RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19946/china-preparing-for-war

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping is rapidly militarizing his country and has instructed its army to “prepare for war” and “fight and win” it.

“Chinese ruler Xi Jinping replaced the senior leadership of China’s Rocket Force, which is responsible for almost all of China’s 400 or so nuclear warheads. These personnel changes are part of what is almost certainly the most ominous development of this time. It looks like Xi is contemplating using or at least threatening to use his most destructive weapons. In other words, China is planning to go to war.” — Gordon Chang, China expert, Newsweek, August 14, 2023.

“Xi sacked Rocket Force commander, Li Yuchao, and its political commissar, Xu Zhongbo. Neither has been seen in public since. Li’s deputy, Liu Guangbin, has also disappeared, along with Zhang Zhenzhong, a former deputy. At about the same time, Wu Guohua, deputy commander of the Rocket Force, reportedly took his own life in early July.” — Gordon Chang, Newsweek, August 14, 2023.

Xi is doubtless weighing the risk-reward ratio of launching an aggressive operation against Taiwan during US President Joe Biden’s term of office. Xi is doubtless aware that his “window of opportunity” may be closing in 18 months, accompanied by a felicitously distracting US presidential election.

The timing of any Chinese assault on Taiwan will most certainly be determined by Xi’s assessment of the domestic political strength of the Biden administration as well as the possible need for a strong diversion from his own imploding economy. Xi is also doubtless assessing the US president’s resolve to back up his repeated declarations that US forces would come to the defense of Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, as opposed to the US State Department’s immediate walk-back of the promise.

The Chinese Communist Party claims that the US is treating Taiwan as an independent state and these VIP visits violate its “One China Policy.” The truth, most likely, is that the CCP’s repeated transgressions against Taiwan’s air and maritime sovereignty, after then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan, are actually just part of the CCP’s military invasion exercises on its way to an all-out assault.

The CCP’s Eastern Theater Command has, in addition, established a Joint Operations Command Center, responsible for coordinating all phases of an actual invasion of Taiwan. Military moves suggestive of the CCP’s hostile intent toward Taiwan, included recent deliveries of wheeled armor vehicles to China’s coastal province of Guangdong, an area with several natural launch points for an invasion of Taiwan.

Xi Jinping and former Foreign Minister Qin Gang both warned the US about interfering in what China claims is an internal problem, and Xi added: “Western countries led by the United States have carried out all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to China’s development.” Xi has stressed that “the Taiwan question is the core of China’s core interest” and has described as “wishful thinking” any expectation that China might compromise on the eventual incorporation of Taiwan into Communist China.

China has also rolled out a campaign of intimidation that shows China calling the shots. These began with the berating the US in Alaska, to which the State Department’s response was “deep concerns” and continued with smuggling over the US border fentanyl and other drugs that have killed an estimated 200,000 civilians.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/iranian-regime-on-edge-as-protest-anniversary-looms/

As Iran edges closer to the anniversary of the September 2022 uprisings laden with historic significance, the regime faces an unsettling reality: the prospect of renewed massive street protests reminiscent of the seismic upheavals of September 2022. Within Tehran’s inner sanctums of power and among its suppressive forces, an uneasy apprehension looms.

Against this backdrop, an intricate web of orchestrated actions and narratives by the Iranian regime against its principal opposition, is captivating global attention. The regime’s strategic orchestration of these narratives unveils a profound storyline—one that crumbles under the weight of scrutiny, exposing the regime’s underlying vulnerability and growing desperation.

Implicit in this tense atmosphere is the understanding that the oppositional group, the MEK, remains a potent catalyst behind such monumental social movements. During the 2018 uprising, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself conceded, based on internal intelligence assessments, that MEK activists had meticulously planned for months to orchestrate the widespread demonstrations that reverberated across the nation.

The subsequent 2022 protests further underscored the MEK’s influence, as the commander of Iran’s State Security Force candidly asserted that “rioters, led by the MEK, are willing to instigate chaos.” Such declarations, along with acknowledgments of MEK-orchestrated protests, expose Tehran’s alarm and its recognition of the MEK’s role as the main architect of unrest.

As the Iranian regime stares down this impending milestone, it artfully maneuvers its tactics to counteract the potency of the MEK during this critical juncture.

Among the recent measures, the regime has invoked INTERPOL mechanisms to apprehend MEK members. July bore witness to Tehran’s announcement of summoning 107 MEK leaders and officials for prosecution, while spreading rumors that the MEK is unsafe and scrambling to relocate to Canada. A thread of “suspicious deaths” among MEK members at Ashraf-3, the group’s residence in Albania, was deftly woven into the regime’s propaganda. Even Iran’s Judiciary Chief publicly proclaimed the regime’s determination to repatriate MEK members from foreign jurisdictions.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19945/india-child-labor

A large number of Indian children… are still subjected to bonded labour and forced employment. India today has more than 33 million children under the age of 18 in work requiring hard labour.

The welfare of children has long been a concern in India. Aware of this need, the founding fathers of independent India in 1949 wrote a Constitution that prohibits employing children under the age of 14 in factories and other hazardous work (Article 24).

India’s Parliament has also tried to safeguard children’s rights by passing legislation . The Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986 makes employing a child a criminal offence.[1] Parliament has also enacted other laws to prohibit, identify and prosecute child labour.

India’s agriculture sector accounts for the majority (70%) of employed children. Child labour, regrettably, is used in almost all of the informal sectors of the Indian economy, including coal mining, and the diamond, fireworks, silk and carpet industries.

A 2003 Human Rights Watch report claims that children as young as five work for up to 12 hours a day, six to seven days a week, in the silk industry.

Official estimates for children working as domestic labourers and in restaurants is more than 2.5 million; some NGOs estimate the figure to be around 20 million.

As of September 2022, the US Department of Labor lists India in its “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor of Forced Labor,” with 25 types of goods produced by child labour.

The main reasons for child labour, clearly, are poverty, illiteracy and malnutrition. Out of India’s 217 million children, 49.9% are poor. Children in this category have little choice but to join the labour force.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/globalists_resurrect_roman_censor_to_police_public_morals.html

One of the most powerful and prestigious offices in the ancient Roman Republic was the censor.  It was the censor’s duty to conduct the census — an account of all the citizens and their properties, an appraisal of an individual Roman’s qualifications for certain honors and ranks, and a division of the people into distinct social classes.  Having the authorities both to assess tax liability and noble rank made the two censors who shared this office inherently powerful.  For this reason, the patricians (the ruling class) originally precluded the plebeians (the commoners) from ever obtaining the office.  The ruling class was not keen on empowering a commoner to decide who is worthy of being a patrician!

Over time, this duty to conduct an official census expanded to include other substantial powers.  Having the sole authority to determine whether a Roman citizen qualified for distinguished ranks and to adjudicate whether that citizen had committed any social infractions rendering him unworthy of retaining those ranks, the censors became de facto wardens of the public morals (the regimen morum).  The jurisdiction to regulate proper Roman character and habits and to judge those Romans found wanting made censors both revered and feared.  They were known as castigatores (chastisers) for their power to create and enforce public opinion through their granting or withholding of noble rank.  They were, in other words, ancient Rome’s original enforcers of “political correctness.”  This authority to regulate both the public and private lives of Roman citizens gave rise to the modern meanings of “censor” and “censorship.”

These immense powers to assess property, tax liability, qualification for noble rank, and general “political correctness” naturally established an additional power: the censors were responsible for administering Rome’s finances and overseeing public works.  As custodians of the public morals and regulators of the public’s taxes, the censors were given broad discretion to decide how to spend public money on roads, aqueducts, bridges, theaters, and temples.  They had a say over which Roman businessmen would be awarded lucrative contracts from the State and which kinds of laborers would benefit from new public works projects.  By controlling the flow of money and jobs, the censors could choose the “winners” and “losers” in the economy.

If these authoritarian powers sound remarkably familiar to Westerners today, that’s because Western governments have fully embraced the role of the ancient Roman censors — dividing society into deserving and undeserving classes, promulgating and enforcing “woke” public morals, and engaging in partisan tax-and-spend policies that reward certain industries and workforces over others.  Just as with Rome’s censors, our censors ostensibly work for the “public good.”  Unlike many of the illustrious Roman censors from two and a half millennia ago, though, today’s censors are not known for exhibiting exceptional character or honor.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19941/starvation-armenians-artsakh

Several watchdog organizations… are accusing Azerbaijan of committing genocide against the 120,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh. Historically known as Artsakh, this ancient Armenian region was brought under Azerbaijani rule in 2020.

Modern day hostilities between Armenia, an ancient nation and the first to adopt Christianity, and Azerbaijan, a Muslim nation that was created in 1918, began in September 2020, when Azerbaijan launched a war to capture Artsakh….

Once the September 2020 war began, Turkey quickly joined its Azerbaijani co-religionists against Armenia, even though the dispute did not concern it.

These Muslim groups committed massive atrocities. One included raping an Armenian female soldier and mother of three, before hacking off all four of her limbs, gouging out her eyes, and sticking one of her severed fingers inside her private parts.

The war ended in November 2020, with Azerbaijan gaining control of a significant portion of Artsakh.

“In the extreme southeastern part of Europe, known as the Caucasus, a silent genocide is looming. The Lachin Corridor that connects Armenia to Artsakh, the region in Azerbaijan where mainly Christian Armenians live, has been closed by the government for eight months. Supermarket shelves are empty; there is hardly any food, fuel, or medicine for the 120,000 Armenian Christians who live there, including 30,000 children and 20,000 seniors… a convoy of food and medicine has been standing in front of the border since July 25 [a month], but the International Red Cross is not allowed access to the inhabitants of Artsakh. According to journalists living in the area, most residents only get one meal a day. People in Artsakh queue for hours at night for bread, waiting for their daily rations. At the same time, sources within Artsakh report shooting at Armenians trying to harvest the land… in all probability bread will also soon be unavailable due to the shortage of fuel… Bakers can no longer heat their ovens.” — Sonja Dahlmans, Dutch journalist, ongehoordnederland.tv, August 24, 2023.

“There is an ongoing Genocide against 120,000 Armenians…[A] blockade… by the Azerbaijani security forces impeding access to any food, medical supplies, and other essentials should be considered a Genocide under Article II, (c) of the Genocide Convention: ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.’….Without immediate dramatic change, this group of Armenians will be destroyed in a few weeks.” — Luis Moreno Ocampo, former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, August 7, 2023.

Muslim regimes regularly make life intolerable for Christian minorities, apparently to force them to abandon their properties and leave.

A few weeks ago, the president of Iraq revoked a decade-old decree that granted Chaldean Patriarch Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako powers over Christian endowment affairs. “This is a political maneuver to seize the remainder of what Christians have left in Iraq and Baghdad and to expel them.” — Diya Butrus Slewa, human rights activist from Ainkawa, aina.org, July 13, 2023.

Former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback referred to the blockade as the latest attempt at “religious cleansing” of Christian Armenia… in his testimony, [he] said that this latest genocide is being “perpetrated with U.S.-supplied weaponry and backed by Turkey, a member of NATO.” If the U.S. does not act, “we will see again another ancient Christian population forced out of its homeland.” — catholicnewsagency.com, June 21, 2023.

Not only has U.S. diplomacy been ineffective for the besieged Armenians; it has actually exacerbated matters by allowing the aggressors to continue their atrocities.

“[T]he only thing the Washington-backed talks appear to have produced is the emboldenment of Azerbaijan’s aggression…. For over eight months, the region’s 120,000 Indigenous Armenians…have been deprived access to food, medicine, fuel, electricity, and water in what is nothing less than genocide by attrition…. When Washington-based talks resumed in June, Azerbaijan began shelling the region. In the months since, the International Committee of the Red Cross has been denied access to Karabakh—and later reported that an Armenian patient in its care had been abducted by Azerbaijani forces en route to Armenia for treatment. This is the predictable consequence of Washington’s insistence on negotiations amid Azerbaijan’s blockade of Artsakh and occupation of Armenian territory. It has signaled to Baku that its strategy of coercive diplomacy is working, disincentivizing de-escalation…” — Alex Galitsky and Gev Iskajyan, Armenian National Committee of America; Armenian National Committee of Artsakh, Newsweek, August 14, 2023.

Indeed, part of the façade of diplomacy is that Azerbaijan insists that the Christian Armenians of Artsakh are being treated no differently than Muslim Azerbaijanis—since all are citizens of Azerbaijan.

Clearly, negotiating simply bought the Azerbaijanis more time in which to starve the Armenians, and possibly another way for the United States to pretend it was “doing something” without actually doing anything –apart from allowing more savagery.

The results are clear: nearly every Armenian who fell into Azerbaijani captivity after the 2020 war has been persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, decapitated or murdered. None of these acts has ever been punished. To the contrary, those who kill Armenians receive medals and are glorified in Azerbaijan.

“The Western press rarely writes about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Most reactions follow the line that it is not a religious conflict, but a claim by two countries over a disputed territory. Given the many examples that exist in which precisely religious buildings, tombs and inscriptions are systematically destroyed, it is difficult to maintain that this is the case.” — Sonja Dahlmans, ongehoordnederland.tv, August 24, 2023.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19940/france-democracy-crisis-authority

Marseille, France’s second-largest city and biggest port, is depicted as a European version of Chicago in the Prohibition times with gang warfare, shootings, protest strikes by police and tension among “communities” routine features of daily life.

The usually tame French media describe the situation as a “challenge to law and order”… President Emmanuel Macron goes further by warning about a “loss of authority” that he intends to correct by as yet unknown measures.

Loss of authority isn’t limited to Marseille gangs engaged in war over a bigger share of the drug market… Authority is also under constant challenge in Paris itself, where one could see numerous shop windows shattered by protesters in the recent riots against a two-year increase in the legal minimum retirement age. Even once sleepy cities such as Nîmes and Limoges have been affected by “loss of authority”.

However, Macron’s first moves and the ideas his entourage are circulating look more like dancing around the issue rather than addressing its root causes.

Where does authority come from?

The classical answer is that it comes from the two key tools of persuasion and coercion that a properly constituted government has for imposing its decisions. Beyond that, however, one may argue that authority emanates from continuity of rules and mores, the accumulation of a cultural, including religious, heritage that transcends here-and-now considerations.

Macron tries to address that problem by talking of “duties” as opposed to “rights”, something that contradicts the core values of the French Revolution. In the French Revolution’s worldview, citizens, regardless of whether they do their duties or not, have inalienable rights. In Macron’s redefinition, a citizen’s rights may look like rewards for duties performed.

But who sets those rights and duties?

Can one talk of duties in the service of an autocratic regime that one hasn’t chosen?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19939/pakistan-muslim-mobs-hunt-christians

Hundreds of Christians fled their homes on August 16 when, in the eastern Pakistani district capital of Jaranwala, Muslim mobs started an anti-Christian riot, vandalizing churches and setting churches and Christians’ homes on fire — all based just on an accusation that a Quran had been desecrated.

At least 20 churches throughout the city were set on fire and more than 400 homes belonging to Christians damaged.

“Two Christian individuals are accused of desecrating the Quran. People are demanding life imprisonment, but the accusation is false. They have done nothing. The accusation was fabricated by an Islamist group, Tehreek-e-Labbaik.” — Faraz Pervaiz, a Christian Pakistani asylum-seeker who fled to Thailand after being accused in Pakistan of blasphemy for criticizing political Islam, reporting through his sources on the ground, August 2023.

“On August 16, 2023 a woman carrying these documents with torn pages of Quran knocked the door of Raja and Rocky, later be accused of blasphemy. When they opened the door, the woman started shouting at the family and accusing them that you have desecrated the Quran. The family was shocked. Meanwhile this woman started making loud noises to wake the people up. ‘Raja and Rocky has committed blasphemy,’ she was shouting, ‘and you Muslims are sleeping!'” — Faraz Pervaiz, August 2023.

The Muslim mobs then started attacking Christian homes and churches; the Christians fled and slept outside to avoid being burned alive, Pervaiz said.

“Christians are sleeping under open sky now. They are helpless. They get no support from any organization or the Government. They get no food support, and no new shelter is provided. They are starving. They are too scared to go back to their homes. They fear being killed… The police were helping the perpetrators and the vigilantes. There was no military intervention to stop the attacks. …The newly elected Prime Minister of Pakistan has condemned the incidents, but Christians need help, which he could have provided. But he did not because he knew that entire Muslim community would stand against him.” — Faraz Pervaiz, August 2023.

To urge Muslims to hunt down Pervaiz, mullahs in Pakistan have led demonstrations where the crowds were encouraged to chant: “There is only one punishment for insulting the Prophet. Sever the head from the body! Sever the head from the body!”

In 2019, Pervaiz’s home address in Bangkok, Thailand, was revealed in a video released on social media, with calls to every Muslim to find and kill him and his family. Several mullahs also attached fatwas to the video calling on Muslims to kill him. Posters with his photograph were plastered across many cities, including outside mosques and government offices in Lahore and Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

Meanwhile, Pakistani Islamists have placed a bounty on Pervaiz. The Tahreek-e-Labbaik political party announced the first bounty of $62,000 in 2015. The next year, a cleric doubled it to $124,000. Pervaiz told Gatestone that many Islamist parties in Pakistan have placed a bounty on him; the amount now totals $400,000.

The UN and other members of the international community seriously need to reconsider their relations with the government of Pakistan. It is a systematic violator of human rights and a major supporter of Islamist terrorism. A government that treats its minorities so unjustly and inhumanely needs to be held to account.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19926/slavery-brics-black-africans

In a garish example of anti-democratic, anti-West, collective state hypocrisy, leaders from the BRICS bloc — representing Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — meeting in South Africa over three days last week invited four Muslim states and two others to join the bloc, while keeping total silence over the racist and Islamist massacre by heavily armed Arab militias of black African civilians being carried out in West Darfur in Sudan over the preceding weeks.

“[A]trocities pile up in Darfur after 100 days of Sudan fighting”, in which “Arab militias are accused of killing lawyers, human rights monitors, doctors and non-Arab tribal leaders”. — Al Jazeera, July 24, 2023.

” [The city of Al-Geneina in West Darfur] has been ethnically cleansed.” — Humanitarian worker, Sky News, broadcasting scenes of thousands of desperate Sudanese refugees displaced in neighbouring Chad, August 17, 2023.

The Africa Defense Forum disclosed on May 16 that Russia’s Wagner group was supervising gold-mining in Darfur, and smuggling nearly $2 billion in gold out of the country.

Yet the “great and the good” — China’s President Xi Jinping, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, with Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing the congregation by video to endorse Russia’s war in Ukraine — made no mention of this genocidal massacre.

Instead, the BRICS leaders invited states with the world’s longest history of enslaving black Africans to join them.

China’s Xinhua news agency reported how Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, who attended the BRICS conference, hailed it as a “commendable step that will facilitate worldwide development while upholding principles of justice.”

Justice? Raisi was deputy prosecutor general in a four-member committee codenamed the “death commission” in Iran in 1988, which was responsible for the executions of thousands of political prisoners who were loyal to a banned opposition movement, “on orders issued by Raisi and his three colleagues.”

Worse, although slavery continued legally in Iran until 1929, “It never went away”. — iranwire.com, April 30, 2020.

The article showed a series of photos of black African slaves in Iran, such as this one from the 1880s. — Denise Hassanzade Ajiri, “The face of African slavery in Qajar Iran – in pictures,” The Guardian, January 14, 2016.

The issue of the enslavement and oppression of black Africans — continuing to this day in Darfur and elsewhere — is an issue suppressed by BRICS.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19929/geert-wilders-speech

I have been on the death lists of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS for a very long time….

In recent years, several fatwas have been issued against me by imams and mullahs, two of which have been repeated quite recently. Fatwas, religious death sentences consisting of concrete calls to Muslims worldwide and also in the Netherlands to kill me.

I now receive so many death threats, every day and about a thousand a year, that I no longer even report everything, because then I would no longer be able to do my work as a Member of Parliament.

They are often descriptions of how they want to kill me, often with explicit pictures, beheading videos, there are audio recordings of threats, including imams from mosques, and other disgustingly violent material. Many of those threats come from various Islamic countries, but especially from Pakistan.

And with a few exceptions of Pakistanis who came to the Netherlands to kill me, but luckily were arrested and also convicted, 99.99% of all people who threaten me from abroad have never been prosecuted.

Luckily one is prosecuted today. And I would like to thank the Public Prosecution Office for that.

I do hope that they will also prosecute the Pakistani mullah Jalali and the political leader Rizvi, who issued the aforementioned fatwas against me. Please don’t forget them.

[T]oday your court is hearing the case against Khalid Latif, a well-known former cricketer from Pakistan, who in 2018 put a bounty of three million Pakistani rupees, then about 21 thousand euros [roughly $23,000], on my head as a reward for the one who murders me, and would post the video of that murder online as evidence. And if he had more money, he added, he would also give it to the one who kills me.

Khalid Latif thinks I should be killed because I (and I quote) would insult “the prophet of God” – he is referring to Muhammad – by organizing a cartoon contest [which did not take place].

But of course that is absolutely no reason to put a price on someone’s head, let alone kill someone.

I wanted to make it clear that making drawings is allowed by anyone and we should never, ever bow down to people who choose violence, threats, murder and terror.

Because of all the fatwas, threats and calls to kill, I have been living in high security for almost nineteen years.

I have lived in a prison with my wife for months for my safety, lived in a barracks, lived in a police station, had to dress unrecognizably in public with mustaches and wigs. And to this day, my wife and I live in a government safe house.

I can’t do the most basic things that every human being does every day without thinking about it…. Quickly get some air. Empty the mailbox. Driving. Walk around the block. Quickly run a message [errand] in the store…..

And frankly, you never get used to it. You learn to deal with it but you never get used to it. And that’s tough. You should know that.

I am grateful to be protected. I also want to say that today.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19928/communist-china-ecuador

“We are basically being plundered. There are no words. There are no words to describe this tragedy…. China took control of the natural resources. They control the hydroelectric plants, they control the oil, a large part of mining, and they control political power. We’ve been colonized. Again.” — Fernando Villavicencio, Ecuadorean investigative journalist and presidential candidate in the award-winning 2022 documentary, This Stolen Country of Mine.

From 2007 to 2017, Villavicencio, who was a leading critic of the country’s sellout to China and government corruption, investigated the corruption and China dealings of left-wing Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, who effectively sold the country and its rich resources to China. In 2020, Correa was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison for corruption but had already fled to Belgium. Today, China is Ecuador’s largest creditor.

[I]n March 2023, Honduras cut ties with Taiwan and established diplomatic ties with China in order to handle its enormous debt and need for investments.

Even more disturbing is the fact that China’s activities in Latin America amount to a significant security threat against US interests.

“What concerns me as a Combatant Commander is the myriad of ways in which the PRC is spreading its malign influence, wielding its economic might, and conducting gray zone activities to expand its military and political access and influence… The PRC is investing in critical infrastructure, including deep-water ports, cyber, and space facilities which can have a potential dual use for malign commercial and military activities. In any potential global conflict, the PRC could leverage strategic regional ports to restrict U.S. naval and commercial ship access. This is a strategic risk that we can’t accept or ignore… This is a decisive decade and our actions or inactions regarding the PRC will have ramifications for decades to come.” — General Laura Jane Richardson, Commander of the US Southern Command, to the House Armed Services Committee regarding her concerns over China’s activities in Latin America. Those include China’s recent financing of a $3 billion container port in Peru, and the establishment of a space monitoring station near the Strait of Magellan. March 8, 2023.