and traditions, and massive social welfare costs, all of which any even casual student of Islamic history would have predicted.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-macron-on-islam-11583447996?mod=opinion_major_pos4

French President Emmanuel Macronspeaking on Feb. 18 (translation by Matthew King):

In the republic, it is not acceptable to refuse to shake hands with a woman because she is a woman. In the republic, we cannot accept that someone refuses to be cared for or educated by someone because she is a woman. In the republic, it is not acceptable to drop out of school for reasons of religion or belief. In the republic, one cannot demand virginity certificates to get married. In the republic, we must never accept that the laws of religion can be superior to the laws of the Republic. . . .

And now that I have said all this, this isn’t a question of stigmatizing any religion. And what we have to do is not, as I have sometimes heard from some people, a program against Islam. That would be a profound mistake. There are millions of fellow citizens, French citizens, who . . . believe in Islam and who live according to the laws of the republic and who want to live as French citizens. What we must fight is the separatism I have just mentioned and all the practices I have just mentioned with great calm, with great determination, with great respect. . . . The risk is that the whole society will say “the problem is our Muslim fellow citizens,” which would be a huge mistake. But this Islamist separatism is incompatible with freedom and equality, incompatible with the indivisibility of the republic and the necessary unity of the nation.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/04/the-lefts-politicization-of-coronavirus-backfires-bigly/

Even first year political science students know how difficult it is to beat an incumbent president and that it is nearly impossible to beat one leading a soaring economy; only five incumbent presidents have lost their re-election bids since 1900. No wonder the media and Democrats have linked arms to mislead the American people in yet another paranoia propaganda campaign.

It’s becoming fairly obvious that the media and Democrats are hyping the coronavirus outbreak to incite panic, harm the markets and economy, and score political points against President Trump. Of course, as with the Mueller investigation and impeachment, their efforts backfired as the president dealt with the outbreak forcefully and immediately.

There is one silver lining in this media circus surrounding the coronavirus epidemic. Their insistence on disseminating widespread fear and paranoia about it has allowed us, in turn, to diagnose our dangerous dependence on China.

It should be apparent to most by now that the corrupt and barbaric Communist Chinese regime has been enriched and empowered by the naïveté of the West. They have stolen intellectual property, used illegal subsidies, dumped their products, and now apparently are using slave labor to produce goods to sell to the West.

But the Chinese have been empowered as well by the greed of Chamber of Commerce corporate shills who were all for offshoring production to sell out the U.S. worker if it meant better bottom lines for themselves.

Let’s be candid: they don’t care about the small and medium-sized businesses and they don’t care about the American workers who don’t wear suits and work in offices. They have undercut this country for decades by offshoring production just to increase profits and sell cheaper goods, all to the detriment of American workers and communities.

Yes, there were short term benefits to consumers, but at what cost to American workers, industry, communities, small businesses, and even national security?

Consider the arguments in favor of globalism in light of what we now must see as a dangerous dependence on the corrupt Chinese regime. Take pharmaceuticals as an example.

A Department of Commerce study found that a staggering 97 percent of all antibiotics in the United States came from China. Add the startling statistic that 80 percent of the ingredients we use to make various drugs within the United States are also from China or outsourced from other nations and you have a recipe for disaster.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15528/released-jihadists

“We’re playing Russian roulette with people’s lives, letting convicted, known, radicalised jihadi criminals walk about our streets”. — Chris Phillips, former head of the UK National Counter Terrorism Security Office, The Guardian, December 1, 2019.

The hate literature was distributed to inmates by… chaplains, who themselves were appointed by the Ministry of Justice.

The prison staff lacked the training to confront and deter… extremist ideology, and “were often fearful they would be accused of racism if they did”. — Ian Acheson, former prison governor, Daily Mail, July 13, 2016.

It remains to be seen, whether releasing a terrorist after serving two-thirds of his sentence, rather than half, will make any difference.

“If there are people who are absolutely determined not to accept any intervention that will change that toxic mind-set, yes they should be in prison and if necessary, indefinitely.” — Ian Acheson, former prison governor, BBC News, February 3, 2020.

On February 3, 2020, Sudesh Amman, who had just been released from prison in England after serving half his prison term, stabbed two people in Streatham, south London, before he was shot dead at the scene by police. Later, ISIS took responsibility for the attack.

The attack again raised the issue of how Europe should deal with jihadist terrorism.

After Amman’s terrorist attack, the government announced that emergency legislation would be introduced to end the automatic early release from prison of terror offenders. Terror offenders would only be considered for release once they had served two-thirds of their sentence and with the approval of the parole board. Justice Secretary Robert Buckland said that the latest attack by Amman made the case “for immediate action”.

“We cannot have the situation, as we saw tragically in yesterday’s case, where an offender – a known risk to innocent members of the public – is released early by automatic process of law without any oversight by the Parole Board,” he said.

It remains to be seen, whether releasing a terrorist after serving two-thirds of his sentence, rather than half, will make any difference. “There will be some people for whom their ideology is bulletproof and there is no way we can get inside that,” said Ian Acheson, a former prison governor. “If there are people who are absolutely determined not to accept any intervention that will change that toxic mind-set, yes they should be in prison and if necessary, indefinitely.”

The attack last week follows the November 2019 terrorist attack on London Bridge — in which Usman Khan, a convicted terrorist, who also had been released on parole half-way into his prison term, murdered two people and wounded several others.