RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14785/boko-haram-bloody-terror

Every year, Nigeria’s Boko Haram, which has gained a foothold in the neighboring African countries of Cameroon, Chad and Niger, appears to be growing stronger.

Suicide bombings and other deadly attacks committed by Boko Haram terrorists over the past decade have claimed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people, while more than two million others have been displaced.

Nigeria’s government has proved itself to be incompetent at best, and at worst, complicit in the attacks.”

“The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, gives billions of dollars in aid to northeastern Nigeria. The problem is that aid, which helps fix small amounts of damage, is not a sufficient answer. As long as groups such as Boko Haram are able to keep destroying whole villages and infrastructure — while devastating populations — NGOs will never be able to keep up.” — International Christian Concern; August 13, 2019.

Boko Haram, the ISIS-aligned group seeking to establish an Islamic caliphate in Nigeria, just celebrated the 10th anniversary of its establishment. Contrary to initial and subsequent assessments, however, the terrorist group, also known as Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP), was not to be easily defeated. On the contrary, every year, the jihadist group, which has gained a foothold in the neighboring African countries of Cameroon, Chad and Niger, appears to be growing stronger.

Suicide bombings and other deadly attacks committed by Boko Haram terrorists over the past decade have claimed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people, while more than two million others have been displaced. These figures do not even include the thousands of women and children abducted, some of whom, according to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), “have been forced to carry out suicide missions.”

The CEP explains:

“Boko Haram has increased the number of female suicide bombers due to the easy concealment of weapons under hijabs and Islamic customs that forbid men to frisk women.”

According to International Christian Concern (ICC), so far in 2019, Boko Haram has kidnapped 179 people in Niger alone, mostly women and girls, a number that amounts to nearly one person per day. This does not include the many unreported abductions or those that took place in Nigeria or Cameroon.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274828/egypt-reinstates-notorious-hate-preacher-raymond-ibrahim

Egypt’s leading authorities have reinstated a notoriously “radical” cleric and hate preacher to the pulpit (minbar), despite strong opposition.

According to Arab Weekly, “The Egyptian Ministry of Religious Endowments, which controls the mosques, gave Yasser Burhami, the deputy head of the Salafist Call, the umbrella organisation of Salafi movements, approval to deliver sermons before Friday prayers at the Wise Caliphs Mosque in Alexandria.”

“Everybody is shocked at the decision to allow this man to preach at the mosques,” said Saad al-Zunt, the head of the Strategic Studies Centre, a local think-tank.

“Salafists adhere to a strict version of Islam,” the report explains.  “They do not believe in women’s rights and call for women to be clothed from head to toe. The Salafists adopt a hostile stance towards non-Muslims, saying they are not full citizens.”

Indeed, Sheikh Yasser al-Burhami has authored numerous fatwas—edicts based on Islamic scriptures—that demand hate and hostility for non-Muslims, most specifically the nation’s largest and most visible minority, the Christian Copts, whom Burhami has referred to as “a criminal and infidel minority,” one that he regularly  invokes “Allah’s curse” on.

For example and in keeping with the doctrine of al-wala’ w’al bara’ (“Loyalty and Enmity”), Burhami has called on all Muslims to hate all non-Muslims—going as far as to say that, although a Muslim man is permitted to marry Christian or Jewish women (ahl al-kitab), he must make sure he still hates them in his heart—and show them this hate—because they are infidels; otherwise he risks compromising his Islam.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/boris-johnsons-tories-lose-majority-in-parliament-as-fight-to-delay-brexit-erupts/

Britain’s ruling Tory party lost its parliamentary majority Tuesday as the melee continues over legislation to delay the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.

Conservative Phillip Lee defected to the Liberal Democrats amid Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speech against legislation that would delay Brexit three months past the October 31 deadline. Lee, who had been a Tory for nearly three decades, said the party has become “infected with the twin diseases of populism and English nationalism.”

Lee’s defection changes Johnson’s political calculus amid the chaotic Brexit fight, but will not automatically trigger a new election. The Liberal Democrats and some members of Johnson’s own party vehemently oppose exiting the European Union without a deal in place to mitigate the consequences of the move, but Johnson has forged ahead, vowing to push Brexit through whether or not a deal is reached with the EU.

“If that happens, all the progress we have been making will have been for nothing,” Johnson said of the legislative proposal to extend the October 31 deadline, saying it would force the U.K. to accept whatever deal the EU demands. “There are no circumstances in which I could accept anything like it. We promised the people we would get Brexit done. Enough is enough. The country wants this done.”

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who backs the delay bill, slammed Johnson’s remarks, calling the prime minister’s policies “dangerous and reckless.”

Johnson has threatened call a snap general election and kick members who oppose a no-deal Brexit out of the party.

“Let’s get on with the people’s agenda,” he said.

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/article/merkels-in-beijing-pence-is-in-poland/

A senior Polish official explained to me recently why his country couldn’t accept American demands to exclude Huawei from Poland’s buildout of 5G broadband. During the early 2010s, the United States ignored Poland entirely, but Huawei made a long-term commitment, and built the country’s entire telecommunications infrastructure. To exclude Huawei at this point would be disruptive as well as prohibitively expensive. Besides, the official explained, Poland’s economic future was bound up with China’s. Its flagship national project, an enormous new airport 40 kilometers east of Warsaw, will be “China’s gateway to the continent.”

That is the background to Vice President Mike Pence’s appearance in Poland on Tuesday to sign a “security pact” requiring “rigorous review” of telecommunications suppliers, that is, Huawei. The pact declares, “We believe that all countries must ensure that only trusted and reliable suppliers participate in our networks to protect them from unauthorized access or interference.” 

One strains to recall another such “security pact,” or to comprehend just what such a pact means in terms of diplomacy. It obligates the Poles to nothing except a formal review process. Germany’s telecom regulator undertook such a review process and declared last April that “no equipment supplier, including Huawei, should, or may, be specifically excluded.” German and Chinese government and industry sources report that the Chinese telecom giant persuaded the German government that its 5G technology would not enable China to spy on the Germans, but rather would prevent the United States from doing so. A senior German official is said to have told US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Germany was not aware of China tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, as the US reportedly did in 2013.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14804/iran-zarif-welcome-europe

The behavior of European leaders towards Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during his visit illustrates how frightened they are of the Iranian regime and how these non-stop moralists will seemingly do anything for money. Iran’s strong anti-Israel rhetoric apparently does not bother them, either.

Trade with Iran is crucial to many European countries. That is one possible explanation for the seeming doublespeak in which European leaders have been engaging since the establishment of the Islamic Republic 40 years ago — boasting among themselves and with the United States about setting a shining example of human rights, yet giving their Iranian counterparts a pass on this issue.

Those of us who sought refuge away from the brutality of the Iranian regime observe with sadness and horror these desperate attempts by many European leaders to please Tehran. Europeans should be viewing the situation with equal sadness and horror.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made a surprise appearance at the Group of Seven (G7) Summit in Biarritz, France, which ended on August 26. Prior to his attendance at the gathering in France, he stopped in Sweden and Norway. Denmark was not part of his itinerary, of course, due to Copenhagen’s rocky relations with Tehran, over last year’s assassination attempt against an Iranian Sunni separatist on Danish soil.

The purpose of Zarif’s trip to Europe, apparently, was to discuss ways to ease tensions in the Persian Gulf and rescue the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the nuclear deal with Iran from which US President Donald Trump withdrew in May 2018.

Zarif’s European tour spurred many human rights activists and Iranian opposition groups abroad to protest. Zarif, after all, represents a regime that is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading violators of human rights. Those in Iran who raise a voice against Tehran’s policies in any realm are often incarcerated: Among them are labor activists, lawyers and women’s rights activists, children’s rights activists, journalists, members of ethnic and religious minorities, environmental activists and even wildlife activists.

Days before Zarif’s trip, in fact, UN human rights experts called on the regime in Tehran to release three women recently sentenced to decades in prison for violating the law that women must wear the hijab.

The demonstrations in Europe were aimed both at Zarif and at European authorities for hosting him. In Stockholm on August 21, peaceful protesters outside the Swedish Parliament were so harassed and beaten by police that Reza Pahlavi — the Maryland-based heir to the throne of the former Iranian monarchy (his father’s ouster coincided with the 1979 Islamic revolution that ushered in the reign of the ayatollahs) — released the following statement:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274720/chinas-organ-harvesting-john-glynn

In June of this year, an independent tribunal based in London came to a chilling conclusion: detainees in China are being killed, their organs are being harvested and some victims find themselves falsely accused of committing crimes that never occurred.

The China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who was a prosecutor at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, determined that:

forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale, [and] the tribunal has had no evidence that the significant infrastructure associated with China’s transplantation industry has been dismantled and absent a satisfactory explanation as to the source of readily available organs concludes that forced organ harvesting continues till today.

Before coming to their damning conclusion, the tribunal members spoke with medical experts and human rights investigators. According to the committee, thousands of people “have died indescribably hideous deaths for no reason.” The committee members warn “that more may suffer in similar ways and that all of us live on a planet where extreme wickedness may be found in the power of those, for the time being, running a country with one of the oldest civilizations known to modern man.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rules-of-geopolitics-are-different-in-asia-11567460320

Colombo, Sri Lanka

The drama in Washington sometimes makes this difficult to remember, but the most important foreign-policy development of the current presidential term isn’t the president’s tweets. It is the slow, inexorable shift in American strategy from the Atlantic and Mediterranean theaters of world politics to what U.S. diplomats and military officials call the “Indo-Pacific.” That shift, which the Obama administration called the “pivot to Asia,” isn’t the special property of Republicans or Democrats, of national-security hawks or doves.

Yet if Americans are increasingly united on the importance of the Indo-Pacific, we are very far from united on strategy there. This is partly because the executive branch is led by a president with unconventional views who is often at daggers drawn with the network of professionals and institutions that have shaped American foreign policy for many decades. But larger forces are at work than President Trump.

Never in human history have so many people and states faced such an avalanche of political and economic change as the Indo-Pacific faces today. If American policy makers find it challenging to understand and respond, they aren’t alone. The teams around Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Shinzo Abe are often similarly perplexed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/everyone-loses-in-germany-11567445967

European elections these days are generally contests between a beleaguered mainstream and insurgent alternatives. Voters in two German states on Sunday chose a form of “none of the above” as the country stumbles out of the Angela Merkel era.

The biggest vote-getters were the main parties of the center. Mrs. Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) came out on top in Saxony, a state they’ve governed since 1990. The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), with whom Mrs. Merkel maintains an awkward coalition at the national level, are on track to maintain their long-time control in Brandenburg.

Yet both parties emerged with diminished support. The CDU’s share in Saxony fell to 32% from above 39% in 2014, while the SPD’s Brandenburg total dropped to 26% from 32%. The result raises new questions about Mrs. Merkel’s preferred successor to lead the CDU and the country, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who doesn’t excite voters anywhere. It also accentuates the crisis of confidence afflicting the leaderless SPD, which can’t decide whether its national coalition with Mrs. Merkel is hurting or helping its fortunes.

The alternatives also underperformed expectations. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party did increase its vote totals to 27.5% in Saxony and 23.5% in Brandenburg from 10% and 12% five years ago, respectively. But this is unlikely to be a harbinger of national success, even if the AfD is currently the largest opposition party in the national parliament.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/18/quantum-revolution-is-coming-chinese-scientists-are-forefront

China’s drive to dominate a field with big economic and military applications outpaces some U.S. strides

HANGHAI — More than a decade ago, Chinese physicist Pan Jian-Wei returned home from Europe to help oversee research into some of the most important technology of the 21st century.

At a conference in Shanghai this summer, Pan and his team offered a rare peek at the work he described as a “revolution.”

They spoke of the hacking-resistant communications networks they are building across China, the sensors they are designing to see through smog and around corners, and the prototype computers that may someday smash the computational power of any existing machine.

All the gear is based on quantum technology — an emerging field that could transform information processing and confer big economic and national-security advantages to countries that dominate it. To the dismay of some scientists and officials in the United States, China’s formidable investment is helping it catch up with Western research in the field and, in a few areas, pull ahead.