RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14936/huawei-china-trojan-horse

A refusal to grant a third waiver to Huawei, the world’s largest telecom networking equipment manufacturer and second-largest smartphone maker, would be the right move for the United States. After all, why should President Trump allow our companies to help Beijing steal the world’s data and remotely control devices connected to the internet?

On Tuesday, China’s Communist Party will celebrate the 70th anniversary of its coming to power. This is not a happy time for the communists, however, as their economy, the primary basis of their legitimacy, is crumbling.

In addition, the thought of licensing technology from Huawei is nothing short of hideous. The Chinese company, founded in 1987, was built on stolen Cisco Systems technology, and from all indications has never stopped stealing. Why should we pay China for tech it criminally took — and is still taking — from us?

Unfortunately, these two companies [ZTE and Huawei] despite Trump’s reprieves, have continued to engage in unacceptable behavior. ZTE has almost certainly violated its settlement agreement with the U.S, by installing Dell equipment in Venezuela, and Huawei is currently under investigation for additional instances of intellectual property theft. It is, therefore, time to impose “death sentences” on the pair of Chinese giants, in other words, cut both of them off from U.S. technology.

More fundamentally, why should we have any contact with Huawei? Trump’s instincts are to cut off all dealings. “We are not going to do business with Huawei,” the president said on August 9, “It’s much simpler not doing any business with Huawei.”

So, let’s not do business with Huawei.

“For China, trade with the United States is viewed as a bonanza to acquire — steal — American technology and bilk our people out of hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. Any compromise with Beijing would, in the long-run, be to America’s disadvantage.” — Brandon Weichert, tech expert, publisher of The Weichert Report.

We did not win the Cold War by enriching the Soviet Union. We should not try to enrich China now.

Rob Strayer, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Cyber and International Communications Policy, told reporters in Brussels on September 26 that the Trump administration is unlikely to grant another 90-day blanket waiver for transactions with China’s Huawei Technologies.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14934/turkey-ban-armenian-chess-champion

The tournament that three-time Armenian chess champion, Maria Gevorgyan, was invited to attend — and from which her invitation was subsequently withdrawn — was the 2019 Sivas Buruciye Chess Open, which was held August 19-24.

In a letter of complaint to the Lausanne, Switzerland-based International Chess Federation (FIDE), MP Mkhitar Hayrapetyan… demanded that FIDE take action…. The investigation is still ongoing.

The solution to the persecution of Armenians in Turkey and Azerbaijan lies in the victory of critical thinking and human rights over dogma and political corruption in those countries.

For there to be a chance of this happening, however, Turkey and Azerbaijan should be governed not by dictatorships that spread hate-filled propaganda, but by people who participate in a true democracy with equal human rights for all.

The banning of three-time Armenian chess champion, Maria Gevorgyan, from an international tournament in Turkey — due to pressure by the Azerbaijani delegation — highlights the discrimination and persecution that Armenians continue suffer in Turkey and Azerbaijan.

The tournament that Gevorgyan was invited to attend — and from which her invitation was subsequently withdrawn — was the 2019 Sivas Buruciye Chess Open, which was held August 19-24.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/30/antifa-goons-block-and-harass-elderly-couple-attending-conservative-event-in-canada/

A protest outside of a free speech event at a college in Ontario, Canada turned violent Sunday evening as far left demonstrators blocked and harassed supporters trying to enter the building.

The event at Hamilton’s Mohawk College featured People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier and American political commentator David Rubin.

Masked agitators waved signs that read “White supremacy is terrorism” and “Refugees welcome here,” and chanted  “Nazi scum, off our streets” as attendees tried to enter the building.

According to a Rebel Media reporter on the scene, antifa members blocked the path of the attendees, shoved their middle fingers in their faces and pulled the hats off their heads.

Things turned positively surreal when a group of antifa agitators got in the faces of an elderly couple as they made their way across the street toward the entrance of building.

“Nazi scum, off our streets!” the antifa thugs screeched at the little old lady hunched over a walker. Three masked agitators moved in so close to the couple, they touched the frail woman’s walker. At that point, one of the goons screamed something and pointed an accusatory finger in the old man’s face as he tried to stand up for his wife.

Four protesters were briefly detained after assaulting conservative attendees, but they were quickly released without charges, according to Portland-based journalist Andy Ngo.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/30/american-b

America’s two parties have given up all pretense of pushing any program for the rest of the current president’s term (which still has over 30% of its length to run).

Forget about another round of growth-driving tax cuts, immigration reform, infrastructure, fixing the health care system, a common trade policy. Anything the American people might like to see.

The only objective on one side: impeachment. On the other: simple survival.

In the UK, the political system is similarly paralyzed. The government is seeking to achieve the people’s will on Brexit on reasonable terms — or even any terms at all. But rogue members of the ruling Conservative Party have voted to ensure it can’t leave the European Union without a deal, which means it has lost its negotiating leverage to achieve such a deal. Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to appeal to the people through a new election. But party rebels have scotched that path forward as well.

In Israel, neither of two major alliances won enough seats in this month’s election to cobble together a majority, and voices across the political spectrum are calling for a so-called “unity government.” But one side won’t join a coalition that includes Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces indictment on corruption charges. The prime minister’s party won’t form a government without him. A potential kingmaker (who forced the second election in a year) says he won’t sit with the prime minister’s party, either, unless it deep-sixes its Orthodox Jewish coalition partners, which the bloc refuses to do.

In short, the world’s three most important democracies, all rendered ungovernable.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-foreign-influence-is-on-the-rise-11569885340

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” George Washington warned in his Farewell Address, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” Those words have rarely seemed more relevant than now, when both the president and the front-runner for the nomination to challenge him are embroiled in a scandal that began with attempts by Ukrainian figures to manipulate Washington politics and policy.

The Ukrainian firestorm is only the start. America and the world are changing in ways that will make the question of foreign influence in U.S. political life more fateful, and more difficult to police, than ever.

This isn’t about Facebook ads and voting machines. It is not even about more blatant forms of foreign meddling, like the alleged Russian leaks of damaging information stolen from the Democratic National Committee. Serious as these problems are, America’s greatest risk isn’t the vulnerability of its voting machines to foreign hackers or the susceptibility of party apparatchiks to phishing scams. It is the erosion of ethical standards in the American political and business establishments that most exposes the U.S. to the kind of foreign interference against which Washington warned.

This isn’t a partisan problem. Some members of the administration, including the tweeter in chief, have behaved in ways that earlier American presidents would have condemned, but they are hardly alone. The Clinton Foundation was perceived by many of its foreign donors to be a way to influence American politics during the years in which Hillary Clinton was a likely future president. And hardly anyone believes it was Hunter Biden’s experience, sagacity and business acumen that commended him as a candidate for board membership to a beleaguered Ukrainian gas company.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/no-the-president-of-poland-didnt-say-that-jews-cause-anti-semitism/

In late June of 1941, my father’s first cousins Moshe and Dvora fled their house in the tiny town of Kameny Most, about halfway between Slonim and Baranavichy in what is now Belarus. Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa days before, and their home stood almost on the German-Soviet line that had divided Poland in 1939. Now the Germans had marched into town. The boy and girl, then 15 and 16, reached the woods behind their house before the Germans arrived. Their parents and baby brother fled a minute later, but the Germans already were there. They couldn’t reach the woods and hid in the tall grass. A Polish neighbor pointed them out to the Germans, who shot them on the spot. Moshe and Dvora joined the partisan brigade led by the Bielski brothers, made famous in the film Defiance. Not long afterwards they returned at night, barricaded the neighbor in his house, set it afire and burned him alive. By the grace of God the teenagers survived the war and came to the new State of Israel and started large and flourishing families. I had the merit to arrive at Dvora’s deathbed in 2004 just in time to receive her blessing upon the American branch of her family.

I tell this story to make it clear that my family isn’t soft on Polish anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is a matter of the most profound importance, and Polish anti-Semitism is something I take personally. That is why it is especially irresponsible to accuse Poles of anti-Semitism falsely, as the Jewish Insider website yesterday accused Polish President Andrzej Duda. According to the website, President Duda told a group of Jewish community leaders assembled at the Polish Consulate in New York that hostile remarks by an Israeli cabinet minister about Polish anti-Semitism “were a ‘humiliation’ and were the reason for an increase in antisemitic attacks against Jews in Poland.” It is wrong to cry wolf under any circumstances, and reckless to cry wolf where real wolves might turn up.

President Duda never said it. I know he never said it because I was at the meeting.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/09/29/often-centuries-europe-blowing/

Last week I wrote about political uncertainty as the new normal for the economy and financial markets. It seems that there is a growing body of opinion at the Bank of England that agrees.

In a speech, Michael Saunders, an external member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, said that UK interest rates may need to fall further regardless of what happens over Brexit, such is the likely seemingly never-ending uncertainty created by its political fallout.

This runs contrary to the official line, which is that even in the event of a no deal Brexit, interest rates may have to rise to deal with the inflationary consequences of any shock to output capacity.

Very few people believe this is actually what would happen in practice, and now along comes Mr Saunders to say, indeed; the economy is already slowing precipitously, so we may need to cut whatever happens over Brexit.

I’ve given up trying to figure out where we’ll end up on this journey. Almost any prediction is rendered redundant within a few hours by the unfathomable politics of the UK’s predicament.

Last week’s Supreme Court judgement seems to make the chances of a deal, already quite slim, vanishingly improbable.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14937/iran-europe-diplomacy

The reality of the delusional approach adopted by Mr Macron and other European leaders was, though, brutally exposed the moment Mr Rouhani arrived in New York. Instead of showing any sign of seeking to repair Tehran’s strained relationship with the West and its allies, he instead indulged in an orgy of self-justification in which he sought to portray his country as an innocent victim of Western aggression rather than accepting, as is really the case, that Iran was the primary instigator of the latest escalation in tensions.

“The security of our region shall be provided when American troops pull out.” — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, UN General Assembly, September 25, 2019.

This will have made for uncomfortable listening for all those European leaders who still believe that the best way to resolve the global crisis with Iran is by trying to save the nuclear deal.

The reality is that, so long as Tehran remains committed to its hostile stance towards the West, there is little prospect of having a constructive relationship with Iran.

The utter futility of European attempts to keep faith with the flawed Iranian nuclear deal has been brutally exposed in the wake of the uncompromising approach adopted by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during the United Nations General Assembly.

In the build-up to the UN’s annual jamboree of global networkers, there had been much speculation that, against a background of mounting tensions in the Gulf over Tehran’s aggressive conduct, the forum might provide an opportunity to re-establish a dialogue with the ayatollahs.

To this end French President Emmanuel Macron has, in particular, been actively trying to broker a diplomatic rapprochement between Tehran and Washington, to the extent it was even suggested that a bilateral meeting might be possible between US President Donald Trump and Mr Rouhani.

The reality of the delusional approach adopted by Mr Macron and other European leaders was, though, brutally exposed the moment Mr Rouhani arrived in New York. Instead of showing any sign of seeking to repair Tehran’s strained relationship with the West and its allies, he instead indulged in an orgy of self-justification in which he sought to portray his country as an innocent victim of Western aggression rather than accepting, as is really the case, that Iran was the primary instigator of the latest escalation in tensions.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14938/iran-we-did-we-didnt-game

For four decades, the mullahs have successfully practiced their “do-and-deny” tactic thanks to the indulgence, not to say cowardice, of Western leaders and the pathetic anti-Americanism of some Western pseudo-intellectuals.

Western anti-American intellectuals who become apologists for the mullahs are victims of their inability to conceive of a situation in which, while America may be bad, its adversary may be worse.

Then we had America versus the Third Reich. Later, America vs. the Soviet Empire, vs. the Vietcong and Khmer Rouge, vs. the Afghan Taliban, vs. Saddam Hussein. In every case, even if America was not the shining city on the hill, its adversary at the time was much worse.

Apologists for the Islamic Republic do not do it a service. By endorsing its illusions and shielding it against deserved criticism, they encourage its worst tendencies — tendencies that could cost Iran and the region more than they imagine.

How to take credit for a mischief you have committed but do not wish to own up to?

This is the dilemma Tehran apologists face when discussing the latest shenanigans in the region, including missile and drone attacks on Saudi oil installations.

On the one hand they want to take credit for the attacks and cast the Khomeinist regime as a mighty power capable of giving as good as it takes in a duel against the American “Great Satan.” They try to cast Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as the little Tom Thumb taking on Donald Trump as the giant of the folk tale.

On the other hand, they try to cast Iran as an innocent victim, highlight the sufferings of babies supposedly left without powdered milk and old women running out of medication.

Wrapping up that theme is the claim that the Islamic Republic has done absolutely nothing that merits sanctions, and that the latest attacks were the work of Yemeni Houthis, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraq’s PMF or even the army of djinns commanded by Zaafar al-Jinni from the 1001 Nights.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14933/italy-salvini-immigration

During just the past several weeks, the number of migrant arrivals to Italy has increased incrementally…. Many of the new arrivals are reaching Italy by using new people-smuggling routes that originate in Turkey.

The interior ministers from France, Germany, Italy and Malta met on September 23 in the Maltese capital, Valletta, where they agreed to a tentative proposal for shipwrecked migrants to be “voluntarily redistributed” throughout the European Union…. Similar proposals have failed in the past and there is no reason to believe this one will be different, largely because the concept of European solidarity is a myth. So far only six EU states have agreed to migrant redistribution: France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain.

NGOs such as Open Arms claim to be playing an invaluable humanitarian role in saving the lives of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing war and oppression in their home countries. Statistics show something else entirely.

Salvini has condemned the new government as one “produced by Paris and Berlin, born out of a fear of giving up power, without dignity and without ideals, with the wrong people in the wrong place.”

Italy’s new government, which has pledged to reverse former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s hardline approach to migration policy, appears to have triggered a new wave of mass migration from northern Africa.

More than 1,400 migrants reached Italian shores since the new government took office on September 5, according to data compiled by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

During just the past several weeks, the number of migrant arrivals to Italy has increased incrementally: 59 migrants arrived on September 6; 67 arrived on September 9; 121 arrived on September 14; 259 arrived on September 15; 275 arrived on September 18; and 475 arrived between September 19 and September 25, according to the IOM. Overall, the number of migrant arrivals in September 2019 is up by more than 100% over the number of arrivals in September 2018.