RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17414/coming-soon-china-navy-patrolling-off-new-york

Chinese planners are not only thinking of the continent [Africa], they are also eyeing islands in the Atlantic, specifically Terceira, one of the Azores.

On that island, part of Portugal, there is a port and, of even greater interest, Air Base No. 4. Better known as Lajes Field, the facility is jointly operated by the U.S. Air Force and its Portuguese counterpart.

If China controlled the base, the Atlantic would no longer be secure…. Chinese planes could patrol the northern and central portions of the Atlantic and thereby cut air and sea traffic between the U.S. and Europe. Beijing would also be able to deny access to the nearby Mediterranean Sea.

Pentagon budget cutters have been scaling back activities at Lajes, making it a “ghost base.” As a result, Lajes is ripe for China to take it over.

China could get a base even closer than [Lajes]. About 90 miles east of Palm Beach, on Grand Bahama Island, a Hong Kong-based business is spending about $3 billion on a deep-water container facility, the Freeport Container Port.

Sri Lanka is perhaps the model for China’s militarization of the Bahamas. In addition to the overly large facility in Freeport, there is a Chinese-funded port on Abaco Island, also part of the Bahamas. The port in Abaco is essentially useless from a commercial point of view and could fall into Beijing’s hands.

China, therefore, could have two naval bases close to Florida, unless the Biden administration moves fast to block Chinese penetration of the Bahamas.

At the moment, America is, with trade and investment, strengthening a hostile Chinese regime, which has declared the U.S. to be its enemy. Last year, America’s two-way trade with China totaled $560.1 billion.

China is scouting for a naval base on the west coast of Africa. In the near future, therefore, Chinese ships could be regularly patrolling off America’s East Coast.

In recent testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, General Stephen Townsend, commander of U.S. Africa Command, has been sounding the alarm.

At the moment, China’s only offshore military base is in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. The facility is near some of the world’s busiest shipping routes, including those going through the Suez Canal.

Townsend believes the People’s Liberation Army Navy is surveying locations on Africa’s west coast, from Mauritania in the north to Namibia in the south. “Now they’re casting their gaze to the Atlantic coast and wanting to get such a base there,” the general told the Associated Press.

Africa is important in its own right. “Located at the crossroads of the world, Africa watches over strategic choke points including the Strait of Gibraltar, the Strait of Sicily, the Red Sea, the Bab al Mandeb, and the Mozambique Channel,” General Townsend points out in a publicly released 2021 Posture Statement for Congress. “The land mass of Africa is larger than the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe combined.”

The African continent is home to 11 of the 25 fast-growing economies and is the world’s most demographically vital region.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/27/central-and-eastern-europe-help-show-the-path-forward/

I’m writing from Warsaw, Poland, making for both my first time venturing behind the old Iron Curtain and my first trip back to Europe since the onset of COVID-19. Despite the overcast weather endemic to this part of the globe, the mood on the ground is unmistakably buoyant.

Poland, along with its fellow Visegrad Group member Central European nations of Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic—and perhaps also including nearby Austria—has emerged as a perhaps unlikely ground zero in the fight to save Western civilization from a debilitating and increasingly all-encompassing liberal decadence.

The sad history of the region continues to pervade daily life here. Locals routinely respond to questions about what sites tourists should visit in one of two ways: “The Nazis destroyed everything in the war” or “The Soviet occupation ruined everything.” Few regions in the world know totalitarian repression and occupation like this area of the blood-soaked European continent does. The Visegrad states, which have rarely tasted national independence over the vicissitudes of the past millennium, felt the full brunt of both Nazi fascism and Soviet Communism in all-too-recent memory.

The silver lining, and the reason this region is so interesting from a contemporary economic and geopolitical perspective, is that out of the joint tyrannical fires of Nazism and Communism were forged, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a robust appreciation for the integrity of the independent nation-state and the importance of Judeo-Christian-inspired societal goals, such as family formation and fortified communitarian ties.

Put more simply, the four Visegrad states and Austria have emerged as veritable redoubts of traditional Western values and substantive political priorities, such as national borders, immigration properly limited to promote assimilation and intergenerational cultural stability, and the transcendental meaning and fulfillment that only religion can provide.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/its-getting-bad-for-the-jews/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=also-from-author&utm_term=first

Thoughts on the rising hostility in the United States and in Europe

 F or the past couple of years, there have been reports about an uptick in “random” assaults in New York. Men are just walking along a street in Brooklyn, and they get sucker-punched. Except it isn’t random. The victims are Orthodox Jews. This growing uptick in assaults has been punctuated by mass killings at Jewish synagogues in San Diego, Pittsburgh, and upstate New York. In recent weeks, as a conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza has become the occasion for a coming-out party for a newly confident anti-Zionist wing in the American Left, we also see newly confident thugs assaulting Jews in Manhattan’s Diamond District while shouting slogans about Palestine.

This is a scandal beyond words. Secular and religious Jews are formed to be sensitive to these upsurges in hostility and violence because their history as a people in exile tells them that these spasms of violence do not just subside. They tend to grow and grow until Jews are finally forced to emigrate. Jewish life is dying out in Paris precisely because of a growing pattern of street harassment and assaults that are punctuated by terrorist attacks aimed at killing masses of Jews at synagogues and kosher supermarkets. Parisian Jews are leaving for Israel. There was a time they might have left for New York. I expect that for many Jews, the realization that New York could go the way of Paris would be the bitterest pill to swallow.

Speaking of the Europeans, what’s going on there is also a scandal. The news of rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel, and Israel launching attacks on the positions from which they are fired, set off major protests in European cities. Now, criticism would be one thing. The state of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces, and even the Israeli people are just that — people — and they are capable of folly, prejudice, and cruelty like any other. And the Palestinians are people too — many of them living in a situation that is abjectly miserable. Imagine both resenting Israel and having the foreign government of Iran pay for the thugs of Hamas to be your political leadership while you seek satisfaction and try to make a life for your family.

But these protests in European cities are not focused on legitimate criticisms of Israel. In North London, a group of Muslim men drove a kind of convoy through a Jewish neighborhood, shouting slogans such as, “F*** the Jews, rape their daughters.”

But crude as this was, there is something more scandalous about the protests in Europe. Muslims might at least feel like a party to the Israeli–Gaza conflict, in some way. What’s truly disturbing is the mass of secular Europeans who come from long lines of native residents in their countries joining in.

It brings up the question of why Israel’s actions bother Europeans so much. The oppression of the Kurds by Turkey occasions not a peep of protest. You’d think it might, given European connections to Turkey through NATO and other European Union–led deals about migration. Or the fact that the tyrant Recep Erdogan travels to European capitals and holds massive campaign rallies to capture the votes of Turkish men and women who live abroad. If the motor is a kind of anti-Americanism — American support for Israel is often brought up at these European protests — then why not protest the humanitarian disaster that has been Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, which causes starvation and has exacerbated the worst cholera outbreak in modern history?