RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15504/boris-johnson-china-huawei

Mr Johnson would be well-advised to heed Mr Pompeo’s advice and reconsider allowing Huawei access to Britain’s telecoms systems, irrespective of the restrictions the British authorities claim they will impose on the firm’s access to sensitive installations.

In an age when the foremost challenge of the Western democracies is to defend their interests against Beijing’s long-term goal of achieving global dominance, it is vital that they present a united front against the Chinese threat.

Mr Johnson needs to understand that Britain’s interests are best served by maintaining strong ties with Washington, rather than by indulging in dubious business deals with Beijing.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to allow the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei access to Britain’s new 5G network has placed unnecessary strain on the transatlantic alliance at a time when it needs to show a united front against Beijing’s global ambitions.

Mr Johnson’s decision to allow Huawei to build parts of the 5G network has been taken in the face of fierce opposition from the Trump administration, which regards the Chinese company a security risk because of its historic links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15362/china-atrocities-muslims

The detainees, from the province of Xinjiang, are treated to a strict “re-education” program that includes what one escapee described as horrific physical abuse, including forced organ removal, abortions and medical “experiments.”

The release of the documents is personally embarrassing for President Xi Jinping, who has been trying to portray himself internationally as a benign and moderate statesman.

Muslim-majority states may now more than ever view China’s Communist regime as an enemy of Islam — just as it is an enemy of the West.

Leaked documents obtained by the New York Times reveal Chinese President Xi Jinping’s directives to round up and incarcerate the one million or so Muslims — Uighurs, Kazakhs and others — in detention centers. The detainees, from the province of Xinjiang, are treated to a strict “re-education” program that includes what one escapee described as horrific physical abuse, such as forced organ removal, abortions and medical “experiments.”

These camps are part of what the New York Times calls “the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era.”

President Xi claims that the purpose of these camps is to protect the country from Islamic radicalism. This excuse for the mass detention of Muslims seems to stem from the fact that an estimated 4,000 volunteers from Central Asian countries joined ISIS.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15500/arabian-gulf-citizens-israel

Whenever there is any hope of good relations with Israel, Qatar tries to embarrass Saudi Arabia by mentioning that the kingdom is the keeper of the Two Holy Mosques. Conversely, when Saudi Arabia says something negative about Israel, such as that Israelis may not visit the kingdom, Qatar quickly publishes it in English to show Westerners how intolerant Saudi Arabia is.

Disappointingly, the Western mainstream media is no different from the Arab Gulf media in weakening the position of pro-peace advocates in the Arab Gulf countries.

Members of the mainstream media seem, in fact, to have an interest in perpetuating conflict, perhaps as more newsworthy, telegenic or enticing to advertisers. Members of the mainstream media also seem, wrongly, to regard anti-Semitic advocates of political Islam as representative of “moderate” Islam. Worse, they actually appear to be against anyone who is promoting peace.

The worldwide lack of support for those who advocate peace or the reform of Islam has brought about exactly what the extremists want: a fear of speaking up. Many of us Muslims do not want to be viewed as traitors, labelled “enemies of the nation”… and have our lives put under threat…

The views of Gulf Arabs towards Israel have been marginalized by a lack of support from both the Arab and Western media, indicating a need for greater emphasis on “digital diplomacy” from the public… and “normalization”….

Since General Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was killed by an American airstrike, it has become even clearer that the Middle East is divided. We find some here were supportive of the strike that rescued the world from a most dangerous terrorist; others were completely outraged. Is the Middle East, then, on the verge of new alliances and further fragmentation?

The reactions of the Arab Gulf countries, including their citizens — especially Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain — are the same as Israel’s. Other Arab countries and the Palestinian territories — mainly Hamas, which is a client of Iran — have responded quite differently.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/28/as-china-carries-disease-elites-carry-their-water/

The World Health Organization is a case study of how the Chinese Communist Party infects supposedly apolitical institutions. But it doesn’t end there.

Two dangerous infectious agents are emerging from China. One is the coronavirus. The other is the Chinese Communist Party.

Just as a virus infects the cellular mechanics of healthy organisms to make replicas of itself, the CCP hijacks independent organizations and institutions and reprograms them to serve its ideology.

It is no exaggeration to blame the party for the spread of the contagion.

The novel coronavirus is believed to have infected the first patients in Wuhan, China in mid-December. But Chinese officials did not report the mystery virus to the World Health Organization until December 31. By that time, 5 million potential disease carriers had left the city for the Lunar New Year holiday.

In every important way, local officials were slow to respond in the first crucial days because they didn’t want to get sideways with higher-ups. The mayor of Wuhan said he had to wait for orders from Beijing before he could do anything.

But local officials if slow to respond to the crisis did respond quickly in arresting those who talked about the infection for “publishing or forwarding false information on the internet without verification.”

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/boris-johnson-scrambles-to-rescue-points-based-immigration-pledge-after-experts-reject-it-as-a-soundbite/ar-BBZpj7U

A blueprint for cutting immigration after Brexit has been branded “a disaster” by social care leaders and has left Boris Johnson’s promise of a points-based system in tatters.

Downing Street is scrambling to rescue the prime minister’s high-profile pledge to adopt an Australian-style system after it was rejected by the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) – which called it “a soundbite”.

The implementation of such a system – based on factors such as age, qualifications and previous study in the UK – risked repeating past “mistakes” and should be introduced for highly skilled migrants only, the MAC said.

Instead, it called for a minimum salary threshold for most workers offered a job – a system Mr Johnson sought to scrap – but set at £25,600 instead of the £30,000 proposed under Theresa May’s premiership.

https://www.asiatimes.com/2020/01/article/huawei-fortinbras-and-xi-jinping/

TS Eliot’s summary judgment on Shakespeare’s Hamlet – “So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure” – brands the Nobel laureate as a ninny. Eliot propounded a cramped, Aristotelian, pettifogging, aestheticizing view of art, and crouched tight-jawed and squinty-eyed before Shakespeare’s sprawling genius. Hamlet is both a tragedy – a national tragedy as well as a personal one – and a sprawling comic romp. It is a tragicomedy in the mold of the first great dramatic work of the modern period, de Rojas’ 1499 play Celestina.

Hamlet is also a play for our times, an object lesson for the United States and a solemn warning to us all. 

Here is the plot of Hamlet in a nutshell: The soldiers who meet the Ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father on the ramparts of Elsinore Castle were not posted there by accident: As they explain in the play’s opening lines, the King of Norway, young Fortinbras, will invade Denmark soon, and they are set as lookouts. The Ghost comes along and distracts them and young Hamlet, and the dramatis personae engage in various machinations until, at the end, all of them lay dead on the stage. Just as Hamlet expires, who should enter but Fortinbras, who asks: “Who’s in charge here? Uh, everybody’s dead. I guess I am.”

Shakespeare’s audience doubtless rolled in the aisles. Fortinbras, the play’s shadow protagonist, typically is cut from modern productions (for example, the 1948 Laurence Olivier film version), which makes the rest of the action meaningless. Such is the atrophy of the modern sense of humor.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-stronger-germany-could-save-europe-11580169200?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Hamburg

It’s time for Berlin to take a more assertive stance in world affairs—that’s the opinion of German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer is the heir apparent to Chancellor Angela Merkel and replaced her in 2018 as party chairman for the Christian Democratic Union. This soft-spoken woman, known as AKK, told me her views on Germany’s position in world politics in an interview here last week and a follow-up exchange of emails.

Germany, and for that matter Europe, can no longer go on in the old way, she said. In a new international reality marked by the “return of great-power competition for spheres of influence and supremacy,” Germany “cannot just wait for others to act. . . . We must develop our own concepts, present our own options. . . . It is our duty as Germans, and it is very much in our own interest, to join in these international debates, to drive them forward, to play a part in protecting the international order.”

Since becoming defense minister last summer, AKK has been making waves, most notably when she delivered a speech in Munich last fall that called on Germany to raise military spending gradually to 2% of gross domestic product and urged Germans to consider deployments as far afield as the Sahel and the Indo-Pacific. Germany already has about 1,000 troops in Mali as part of the United Nations peacekeeping mission there.

In the cautious world of German foreign policy, these are radical ideas. After the terrible experiences of the 20th century, many Germans reject power politics. With the fall of the Soviet Union and German unification at the end of the Cold War, most Germans shared the American feeling that history had ended. Germany slashed military spending and focused on issues such as human rights and climate change. Many also believed that the European Union, with its massive consumer market and values-driven approach, would emerge as a major power in a peaceful and rule-driven world.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/classified-report-reveals-150-islamist-no-go-zones-daniel-greenfield/

Five years ago, Mayor Anne Hidalgo, the socialist boss of Paris, threatened to sue FOX News for reporting on the existence of no-go zones: territories in France under Islamist control.

“When we’re insulted, and when we’ve had an image, then I think we’ll have to sue, I think we’ll have to go to court, in order to have these words removed,” she told CNN.

There was no lawsuit, but FOX News issued repeated apologies, with hosts “correcting” experts like Steve Emerson and Jessie Jane Duff who actually knew what they were talking about.

Two years later, Pamela Geller came under attack from the media for discussing French no-go zones.

The media had mocked Emerson and Geller as Americans who didn’t know anything about France.

But the wall of silence on no-go zones has been coming down. And it is indeed a wall of silence. The existence of a classified report by the General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI) identifying 150 areas in France under Islamist control has leaked. That leak comes just as the DGSI busted 7 Muslims for plotting a terrorist attack. The perpetrators were just another of the 400,000 on the Fiche S watch list.

These 150 neighborhoods that are held by Islamists not only overlap many of the territories that had been previously listed as no-go zones, but point to a problem that has is expanding across France. Beyond the suburbs of Paris, Lyon and Marseille, the report identifies areas of concern in Maubeuge, Roubaix, Denain, Haute-Savoie, Annemasse, Bourg-en-Bresse, Bourgoin-Jallieu, and Nogent-le-Rotrou.

Why did a report listing the existence of 150 no-go zones have to be classified? The inciting incident behind the secret report was a mass stabbing by a Muslim terrorist in early January. While the media insisted, once again, that the terrorist, who had shouted, “Allahu Akbar”, was suffering from mental illness, behind the scenes the wheels had begun to turn leading to the creation of the secret report.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/chilly-winter-norway-bruce-bawer/

Once upon a time, Norway’s Progress Party was anti-establishment. Founded in 1973, it stood for individual liberty, lower taxes, and fewer regulations in a country whose postwar welfare state had been built on collectivism, high taxes, and ubiquitous government intrusion into every aspect of life. In later decades, as the perils of mass Muslim immigration became more and more obvious, only the Progress Party opposed the nation’s self-destructive policies on this front. Some Progress Party politicians even said that if handed power, they’d seek to end the state monopoly on liquor sales and to privatize NRK, the taxpayer-funded government broadcaster and Labor Party propaganda organ.

For years, establishment parties and mainstream media dishonestly painted the Progress Party as a bunch of far-right Islamophobes; but for a growing number of Norwegians who were unimpressed with the twin faiths of statism and Islam, it stood for freedom and competition, law and order, and common sense about the Religion of Peace.

In September 2013, the day of which Progress Party voters had dreamed finally arrived: a general election swept the Progress Party into the government for the first time, as the junior partner in a coalition with the Conservatives. While Conservative leader Erna Solberg became Prime Minister, Siv Jensen, head of the Progress Party, was named Minister of Justice. Writing at this website shortly thereafter, I discussed a recently published anthology about Norwegian society and politics that contained essays by both women. Solberg’s “toothless” essay, I wrote, painted an absurd, PC picture of “innocent Muslims being denied social acceptance by bigoted Norwegians”; Jensen’s, by contrast, was “a call to arms” in which she “tackle[d] head-on the Muslim leaders in Norway who spread conspiracies about Jews and who refuse to reject the death penalty for gays.” I called Jensen Norway’s “Iron Lady.”