RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15036/erdogan-plan-annihilation-kurds

As the Voice of America itself reported on January 23, Erdogan’s plan was to resettle three million or more refugees from other parts of Syria in this “security zone” extending twenty miles deep into Syria. Twenty miles may not sound much, but – the VOA omitted to mention – almost all the Kurdish towns of northeastern Syria lie within that area. So Erdogan’s intention to annihilate the Kurdish presence in that area and replace it with others has been manifest ever since the beginning of 2019.

A whole series of Trump’s Republican supporters in the Senate expressed outrage over his decision, starting with Lindsey Graham (“Pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump Administration”) and continuing with Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who remarked: “As we learned the hard way during the Obama Administration, American interests are best served by American leadership, not by retreat or withdrawal.”

It is now clear that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan intended the annihilation of the Syrian Kurds already two years ago. Moreover, his plans became evident to the US military by the beginning of 2019 and were conveyed to President Trump at that time.

In order to disguise his plans, Erdogan revealed them stage by stage, by making first lesser and then greater demands on the US military, to which Trump agreed — sometimes in the course of telephone conversations with Erdogan. So Erdogan was able to hoodwink the US military up to January 2019 and to hoodwink Trump up to the current invasion: Trump resolutely defied contrary advice from the military (and from everyone else).

At first, Erdogan demanded the removal of Kurdish militias only west of the Euphrates river. This was the proclaimed aim of his so-called Operations Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch (the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Kurds from the Afrin area). With that accomplished, he began demanding a Turkish-controlled “security zone” east of the river, to be 32 kilometers deep. The US responded by agreeing to joint US-Turkish patrols in the area. Erdogan demanded that the Kurdish towns in the area should dismantle the fortifications that they had raised to defend themselves from the Islamic State (ISIS). The Kurds agreed, reassured by the US military that this step would remove any excuse for a Turkish invasion.

Finally, in October 2019, Erdogan asked Trump in a further telephone call to remove US troops from the patrols and Trump agreed, believing that by threatening Turkey on Twitter, he could deter a Turkish invasion. The invasion started forthwith. It has been stalled, maybe, now that the Kurds have invited the army of the Assad regime to deploy throughout northeastern Syria up to the Iraqi frontier. If so, the beneficiaries will include Iran, America’s arch enemy, which can now see its yearned-for highway all the way from Tehran to Quneitra on Israel’s border.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15034/syria-kurds-turkey-russia-iran

The U.S. Congress is looking to push back against Erdogan’s brazen foray into northeastern Syria. For months, there has been a bi-partisan effort on Capitol Hill to convince the Trump administration to implement sanctions on Turkey in the wake of its purchase of the Russian S-400 missile system. The events of this past week will likely only escalate pressure by Congress against the Erdogan regime.

“We defeated ISIS,” a Peshmerga general said, “only to see Iran and its Shia militias become stronger. They are filling the vacuum.”

Islamist-led Turkey has now joined those same Iranian-led forces in filling that vacuum — with the full acquiescence of the United States.

On the Iran-Iraq border a few weeks ago, I found myself just a few hundred meters from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), standard bearers of a regime that has practically copyrighted the phrases, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

At the Kurdish Peshmerga military base stood a series of small, white structures spread out across the mountaintops on the Iranian side of the border.

“IRGC observation posts,” said one of my Kurdish hosts, eying the mountains warily.

The Pershmerga generals interviewed in Iraqi Kurdistan seemed eager to talk about the threat posed by the IRGC and the Iranian regime—not only to the Kurds, Israel and the broader Middle East, but also to the United States.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hong-kong-crackdown-has-begun-11571180182

Hong Kong

The Chinese crackdown here is under way. Tanks haven’t rolled into Hong Kong à la Tiananmen Square in 1989. But Beijing is carrying out a subtler, though often still violent, effort to suppress dissent, hoping the world won’t notice. Ask Stanley Ho Wai-hong of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions.

The 35-year-old pro-democracy labor activist planned a community event Sept. 29 in Sai Kung, a fishing village in Hong Kong’s New Territories. But that afternoon, tens of thousands were rallying in the city against China’s human-rights abuses, so Mr. Ho canceled his event at the last minute. He was driving away when a stranger called him and asked him to come back so villagers could give him a gift. “It was a trap for murder,” he told me at the hospital earlier this month.

When he arrived back in Sai Kung, he says, three men ambushed him and bludgeoned him with metal rods. Mr. Ho fell to the ground and tried to cover his skull with his hands. It took only half a minute for bystanders to rescue him, but “30 seconds is a long time.” The attack left Mr. Ho with seven gashes in his head and five bruises on his back. His right thumb and three other fingers were broken, the left index finger so severely that he needed surgery.

Other pro-democracy figures have been the targets of criminal violence, including lawmakers Lam Cheuk-ting and Kwong Chun-yu; an unnamed reporter for the Apple Daily news paper; Davin Wong, a student activist who was acting president of the Hong Kong University Students’ Union; and Jimmy Sham, convenor of the Civil Human Rights Front, which organized several protests with a million or more participants in Hong Kong this summer. The home of Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai was firebombed in September, and posters hung up in the metro system recently advertised his personal phone number as well as those of his children. Plainclothes thugs have also beaten up protesters, most famously in Yuen Long district in July, where some 45 were injured. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kim-jong-un-astride-a-pale-horse-urges-self-reliance-in-face-of-u-s-sanctions-11571209808?cx_testId=30&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

SEOUL—North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, riding a white horse, galloped to the top of the country’s tallest mountain and delivered a blunt message aimed at the U.S.: his people’s pain has “turned into their anger.”

Mr. Kim blamed his country’s hardships on “ceaseless sanctions” and pressure from U.S.-led forces hostile against the North, according to a Wednesday report in state media. The North Korean leader has been calling for the country to be more self reliant while sanctions batter the cash-strapped regime’s economy.

“We should neither want help from anyone nor lend an ear to any temptation,” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying. “We should choose the prosperity based on our own efforts.”

Mr. Kim’s comments suggest Pyongyang’s hardened stance on nuclear talks with Washington isn’t softening. Working-level negotiations broke off earlier this month in Sweden. The Kim regime has since threatened to end diplomacy unless Washington takes a substantial step toward Pyongyang’s position before the end of the year.

The State Department offered a different account of the Oct. 5 meeting held by Stephen Biegun, the U.S. special representative on North Korea, and the chief North Korean negotiator, Kim Myong Gil. The U.S. said it had brought “creative ideas” and hoped talks would pick back up within two weeks.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/10/an-afternoon-with-anne-marie-waters/

“The charge against the For Britain founder is that she is ‘a racist’. The evidence for this, according to those on the Left who seek to gag her, is a relentlessly articulated and witheringly explicit analysis of the harm Islam has done to every aspect of British life.”

I wanted the restaurant to be English in character but I discovered that in Spitalfield that meant spare and pricey and not oak and hearty so I settled on Dilchad, in Widegate Street. It was Bengali so there would be plenty of vegetarian (even if it, too, would be halal-certified) and when I went in at eleven o’clock to look over the wine list and book the table in the window corner, the young fellow in charge was polite and it looked safe and so I wandered back down Bishopsgate to St Botolph’s, the church where Keats had been baptised, the one the IRA had bombed in 1993, and sat in the pews and thought about what I would say to her and whether it would be awkward and, if it were, whether I could manage that kind of situation satisfactorily. She had, after all, been very generous in the way she had answered an unsolicited request from a retired Australian judge to meet her.

A wise woman buildeth up her own house.
—Proverbs 14:1

It was a Friday and Anne Marie had asked that we meet near Liverpool Street station. I had never been to that part of the East End but after arriving from Australia on the Wednesday it was already clear to me that since my last visit in 2011 London’s decline had been in free-fall and this part of it was no different. As I walked about that district and watched the sub-continental fellaheen shambling down the streets and through the monuments and relics of this most ancient ward of the capital, the expletive-laden chatter of young Threadneedle Street bankers managed to make itself heard over the din of the buses and the mini-cabs. I remembered that the City had been—it still was—the Remainers’ redoubt. I also remembered that London wasn’t all that Britain was.

But, still, this wasn’t good. Pubs were harder to find. I found out why. I talked to the owners who have kept theirs open and also to the odd brave patron. They had signs on the door and at the bar telling people not to proselytise their customers about drinking alcohol. The signs are not directed at the Salvation Army, let me tell you.

Back in Australia, I had thought that the chaos and indignity of Mrs May’s premiership might be enough for the British people to refuse to cop it sweet from their elites any longer. After such national humiliation, politics surely could not merely remain “downstream” from culture (as everybody says some deceased young media tycoon once said). Cultural imperatives would assert their former primacy in political life. They had to, I thought. If they didn’t, Britain would not survive. These things concern me deeply because I am British and because I love my country as much as I do the nation it founded on the other side of the earth.

Tweet from Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Tweeted:

After defeating 100% of the ISIS Caliphate, I largely moved our troops out of Syria. Let Syria and Assad protect the Kurds and fight Turkey for their own land. I said to my Generals, why should we be fighting for Syria…. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1183822488192671745?s=17

Tweet from Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Tweeted:

….and Assad to protect the land of our enemy? Anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte. I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles
away! https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1183822494031065088?s=17

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15019/france-terrorism-denial

This latest attack also demonstrates how inadequately prepared France is to tackle the problem. The murderer was not just any civil servant: his security clearance allowed him to have access to sensitive files such as the personal details of police officers and individuals monitored by the department, including several individuals suspected of terrorism.

Beyond the political sphere, there is also a culture a denial of the Islamist threat in the French media. Journalists, academics and politicians, with a few exceptions, have consistently played down not only the risk of terrorist attacks but also the threat of growing Salafist radicalization in the country.

According to a study by the Montaigne Institute, 29% of Muslims in France believe that Sharia law is more important than French law. This means that almost one-third of French Muslims live according to values that are fundamentally incompatible with French or Western standards.

It is important to note that theses quotes are not from right-wing thinkers or activists. Both François Hollande and Gerard Collomb were long-time eminent figures of the Socialist Party.

These are typical examples of what some call “la démission des élites” (the abdication of the elites): refusing to act on a situation of which they are perfectly aware but afraid to mention because of the dominant ideology of political correctness.

On October 3, 2019, a knife-wielding Muslim employee of the Paris Police Department Intelligence Directorate stabbed to death four other employees at police headquarters in the center of Paris, before a trainee police officer shot and killed him. While it was not the deadliest terror attack France has experienced in recent years, the fatal stabbings that took place at the Paris police headquarters were perhaps the most worrisome. Its author (a French public servant employed by the police), its highly sensitive target, and the catastrophic handling of the aftermath of the attack reveal the failure of the French institutions.

As it was the case for all recent terror attacks, French media and authorities first tried to downplay what happened. The attacker was initially described through potentially mitigating factors, such as his handicap (the killer is partly deaf and mute). It took 24 hours before it was eventually revealed that he was an Islamist militant who had carefully planned his attack.

That a radicalized militant had been able to remain undetected in a critical security institution for years sent shockwaves throughout the country. Members of the parliamentary opposition asked for the resignation of Home Affairs Minister Christophe Castaner, who at first had said that the attacker “had never shown any warning signs or behavioral difficulties.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/failure-of-socialism-israel-india-united-kingdom-adopted-free-market-policies-and-prospered/

Israel, India, and the United Kingdom each lifted itself from economic stagnation by switching to free-market policies.

Socialists are fond of saying that socialism has never failed because it has never been tried. But in truth, socialism has failed in every country in which it has been tried, from the Soviet Union beginning a century ago to three modern countries that tried but ultimately rejected socialism — Israel, India, and the United Kingdom.

While there were major political differences between the totalitarian rule of the Soviets and the democratic politics of Israel, India, and the U.K., all three of the latter countries adhered to socialist principles, nationalizing their major industries and placing economic decision-making in the hands of the government.

The Soviet failure has been well documented by historians. In 1985, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev took command of a bankrupt disintegrating empire. After 70 years of Marxism, Soviet farms were unable to feed the people, factories failed to meet their quotas, people lined up for blocks in Moscow and other cities to buy bread and other necessities, and a war in Afghanistan dragged on with no end in sight of the body bags of young Soviet soldiers.

The economies of the Communist nations behind the Iron Curtain were similarly enfeebled because they functioned in large measure as colonies of the Soviet Union. With no incentives to compete or modernize, the industrial sector of Eastern and Central Europe became a monument to bureaucratic inefficiency and waste, a “museum of the early industrial age.” As the New York Times pointed out at the time, Singapore, an Asian city-state of only 2 million people, exported 20 percent more machinery to the West in 1987 than all of Eastern Europe.

https://spectator.org/the-syrian-kurds-are-not-americas-problem/

All of Washington has been atwitter with the president’s recent decision to draw down American forces from their ongoing mission in Syria. The reason is the purported American abandonment — betrayal, in the eyes of many — of the Syrian Kurds. But the situation is more complicated than that. There has been much conflation of both the American mission in Syria and the disposition of America’s erstwhile Kurdish friends.

The fact is, despite being the world’s largest stateless ethnic population, sharing a contiguous landmass that cuts across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran — roughly a 500,000-square-kilometer area — the Kurds are by no means a monolithic entity. What’s more, the United States government has never officially endorsed the concept of a Kurdish state in the Middle East.

Don’t let those facts stop the experts from trotting out many falsehoods and half-truths about the messy situation that is Syria, though. Obviously, the Kurds who have been fighting alongside Americans throughout the entirety of America’s three-decade-long series of Middle East conflicts should be rewarded for their courage. It is utterly confounding, however, that the same “serious” foreign-policy “thinkers” in Washington and media who continually lambaste President Trump for his supposedly destabilizing actions in the Middle East are also in favor of massively destabilizing the region to midwife the birth of an independent, Kurdish state.

The rejiggering of the Middle East map would require more than the paltry American force currently fighting alongside the Kurds of northern Syria. It not only would require the United States to understand the various tribal and regional dynamics between the numerous Kurdish communities throughout the Mideast but would also mean that any potential Kurdish state would have to be cleaved from Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. This could never be achieved peacefully. It would entail some degree of violence and inevitably invoke ethno-religious tribal backlash against the United States at precisely the moment America does not need that headache.

Further, what critics do not understand is that the Kurds have been rewarded for their loyalty to the United States. They also confuse the Marxist elements of northern Syria’s Kurds with the pro-American Peshmerga of northern Iraq.

Here’s Why Everyone Is Upset About the Kurds