RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-cracks-down-in-asias-once-freest-city-11556750356

For most of my life I have advocated change in the world’s most closed, repressive nation: North Korea. As a South Korean, my priority has been peace and freedom on the peninsula I call home. But I cannot ignore the erosion of freedom in what was once one of Asia’s freest cities: Hong Kong.

There used to be parallels between South Korea and Hong Kong. Both are economic “tigers,” with basic freedoms and an openness to the world, living in the shadow of authoritarian regimes to the north.

But now there is a divergence, as Hong Kong is being subsumed into Xi Jinping’s China in the midst of its worst crackdown on human rights since the Tiananmen Square massacre 30 years ago.

Last week Hong Kong authorities handed prison sentences to nine leaders of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement. This is merely the latest alarming example of suppression in the city, in which civil rights are steadily declining.

To be sure, Hong Kong cannot be compared to totalitarian North Korea. Though Hong Kongers are denied universal suffrage, there is still some freedom of expression and a generally fair legal system. Since Britain handed over control to China in 1997, Hong Kong has functioned under the principle of “one country, two systems” with a high degree of autonomy. It was for years the only place in China where people could demonstrate, speak out in the press, or criticize the government without fear of arrest. All that is now in jeopardy.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273581/germanys-hypocrisy-israel-joseph-puder

On May 2, 2019, Israel will observe Holocaust Remembrance Day. It would be a good time to re-examine the Jewish state’s relations with the Federal Republic of Germany, formerly Nazi Germany, a nation that perpetrated the greatest crime in history against Europe’s Jews, known as the Holocaust. Naturally, many Germans wish the memory of the Holocaust and its German perpetrators to go away and be forgotten. Young Germans do not wish to carry the burden of guilt for the most heinous crime in modern history.

Monetary reparation paid by the Germans to Holocaust survivors for the stolen properties of European Jews notwithstanding, reality today is that Berlin has not done more than lip service to “solidarity with Israel” and its claims of “Israel’s security being Germany’s raison d’état.” Germany has been a major contributor to anti-Israel resolutions at the UN General Assembly and other UN agencies. Germany moreover, has aided and abetted the genocidal Islamic Republic of Iran in evading U.S. sanctions.  Germany’s non-governmental agencies (NGO’s) supported by the German government fund various anti-Israel groups in the Palestinian Authority and in Israel itself.

According to the Gatestone Institute, Chancellor Angela Merkel has pressured other European Union states to refrain from moving their embassies from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital – Jerusalem. Merkel not only rejected the Trump administration’s move to relocate the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, she has authorized the allotment of $100 million to the Palestinian Authority’s allocated budget of $300 million, for payment to Palestinian terrorists to kill Jews.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14166/hong-kong-dark-days

The continued defiance of Hong Kong’s people in the face of Chinese repression is inspiring resistance in Taiwan.

“In the early 1980s the ‘one country, two systems’ concept was created for Taiwan, not for Hong Kong,” said Ma Ying-jeou to Al Jazeera when he was Taiwan’s president in September 2014. “But Taiwan has sent a clear message that we do not accept the concept.”

Xi Jinping, the current Chinese ruler, once held the Hong Kong portfolio in the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee. He certainly knows that one of the signs of Chinese regime failure is trouble on the periphery, and he is determined that the open defiance in Hong Kong does not spread to other areas far from the center of Chinese power. Xi has no effective response to Hong Kong, however.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Hong Kong on Sunday to protest planned changes to the city’s extradition law. Many believe new rules facilitating the sending of suspects to China would effectively allow Beijing to grab people at will and thereby completely control the city. “You will be screwed,” said a marcher, a law clerk, to Reuters.

The turnout was high — organizers said 130,000 people took part — in part because the demonstration followed the sentencing of democracy activists for their role in the massive “Occupy Central” protests in 2014. On Wednesday, a lower court handed out prison terms of between eight to 16 months to four of the “Umbrella Nine.” Three others received suspended sentences. One person was given 200 hours of community service.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14163/turkey-armenian-genocide-anniversary

It is estimated that between one and one and a half million Armenians perished.

The government-funded Turkish Institute of History just announced that it is preparing to publish 25 volumes “refuting Turkey’s involvement” in the Armenian Genocide.

“[I]t’s obvious that the recognition and condemnation of genocides are the most effective tools for the prevention of new genocides.” — Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, February 13, 2019, ArmenPress.com

April 24 marked the 104th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide by Ottoman Turkey. It was on this date in 1915 that Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were arrested in Constantinople and later murdered. It is estimated that between one and one and a half million Armenians perished.

Since then, Turkish authorities have aggressively denied that the genocide even took place, or that Turks carried it out, and penalized those who dare to assert otherwise.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14118/erdogan-friendless

In reality, with the exception of Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Venezuela’s troubled man, Nicolás Maduro, Erdoğan is increasingly friendless.

China’s ambassador to Ankara, Deng Li, diplomatically showed Turkey the most frightening stick. Deng told Reuters: “If you choose a non-constructive path, it will negatively affect mutual trust and understanding and will be reflected in commercial and economic relations.”

It was a shock to the Turkish president to wake up the other day and learn that the genocide suspect whom he embraced as “brother”, President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, had been ousted by a coup d’état.

“World leaders hail Erdoğan on local vote win,” the news headline ran, referring to the outcome of Turkey’s local elections on March 31. They laboriously ignored that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist AKP party lost in all of Turkey’s three biggest cities — and for the first time in 25 years in Ankara and Istanbul. They were nevertheless able to find one element to hail regarding Turkey’s strongman. But, “world leaders?”

Here is the full list: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, tripartite Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Chairman Milorad Dodik, former Bosniak member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Bakir Izetbegovic, Guinean President Alpha Conde, and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14162/finland-iran

Just a little more than ten years ago, Finland’s flagship telecommunications company, Nokia, was found to have sold to Tehran surveillance technology, which was used a year later to suppress dissident demonstrators’ use of social media.

“[T]here are two documented instances where [the Finnish company] Cargotec-tied cranes have been used for public executions.” — United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) press release.

How Finland behaves today is eerily reminiscent of its behavior with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. During that time, Finnish politicians, academics and journalists practiced self-censorship. They knew whom not to talk about, let alone criticize. Today it is criticism of Islam that is aggressively prosecuted under the guise of combating “hate-speech” or “disparaging of religious groups”. It is the same M.O., just a different place and time.

There is a special saying in Finland describing a person’s naïvety: it is called being “blue-eyed”. Unfortunately, there is not a saying that describes the same trait for an entire political class.

Successive Finnish governments could be accurately described as extremely “blue-eyed,” especially during the last decade or so in their relations with Iran.

Part of the problem seems to lie with Finnish politicians, who seem truly to believe that having a dialogue — any dialogue — regardless of who is on the opposite side of the table, is better than having no dialogue at all. So you can easily end up with the equivalent of a businessman trying to reach an agreement with Al Capone, while each holds completely different assumptions about the underlying terms of an agreement, including whether agreements are even meant to be kept.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273607/tommy-robinson-mep-bruce-bawer

Tommy Robinson’s announcement on April 25 of his candidacy for the European Parliament met with precisely the kind of media response you would expect. In the Guardian, Josh Halliday gave the term “far-right” a workout. He described the For Britain party, whose founder Anne Marie Waters introduced Tommy at his campaign kickoff event in Wythenshawe, a largely working-class Manchester neighborhood, as “far-right.” Halliday made sure to point out that Tommy had “founded the far-right English Defence League” – but omitted to mention that Tommy had left the EDL precisely because it had become “far-right.” And Halliday noted that local MP Mike Kane had “signed a joint letter with Christian, Jewish and Muslim faith leaders saying Tommy’s ‘far-right political views are not welcome in our town.’”

In the same letter, Kane, a Labourite who serves as Shadow Minister for Education, and the “faith leaders” – a Baptist preacher, a Roman Catholic priest, an Anglican rector, a Muslim imam, and a Jewish rabbi – explained that they would not welcome Tommy because Wythenshawe is a “welcoming” place. Neither the signatories nor Halliday seemed to be aware of the blatant self-contradiction. The letter further noted that Wythenshawe contains “thriving Chagossian and Keralan communities, among others, living and working here. If we were to welcome this man we’d be dismissing the valued contribution these people have made to the area.” In fact Chagossians, an Indian Ocean people, are Christians, and most people from Kerala, a state in the south of India, are Hindus. Tommy’s problem, of course, is with the ideology of Islam, in accordance with which jihadists have murdered countless Christians and Hindus.

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/new-party-emerges-in-britain-to-rescue-brexit/90665/

It Leads the Polls for European Parliament, Our Diarist Reports

The British Prime Minister is a wrecking crew of one. Theresa May scuttled Britain’s March 29 exit from the European Union. Her preferred withdrawal option places the UK in a worse position in relation to the EU. Not content to wreak havoc in foreign relations, she is effectively destroying the Conservative party.

This is a moment to harken to Newton’s third law — “to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.” It’s starting to look as if the third law applies in politics too, and is now in full force in Britain. Mrs. May has midwifed the Brexit party.

With Nigel Farage at its head, the Brexit party was formed when Britain failed to exit the EU as Britons — and Parliament — ordained. In a few short weeks it will contest the European Parliament elections and fight a polite but firm guerrilla campaign for Brexit in Brussels. Tories truculence at home augurs that Mr. Farage must take the fight to Westminster as well.“We want the European election to be the first step of a massive change that re-steps entirely British politics and actually makes it look more like the country,” Mr. Farage told the London Sun. “MPs will realize that if they carry on trying to stop Brexit, they’ll lose their seats at the next General Election.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-china-dislodge-russia-in-central-asia-11556577788

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

A trip to the picturesque capital of this mountainous landlocked republic in Central Asia feels a bit like traveling through time. The brutalist architecture and the monumental scale of the avenues and city squares show just how deeply the Soviet Union left its imprint, and the scarcity of Western-style shopping malls and food chains shows how slowly the local economy has grown since the Soviet collapse.

Bishkek also offers a window into the future of Chinese power. The five countries in Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan—stretch from the Tien Shan mountains to the Caspian Sea. They contain majestic mountains, fertile valleys and vast reserves of minerals, oil and gas. They are also central to China’s ambitious attempt to transform international trade so that land routes across Asia replace the sea routes between Europe and Asia.

Many Western observers think China’s rise to primacy in Central Asia, where Russia has traditionally dominated, is inevitable. Russia’s economy is stagnant, while the appeal of China’s vast market, its cheap consumer goods, and its multibillion-dollar commitment to build a rail and road network throughout the region all tend to pull these countries away from Moscow and toward Beijing.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/29/authorities-arrest-canadian-father-refers-trans-child-real-sex/

Last Wednesday, The Federalist reported that the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, declared a father guilty of family violence for his polite refusal to refer to his daughter as a boy in private, and his repeated choice to affirm in media interviews that she is a girl.

At about the same time that story was published, the Supreme Court issued an additional, more heavy-handed “protection order” from the same ruling. The three-page document declares that the father, Clark*, will henceforth be subject to arrest, immediately and “without warrant” if any police officer has “reasonable” grounds to believe that he has in any way referred to his daughter as a girl in public or in private.

The new order further stipulated not only that Clark must not discuss his daughter’s sex or gender identity in public, but also that he cannot share court documents describing his own gag order. On the one hand, this demand may seem ironic, since it covers a publicly available court ruling. On the other hand, the injunction is so broad that it naturally includes the very document upon which it is written and that document–with its threats of immediate arrest without warrant–has not, as of yet, been made available on the court’s website.