RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/abraham-accords-gift-keeps-giving-hugh-fitzgerald/

Four Arab countries – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco – have now joined the Abraham Accords and “normalized ties” with Israel. While much attention has been paid to the business deals – involving trade, technology, and tourism – made between Israel and the UAE, that in the first year now amount to $675 million worth of agreements, from Morocco comes another sort of tie that binds, and that transcends business: It Is the rediscovery and restoration of Morocco’s Jewish past. A report on this effort is here: “Moroccan King Orders Restoration of Hundreds of Jewish Sites,” Algemeiner, December 13, 2021:

King Mohammed VI of Morocco recently introduced an initiative to restore hundreds of historical Jewish sites in the kingdom, according to Arab media reports.

The move is part of the rapprochement between Rabat and Jerusalem, which resumed diplomatic relations earlier this year as part of the Abraham Accords, according to the reports.

The rapprochement was helped along by the Trump Administration, which persuaded Morocco to join the Abraham Accords and, by way of encouragement, announced that Washington recognized Morocco’s claim to the western Sahara, long disputed between, and fought over by, Morocco and the Algerian-backed Polisario Front.

Morocco’s recent royals have been well-disposed to Jews. The present king’s grandfather, King Mohammed V, protected the 250,000 Moroccan Jews during World War II from both the Nazis and Vichy authorities. He prevented roundups, most famously in Casablanca. He refused to enforce Vichy’s anti-Jewish legislation. He publicly declared that “There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccan subjects.” No Moroccan Jews were deported or killed during the war.

His son King Hassan II was similarly well-disposed to Jews, and employed a Moroccan Jew, Andre Azoulay, as one of his advisors. Azoulay has for many years been the senior adviser to his son, King Mohammed VI.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18087/sanaa-mystery-man

He [the late Ambassador Hassan Ayerloo] had reorganized Ansar Allah, the armed wing of the Houthi movement, raising the number of its fighters from 1,000 in 2005 to over 10,000 last year. Thanks to Ayerloo’s leadership, the Houthis, initially a small tribal group in Saada, northern Yemen, was built into a major political movement seeking to rule the whole of Yemen.

Ayatollah Ali Yunesi includes Sanaa among the four Arab capitals he claims Iran now controls, the others being Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut.

The news last week of the death in mysterious circumstances of the Iranian ambassador to Sanaa reminded me of a 19th century English limerick:

Who and where and when and what
Is the Akhund of Swat
Is he lean or is he fat
Is he cold or is he hot
The Akhund of Swat?

The Akhund of Swat was a cleric leading a tribal rebellion against the British Raj in the badlands of Pashstunistan. The questions posed in the limerick went unanswered as, one foggy day in the mountains, the Akhund disappeared. And since no one could claim to have actually seen the Akhund, an endless number of fables were woven around his name.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18089/biden-legacy-dismantling-democracies

Biden inflicted untold damage on the free world by his catastrophic surrender in Afghanistan, demonstrating to America’s enemies and friends alike that, under his administration, the US was no longer willing to stand by its allies nor to protect its own vital national interests.

Now Biden is planning discussions in early 2022 between Russia and selected NATO members to “defuse” the situation [Russia threatening the Ukraine]. Can he really believe that any negotiations short of capitulation to Russian demands would satisfy Putin or achieve anything? So-called diplomacy down the barrel of 90,000 Russian guns looks a lot like even more appeasement.

Biden has failed to respond to Iranian attacks on Saudi Arabia, Iranian aggression against Israel and even Iranian attacks on US forces in Syria and Iraq. Iran’s contempt for Biden was further displayed last week in the launch of multiple ballistic missiles during manoeuvres that Iranian commanders explicitly said were intended to threaten Israel.

In the face of Iranian nuclear provocation, Biden’s officials have refrained from any threat of military action — taking off the table the only truly effective deterrent against regimes that respect strength alone.

Biden’s policies of appeasement towards Iran and Russia are bad enough. But the greatest threat to the free world today comes from China. Biden has a long record of appeasing Beijing.

Biden’s administration has projected only confusion over China’s ambitions against Taiwan. The president twice suggested the US might be willing to defend the country in the event of Chinese invasion, with his comments immediately walked back by officials… Similarly mixed messages coming from London led the Argentinian junta to believe Britain, despite its vast military superiority, would not fight to defend the Falkland Islands on the other side of the world, and actually encouraged the 1982 invasion.

“One of [Biden’s] first acts on assuming the presidency was to shut down the investigations into the origins of Covid-19 — including the one I led at the State Department in 2020, which presented troubling scientific and circumstantial evidence on the secret activities of the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] that bolster the lab-leak theory”. — Dr David Asher, who spearheaded the State Department task force investigating the origins of Covid-19 and the role of the Chinese government, Hudson Institute, November 17, 2021

None of Biden’s acts of appeasement are isolated to their targets alone; they are widely observed and cumulative in effect. They embolden America’s enemies and unnerve its friends, potentially fracturing alliances that are vital to defending democracy. So much damage has already been done in just one year that even were Biden to change course, his legacy might well be the dismantling of democracies and the free world.

When US President Joe Biden took office, he removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. He should have replaced it with one of Neville Chamberlain. After Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938, Churchill told him: “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.”