https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=H_FIPO1Iv7U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KElidy8Luk4&t=326s
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14650/russia-turkey-iran-adversaries-nato
Germany’s outright rejection of Washington’s request [to support Washington’s proposal for a maritime protection force in the Arabian Gulf to protect shipping from attacks by Iran] is likely to inflame tensions further between Washington and Berlin. U.S. President Donald J. Trump is already at odds with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on a range of issues, from Germany’s obstinate refusal to meet its Nato funding commitments to its pursuit of closer energy ties with Russia through the construction of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
Mr Trump is highly critical of the project. He argues that it will make Europe, and especially Germany, too dependent on Moscow for its energy needs, which could undermine the resolve of the Nato alliance to take a robust stand against Moscow in any future confrontation.
So, at a time when the Western alliance is already struggling with how to respond to Turkey’s deepening military ties with Russia, Germany’s refusal to fulfil its obligations to protect shipping in the Gulf will be interpreted by adversaries of the West such as Moscow and Tehran as yet further evidence of what would doubtless please them very much: deepening divisions within the Western alliance.
Germany’s point-blank refusal to support Washington’s proposal for a maritime protection force in the Arabian Gulf to protect shipping from attacks by Iran is yet another example of Berlin’s diplomatic and economic sabotage of the Western alliance.
Following the recent upsurge in Iranian aggression in the all-important Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf shipping artery through which flows one-fifth of the world’s energy needs, Washington has sought international backing for Operation Sentinel, its naval operation to protect shipping in the region.
This search follows a series of Iranian attacks, including the shooting down of a US Navy drone operating in international waters in the Strait of Hormuz, as well as a number of attacks against merchant shipping, such as last month’s seizure of the British-registered oil tanker Stena Impero.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-seizes-vessel-in-persian-gulf-accused-of-smuggling-fuel-11564916008
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has seized a vessel accused of smuggling fuel and detained its crew, Iranian state television reported, in another case of Tehran interdicting ships in the volatile Persian Gulf.
The report on Sunday said the Guard’s Navy patrol forces seized the vessel, along with 700,000 liters of smuggled fuel and, in coordination with Iranian judicial authorities, impounded it near Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf.
Iranian state news agency IRNA reported that a video of the moment the vessel was interdicted showed it was Iraqi. Maritime confrontations between Iran and Iraq are considered rare. The Iraqi ship’s seizure would follow July’s visit to Tehran by Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who has sought to ease tensions between the U.S. and Iran, both close allies of Iraq.
The Iraqi Oil Ministry said it had no relation to the detained vessel. Spokesman Assem Jihad said the ministry was gathering information on the vessel, describing it as smaller than those that officially market its oil and products.
Gen. Ramezan Zirahi, a navy forces commander in the Guard, was quoted by Iran’s Fars News Agency as saying the fuel had been transferred to the vessel from another ship, and was bound for Arab countries in the region when it was stopped. The seven detained crew members were foreign, he said, without naming their nationality or that of the vessel.
The ship’s seizure took place last on Wednesday, Sepah News, the Revolutionary Guard’s official news service, reported, a day after United Arab Emirates officials traveled to Iran to discuss maritime border cooperation and the flow of shipping traffic, including illegal movements.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/456055-with-autocrats-on-defensive-us-has-opportunity
Moscow detains nearly 1,400 protesters after a bloody crackdown and returns its most prominent opposition figure to jail after what he suspects was a state-ordered poisoning that put him in the hospital. Beijing hints that it will send its army to quell protests against Hong Kong’s China-backed government.
For all their outward self-confidence, the governments of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping seem unusually unnerved by recent protests, perhaps reflecting unstated concerns that the protests could threaten both regimes.
That’s unlikely, but those governments would be wise to take nothing for granted. After all, no one knows what will trigger an uprising that’s large enough to topple a government, or a series of them. No one could have predicted the Soviet crack-up of three decades ago or the “Arab Spring” of more recent years, however much the populations in both places were itching for change.
Moreover, autocracies face new challenges to maintaining power. Modern communications – computers, mobile phones, social media – make it harder for autocracies to prevent their constituents from securing information from the outside and, in turn, comparing their plight with their brethren in freer and more democratic societies.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14631/un-christian-refugees
Jordan is supposed to be their transit country; they are seeking resettlement to other countries via the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Australian Special Humanitarian Program.
The registration with the UNHCR gives them the protective status of refugee as they await resettlement. Yet, the process of resettlement takes at minimum several months and sometimes even years due to the growing refugee backlog….. “The majority of those stuck in limbo have been waiting more than two years—some since the rise of ISIS in 2014,” according to the report.
“Since January, the process has become even slower and more difficult. The UNHCR has not even granted newcomers refugee status since. They just give them an appointment date, then they cancel the date and give them a new one. So we all keep waiting.” — Lorance Yousuf Kazqeea, a Christian originally from Baghdad, has been an asylum seeker in Jordan with his wife and two children since September 2017; to Gatestone Institute.
“You can contact the local UNHCR office in your country and demand answers – why Iraqi Christians have been waiting for resettlement for years and why the West continuously rejects them.” — Juliana Taimoorazy, founding president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, which has been active in Jordan since 2015; to Gatestone Institute.
Since the 2014 invasion and genocide by the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, at least 16,000 Assyrian Christians from Iraq have become refugees in Jordan. Most are still suffering economically and psychologically there, under extremely difficult circumstances.
These Assyrian Christians are in Jordan on a temporary basis with plans to emigrate to a third country. However, as they have not been given official work permits by the Jordanian government, they largely rely on their savings, remittances sent by relatives abroad or aid from charity organizations and churches. Jordan is supposed to be their transit country; they are seeking resettlement in other countries via the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Australian Special Humanitarian Program.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14649/iran-flog-dead-donkey
The Europeans pretend to be working on a magic potion that shall have the dead donkey up and running in no time. For their part, Tehran’s Khomeinist leaders insist that the donkey is alive and well but continue to pull off its legs one by one. The Russians and the Chinese serenade the dead donkey every now and then but are clearly not interested in whether it is dead or alive.
Trump may have done everyone a service by exposing the fraudulent nature of the JCPOA and seeking a fresh round of negotiations to address the totality of issues that have kept relations between Iran and the outside world in a state of crisis for the past four decades. The wisest course in the interest of all concerned is to bury the dead donkey and clear the deck for new initiatives on a solid legal basis.
The failure of the G7 summit to come up with a united and constructive stance on the “Iran problem” would encourage the mullahs to pursue policies that have done so much harm to Iran, indeed to the whole Middle East, in the past four decades.
Of all the futile things one could imagine, beating a dead donkey in the hope of forcing it to move on is the proverbial example. Right now, we are witnessing an example of that in the diplomatic gesticulations designed to maintain the so-called “Iran nuclear deal” on a life-support machine.
The Europeans pretend to be working on a magic potion that shall have the dead donkey up and running in no time. For their part, Tehran’s Khomeinist leaders insist that the donkey is alive and well but continue to pull off its legs one by one. The Russians and the Chinese serenade the dead donkey every now and then but are clearly not interested in whether it is dead or alive.
In theory, the “deal”, also known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was the fruit of collective efforts by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany on one side and Iran’s Khomeinist establishment on the other. However, in reality, it was a diabolical elixir that President Barack Obama concocted by using every dubious ingredient he could get hold of.
http://www.uklfi.com/dfid-ordered-to-disclose-audits-of-palestinian-
DFID ordered to disclose Audits of Palestinian Authority Funds used to pay Salaries to Terrorists
The Information Commissioner has ordered the Department for International Development (DFID) to disclose audit reports of accounts into which British grant aid was transferred and allegedly used to pay salaries to convicted Palestinian terrorists. The Commissioner has concluded that there is a significant public interest in the disclosure of the information.
This overturns the refusal of both the DFID and its internal reviewer to disclose these reports, following Freedom of Information requests made by UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) last year.
UKLFI submitted a Freedom of Information request to DFID for copies of audit reports for the Palestinian Recovery and Development Program (PRDP), a World Bank multi-donor trust fund (MDTF) for the Palestinian Authority (PA), along with the terms of reference for these audits.
In the period 2008 to 2015 Britain paid grant aid to the PA totalling £430.5 million, via the World Bank, untied and not earmarked, to the PA Central Treasury. Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) disclosed documents which showed that the PA pays over 8% of its total budget to fund salaries for convicted terrorists, which serve to reward and encourage terrorism. The funds to pay these salaries came out of the PA’s Central Treasury account.
UKLFI had noted that when questions about payments of salaries to terrorists were raised in Parliament, British Ministers had claimed that the payments were not salaries but welfare payments. However, the PMW material had shown that these claims were false. UKLFI demonstrated that British Ministers have repeated claims that the payments were for welfare long after the PMW reports showed that this was untrue.
HONG KONG (Reuters) – Hong Kong police fired multiple tear gas rounds on Saturday night in confrontations with black-clad activists in the city’s Kowloon area, as the Chinese-controlled territory was again rocked by anti-government protests.
Police had kept out of sight during the afternoon as tens of thousands of protesters marched through Mong Kok, usually a busy shopping district. But they charged onto the streets after 9 p.m. (1300 GMT), with hundreds of officers in riot gear pushing back crowds who jeered them.
At around midnight in Wong Tai Sin, a residential area, protesters hurled umbrellas and other objects at police, who responded with pepper spray and then tear gas.
Throughout the evening in Kowloon, police confronted protesters who retreated and regrouped. Some were detained.
Protests against a proposed bill allowing people to be extradited to stand trial in mainland China have grown increasingly violent since June, with police accused of excessive force and failing to protect protesters from suspected gang attacks.
On Saturday, protesters set fires in the streets, outside a police station and in rubbish bins, and blocked the entrance to the Cross-Harbour Tunnel, cutting a major artery linking Hong Kong island and the Kowloon peninsula.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14643/france-sinking-chaos
President Macron never says he is sorry for those who have lost an eye or a hand… from extreme police brutality. Instead, he asked the French parliament to pass a law that almost completely abolishes the right to protest and the presumption of innocence, and that allows the arrest of anyone, anywhere, even without cause. The law was passed.
In June, the French parliament passed another law, severely punishing anyone who says or writes something that might contain “hate speech”. The law is so vague that an American legal scholar, Jonathan Turley, felt compelled to react. “France”, he wrote, “has now become one of the biggest international threats to freedom of speech”.
The main concern of Macron and the French government seems not to be the risk of riots, the public’s discontent, the disappearance of Christianity, the disastrous economic situation, or Islamization and its consequences. Instead, it is climate change.
“The West no longer knows what it is, because it does not know and does not want to know what shaped it, what constituted it, what it was and what it is. (…) This self-asphyxiation leads naturally to a decadence that opens the way to new barbaric civilizations.” — Cardinal Robert Sarah, in Le soir approche et déjà le jour baisse (“The Evening Comes, and already the Light Darkens”).
Paris, Champs-Élysées. July 14. Bastille Day. Just before the military parade begins, President Emmanuel Macron comes down the avenue in an official car to greet the crowd. Thousands of people gathered along the avenue shout “Macron resign”, boo and hurl insults.
At the end of the parade, a few dozen people release yellow balloons into the sky and distribute leaflets saying “The yellow vests are not dead.” The police disperse them, quickly and firmly. Moments later, hundreds of “Antifa” anarchists arrive, throw security barriers on the roadway to erect barricades, start fires and smash the storefronts of several shops. The police have a rough time mastering the situation, but early in the evening, after a few hours, they restore the calm.
A few hours later, thousands of young Arabs from the suburbs gather near the Arc de Triomphe. They have apparently come to “celebrate” in their own way the victory of an Algerian soccer team. More storefronts are smashed, more shops looted. Algerian flags are everywhere. Slogans are belted out: “Long live Algeria”, “France is ours”, “Death to France”. Signs bearing street names are replaced by signs bearing the name of Abd El Kader, the religious and military leader who fought against the French army at the time of the colonization of Algeria. The police limit themselves to stemming the violence in the hope that it will not spread.
