RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/wuhan_revisited.html

For a number of years in the 20-aughts, I worked in Wuhan, Hubei Province, People’s Republic of China.

China being China, and Wuhan being a provincial outpost of old China, an amalgamation of three towns incorporated under the one name, observations of life there then might be of interest now, given the tumult over the mushrooming conflagration of the coronavirus.

Because I lived on the outskirts of town, near a squealing pig farm, many buffalo in the fields, goats occasioning the streets, wild dogs inoffensively wandering about most of the open-air eateries not presumptuous enough to call themselves restaurants — a few plastic chairs and unwashed PVC tables scattered near a rough kitchen, basically — I was faced daily with the critical choice: Shall I risk whatever microbes or bacteria or whatever we might ‘catch’ or go along with the locals, who ate whatever was on offer without much of a tremor or fret.

Most of the time, frankly, I was hungry, and my colleagues and I trusted to Providence to keep us out of what the local Wuhanites called the doctor’s office, or the uncontemporary places they called hospitals, where  if you were unlucky enough to be in one of the stalls, your relatives brought you food, bed linens, and whatever else you needed that was outside the pill regimen or ‘treatment’ you were being accorded.

At night, because my brand- new apartment had been completed with a living room, a bedroom and a marble-floored Western bathroom, a major prize considering everyone else having a squat toilet, even at work, but no kitchen at all, I would  do my work, try to fight off the plagues of mosquitoes that bedeviled me every single night. Despite my burning Citronella candles as an encircling talismanic circle around my work-desk in a vain attempt to discourage the fierce buggers, every morning I’d have a field of itching bites up and down any exposed flesh.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15507/christians-persecution-global-catastrophe

Dictatorial paranoia continues to make North Korea (#1) the worst nation. “If North Korean Christians are discovered, they are deported to labor camps as political criminals or even killed on the spot.” — World Watch List 2020, Open Doors.

Otherwise, as has been the case in all statistics and reports on the global persecution of Christians, not only does “Islamic oppression” remain the chief “source of persecution” faced by Christians in seven of the absolute ten worst nations, but 38 of the 50 nations composing the list are either Muslim majority or have a sizeable Muslim population.

The targeting of Christians around the world has become more widespread than ever. Part of this is because “persecution against Christians has taken a technological turn.” ….in India (#10) — where “Hindu radicals often attack Christians with little to no consequences” — “the government plans to introduce a national facial recognition system. Similarly, China (#23)….” — World Watch List 2020, Open Doors.

Perhaps the most disturbing trend is that the number of persecuted Christians continues to grow year after year….

Will this trend ever stop and reverse, or will it continue to get worse — and possibly even spill into those nations that, for now, enjoy religious freedom and equality?

The global persecution of Christians has reached unprecedented levels: “260 million Christians experience high levels of persecution” around the world, notes the recently published Open Doors World Watch List 2020, an annual report that ranks the top 50 countries where Christians are most persecuted for their faith.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15508/iran-chinese-dream

The Chinese found out that producing and exporting goods that people wanted across the globe was easier and more profitable than trying to export a revolution that no one, perhaps apart from a few students in London and Paris, thirsted for.

The Shah had promised that he would turn Iran into “a second Japan”. Rafsanjani promised a “second China.”

Some of Rafsanjani’s close associates now tell me that he was “a bit of a coward” and lost his opportunity to do a Deng Xiaoping by being sucked into corrupt business deals. According to them, Rafsanjani didn’t realize that one starts making money for himself, his family and his entourage after one has done a Deng Xiaoping, and not before.

Today, the Tehran “deciders” constitute a small, increasingly isolated minority caught in an imagined past and fearful of the future. Worse still, many “deciders” have already put part of their money abroad, having sent their children to Europe and America. Going through a who-is-who of these “deciders” one is amazed by how many are behaving as carpetbaggers, treating Iran as a land to plunder, sending the proceeds to the West. They cannot produce an Iranian “Deng” because they don’t want to create a productive economy; all they are interested in is to get the money and run.

Could General Qassem Soleimani’s dramatic demise provide the shock therapy to persuade those who wield real power in Tehran to admit the failure of a strategy that has led Iran into an impasse? This was the question discussed in a zoom conference with a number of academics from one of Iran’s leading universities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15509/sweden-hijab

Hejazipour said that she had decided not to have a share in this horrendous lie and not to play the game of ‘We love the hijab and have no problem with it’ anymore… It creates many limitations for women and deprives them of their basic rights. Is this protection? I say definitely not, it is solely and merely a limitation.”

“The Iranian authorities are employing the full machinery of the state to crush opposition to forced hijab, but with more than half the population against it, the tide is increasingly against them.” — Hadi Ghaemi, Executive Director, Center for Human Rights in Iran, August 19, 2019

Swedish Elle readers are obviously free to choose whomever they see fit to be “look of the year”. It is, however, perplexing that female readers in a self-proclaimed feminist nation who wears the hijab, when a study commissioned by Swedish authorities has shown that wearing a hijab for many women and children in Sweden is far from being a voluntary choice.

“Those of us who have fled gender apartheid dictatorships, where women risk their lives to protest the veil, know and have experienced what chastity laws mean… our feminist government chooses to prioritize collective religious rights over the human rights of children and women… As long as trendsetting journalists see gender apartheid as ‘culture’ …. oppression based on honor will continue”. — Maria Rashidi and Sara Mohammad, human rights activists, Dagens Samhälle, December 14, 2019.

On February 1, World Hijab Day will be marked in countries all over the world, including in Sweden. Will anyone use that occasion to stand up for the many women and children who do not want to wear one?

On January 20, Iran’s only female Olympic medalist, Kimia Alizadeh, defected from Iran. “I am one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran whom they’ve been playing for years,” she wrote.

Then, last month, the Islamic Republic’s female chess master, Mitra Hejazipour, 27, removed her hijab during a chess tournament in Moscow and was promptly removed from the national chess team.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/brexit_nigel_farage_takes_britain_out_of_europe_with_a_stellar_flourish.html

Brexit goes through today, and Britain is finally independent, free from the clutches of the European Union.  It’s a great event regardless of how it happens, but in this case, it was cool beyond description. 

It all ended with a pretty amazing flourish, one that told us a lot about both the European Commission and newly sovereign Britain itself.  Chief Brexiteer Nigel Farage made his last speech before the European Commission, which was a great scolding and call to shut down the whole operation altogether, which was subversive enough.  But he drove it even farther. 

Here was the great final moment:

Farage and his buddies ended the whole thing by explicitly waving the British flag of sovereignty right in the faces of all the angry little European Commission eurocrats, even as they sputtered and cut off his mic.

Metaphor, anyone?  It was the mother of all metaphors, a Britain that asserted its sovereignty in waving its symbolic flag as its soulless eurocrat masters got angry and tried to stop it, not on political grounds, not because they were afraid the other member-states might follow, but on petty rules grounds, little administrative state foot-stamping, insisting on cookie-cutter order and obedience, no exceptions, in the face of a newly freed state that just asserted that it can do what it wants.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-and-xi-jinpings-crisis-of-legitimacy/

China faces many crises. Coronavirus makes them worse.

The epidemic is the latest blow to the legitimacy of China’s ruling Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping. When the party’s Central Committee ended term limits in March 2018, Xi emerged as China’s strongest leader since Mao Zedong. He ruled an authoritarian AI-powered surveillance state that global media hailed as the wave of the future. Or so it appeared.

The years since have not been kind to Chinese autocracy. Trade war with the United States slowed the Chinese economy and exposed divides within the nomenklatura. In March 2019, pro-democracy protests broke out in Hong Kong. They have not abated. Last November the New York Times published a stunning exposé of China’s prison-camp system in Xinjiang Province. Last month China lost face when it agreed to some of President Trump’s demands as part of a “Phase One” trade deal. A few days later Taiwan’s pro-independence president, Tsai Ing-Wen, won reelection in a landslide.

Now comes this nasty bug. Chinese officials, in classic authoritarian fashion, responded to the outbreak by downplaying its significance and hiding its magnitude. “Partly because the government covered up the epidemic in the early stages,” writes Nick Kristof, “hospitals were not able to gather supplies, and there are now major shortages of testing kits, masks, and protective gear. Some doctors were reduced to making goggles out of plastic folders.” The bill for this negligence and corruption was paid in lives lost.

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The economy also suffers. Nor do the niceties of diplomacy override the fact that China is isolated. No one has reason to take its government’s disclosures at face value. Several countries have suspended travel to China. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has called on the United States to do the same. A de facto ban may wind up taking effect as airlines and cruise ships cancel Chinese itineraries and passengers stay home rather than risk infection.

Among Xi’s initiatives is “Made in China 2025.” He wants to export supercomputers. What has he given the world instead? A public-health emergency.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/future-doesnt-belong-china-daniel-greenfield/

In the 1980s, movies like Die Hard and Back to the Future 2 showed off a Japanese takeover of America. Turning Japanese was bound to be playing on the radio every hour. Japan had leveraged unfair trade policies, currency manipulation, and government subsidies to buy up American companies (it’s still happening, but few are paying attention) and was the wave of the future sweeping over America.

Everyone was driving Japanese cars, using Japanese electronics, and buying “Made in Japan.” And Japan got there by stealing massive amounts of American intellectual property and reselling it to Americans.

By 1991, George Friedman’s book, The Coming War With Japan, was flying off the shelves.

Why doesn’t the future belong to Japan? There are economic answers. But there’s also a demographic answer. Japan entered the 1980s with an acceptably healthy 14 births per 1,000 people birth rate. The Japanese rate back then was only a little below America’s own 15 births per 1,000 people number.

But throughout the 80s, while Japan was supposed to be taking over America, its economy was impressive, but its birth rate was cratering at an even more impressive rate. By 1991, the future not only didn’t belong to Japan, but at a rate of 10 births per 1,000 people, it didn’t even have a future of its own.

Japan had entered the 1980s with a median age of 32. It left the decade with a median age of 37. By 2000, the median age was 40. Today, it approaches 50. The median Japanese age had passed fertility.

The Japanese had foreclosed their own future.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/egypt-ushers-new-year-murderous-assaults-raymond-ibrahim/
The New Year began with an uptick of slaughter attempts on Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority.

First, on January 12, 2020, a Muslim man crept up behind a Coptic woman walking home with groceries, pulled her head back with a hand full of hair, and slit her throat with a knife in the other hand.

Nearby people attacked and restrained the man in al-Wariq, Giza, where the incident took place. Catherine Ramzi was rushed to a nearby medical center, where her throat was sewn with 63 stitches; despite initial heavy bleeding, she managed to survive. The doctor told her that had the knife penetrated one millimeter more—her now mangled sweatshirt had provided some buffering against the knife—it would’ve reached her jugular and killed her.

During an interview, she explained that she had never before seen the man. All she heard him say during the assault is that she “deserved it” because her “hair was exposed.” He may have also identified her as a Christian because, like many Copts, Catherine bears a visible tattoo of the cross on her hand.

When the interviewer suggested that the assailant must have been insane, Catherine and her sister, who was present during the interview, argued otherwise, giving several reasons—including that the man knew and casually recited his ID number, his home address, and other detailed information to the arresting officers—suggesting that he was sane of mind. “This was a determined man who sought to execute a specific idea in his mind,” said Catherine’s brother. “There is no way that he was acting in a craze.”

Two days after the attack on Catherine, on January 14, 2020, in the region of al-Maraj, Egypt, another Muslim man tried to slaughter a Coptic man with a sharp box-cutter in a public space; he managed only to slice off a portion of the Christian’s ear.

After Muhammad ‘Awad, 32, was arrested and questioned as to why he tried to murder Rafiq Karam, 56, he confessed that he did not know the Copt, but that he simply “hates Christians, for they are from among the People of Lot, and the [death] penalty must be applied to them, for they commit indecencies.”

“The People of Lot” is a reference to the homosexual behavior of the denizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, as recorded in the Bible and, later, the Koran. This would not be the first time a Muslim misunderstands Christianity’s message of love as promoting libertine or illicit sexuality.

These recent attacks are hardly unprecedented for Egypt. For example, one need look no further than to al-Wariq, Giza, where Catherine was attacked for a nearly identical precedent: there, in March, 2017, another Muslim man slit the throat of another Christian woman, also in broad daylight—and also only to be characterized by authorities as “mentally unstable.”

In January, 2017, another Muslim man crept up behind a Coptic man, 45, and slit his throat, killing him in Alexandria. The murderer’s reasoning was that the Christian man owned a shop that sold alcohol, which the Muslim deemed “contrary to the shar‘ia [Islamic law] and the religion [Islam].” There are many more examples.

In other words, these most recent and random murder attempts of 2020 are clear indicators that there’s nothing “new” about the New Year—at least not in Egypt, where its Coptic minorities continue to be targeted for slaughter, simply for being Christians.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/iran_faces_stark_options_for_the_future.html

The November 2019 uprising of the Iranian people in 191 cities that began under the pretext of protesting rising gas prices showcased the dislike of the Iranian people for a regime marked by repression, discrimination, looting, and corruption. The November uprising was a strategic blow to the regime and was instrumental in cornering it internationally. The killing of Qasem Soleimani, too, was a serious blow to the regime’s credibility beyond its borders. The mullahs employed an array of propaganda tactics to portray Soleimani as a national hero and organized funeral ceremonies in different cities. By magnifying Soleimani’s loss, the regime’s intention was to cover up the killing of 1500 protesters in the November uprising and to solicit for international criticism of President Trump’s order to kill Soleimani. But the downing of the Ukrainian airliner by the IRGC’s missiles turned the tables against Iran. One more time, the world faced the lies of the regime in Tehran. The plane’s destruction became a source of internal disagreements between different factions of the regime.

Iran has not yet handed over the aircraft’s black box to the appropriate authorities. The deputy prime minister of Canada is calling for an independent inspection of the plane’s black box. On another front, as Iran has materialized its intentions of stepping away from the nuclear agreement and has taken its so-called fifth step, Europe had no choice but to activate the trigger mechanism embedded in the nuclear agreement. Europe seems to be becoming less cozy with Iran and getting closer to the U.S. approach to dealing with the regime, even though the European signatory countries of Britain, France and Germany are talking about drafting a new nuclear agreement with Iran.