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“Assimilation” China Style by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on October 7th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16602/china-minorities-assimilation

The principal feature of the “assimilation” program in ethnic areas is the eradication of native languages as a medium of instruction. All courses in minority regions are now taught in Mandarin….

The accounts of the CCP’s ethnic purification campaigns should serve as warning to Chinese Christians that recent sporadic examples of state security officials removing crosses from church steeples might be prologue to a much more intense campaign to suppress Christianity in China.

The CCP under Xi’s leadership will not tolerate any force or institution that might serve as a rally point for Chinese citizens who might be opposed to the Communist regime, or even be an alternate source of admiration to it.

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping doubled down on his professed policy of ethnic assimilation on September 26 at a two-day party conference on Xinjiang.

In reality, the CCP policy in Xinjiang of “assimilation” resembles more the forced unity of cultural genocide. There is ample evidence that these same repressive policies are being applied in several other Chinese territories where ethnic minorities are prominent. Similar “assimilation” programs presently are being implemented in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China’s northeastern province of Jilin.

These “assimilation” projects were kept under wraps until they were abruptly revealed upon the opening of the new school year on September 1. The principal feature of the “assimilation” program in ethnic areas is the eradication of native languages as a medium of instruction. All courses in minority regions are now taught in Mandarin, the principal language of Han Chinese who comprise about 92% of the population.

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Trump, Escaping Wile E. Coyotevirus By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 7th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/trump-escaping-wile-e-coyotevirus/

Media meltdown over Trump’s COVID case is the latest sortie in a four-year effort to destroy his campaign and then presidency.

O nce it was announced that President Trump had COVID-19, the media almost immediately talked of all the people in the “Trump orbit” who fell ill from COVID-19 — including many on his staff, U.S. senators, and at least three White House reporters.

The surreal subtext was not that the toxic Trump had been infected by someone else. Apparently reporters, in their Trump-obsessed universe, believed in some mysterious Aristotelian concept of spontaneous generation, by which his self-spawned coronavirus germs had sickened all within his deadly circuit. Or perhaps Trump was guilty of catching the germ from one of his staffers, who in turn would never have been sickened if they had never been close to Trump in the first place. The possibility that the White House “positive” reporters might have been careless at times or might’ve infected others was never entertained.

Within a few hours, the usual camps and suspects weighed in. Former Clinton and Obama staffer Zara Rahim prayed for Trump’s demise and celebrated his infection with a terse “I hope he dies.” The Washington Post hastily took down an official Twitter feed automatically posting an op-ed column expressing a similar hope for a dead president: “Imagine what it will be like to never have to think about Trump again,” on the realization that running such a headline while Trump was sick “rendered it tasteless”— as if it was not tasteless when he was well. Write that after swapping the name “Obama” for “Trump,” and the FBI would have shown up at their doors.

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No, Joe Biden Does Not Have a Proven Record of Defying Dictators By David Harsanyi

Posted By on October 7th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/joe-biden-no-record-defying-dictators/

There is no record of Biden standing up to Putin or any dictators — save Saddam Hussein — in any real way.

A t a campaign event masquerading as an NBC News town hall this week, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden dropped this statement:

I have taken on the people we’re worried about. I’ve taken on the Castros of the world, the Putins of the world. I’ve been straightforward with them. I let them know it stops here. It stops with me. It stops with me as president.

The notion that Biden has stood up to the Putins or Castros — or Assads or Mullahs or Xis — in any genuine way is nothing but a retrofitted fantasy.

Since no one holds Biden to account for his long senatorial record, we are left to focus on his tenure in the Obama administration, which the former vice president is eager to take credit for anyway.

This was an administration obsessed over a “reset” with Vladimir Putin — an idea strongly influenced by Biden. Under the precepts of this “reset,” the Obama administration spent two years trying to kill the Magnitsky Act — the sanctions bill named after Sergei Magnitsky, who was murdered by the Russian government — before acquiescing to bipartisan pressure.

This isn’t the opinion of Donald Trump or Mitt Romney, but Bill Browder, the driving force behind the sanctions, who noted that the Obama administration, “starting with Hillary Clinton and then John Kerry, did everything they could do to stop the Magnitsky Act.” It was Browder who wrote that “ever since Barack Obama had become president, the main policy of the U.S. government toward Russia had been one of appeasement.”

It was Obama who let Putin’s stooge Dmitry Medvedev know that the administration would have more “flexibility” on undermining missile defense after the election. By that time, Obama had already canceled the sale of American missile-defense systems to former Warsaw Pact allies in Poland and the Czech Republic. “Russia’s Putin praises Obama’s missile defense decision,” read the headlines at the time that don’t describe someone “standing up” to Putin.

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Trump, Covid and Reason A new statement by scientists explains how to live with the virus.

Posted By on October 7th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-covid-and-reason-11602026102?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

President Trump’s tweet Monday “Don’t be afraid of Covid” has invited more criticism that he’s again downplaying the virus. Mr. Trump doesn’t do nuance, and he and his team have often acted recklessly, most prominently at the Rose Garden ceremony announcing Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination. But scientists generally agree with his fundamental point that Americans need to learn to live with the virus.

That’s also the message of a new declaration from scientists that the media are ignoring. Organized by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, the Great Barrington Declaration recommends that people be allowed to live normally while protecting the vulnerable. The authors are infectious-disease experts, and the statement by our deadline had been signed by more than 2,300 medical and health scientists and 2,500 practitioners, and counting.

They describe their approach as “Focused Protection,” but it’s essentially what Sweden has done and even the World Health Organization is now recommending. Many European leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron are also slowly embracing it, though it still remains heresy on America’s left.

The collateral damage from government lockdowns “include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health—leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice,” the declaration says. “Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pelosi’s Taxpayer Ransom Demand Trump walked after the Speaker insisted on no less than $2 trillion.

Posted By on October 7th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-taxpayer-ransom-demand-11602026171?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Trump decided Tuesday to walk away from talks on another coronavirus spending blowout until after the election, and that’s the best decision for the economy and taxpayers. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats refused to accept anything below $2 trillion, and their political ransom demand is what blew up the deal.

Mrs. Pelosi’s calculation is pure political cynicism. Either Mr. Trump agreed to her terms, or she’d blame him for the failure and use it as an election issue. She didn’t want to risk giving Mr. Trump even half-credit for a relief bill before the election. She knows the media will spin it her way, and if Joe Biden wins in November she’ll be able to write an ever bigger spending bill disguised as “stimulus” next year

You almost have to admire the audacity of her demands. Our sources say the White House’s final offer was in the range of $1.6 trillion, but Mrs. Pelosi wouldn’t take it. Think about that. A Republican President was willing to spend an amount that was half the federal budget only a few years ago, and Mrs. Pelosi said no. Some spirit of compromise.

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A Dialogue With Pope Francis Amid a Vatican scandal, he opines on markets and Covid-19.

Posted By on October 7th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-dialogue-with-pope-francis-11602026069?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

On Sunday Pope Francis released his encyclical Fratelli Tutti (“All Brothers”), meant to point a world reeling from Covid-19 in a more hopeful direction. Though ranging from war and nationalism to immigration and social dialogue based on “insult,” the document repeats his earlier indictments of capitalism. In particular he scores “those who would have had us believe that freedom of the market was sufficient to keep everything secure” after the pandemic hit.

The true answer to what ails us, he writes, is openness and dialogue. So in that spirit we would suggest that while the pope has many wise things to say, we’ve never met any market liberals who believe what Pope Francis attributes to them. Certainly Adam Smith—a professor of moral philosophy—did not believe the “dogma” that markets can “resolve every problem.” As Smith understood, the market depends on a rules-based legal order and the cultivation of virtues such as hard work, thrift, enterprise, and even what he saw as the religious virtue of benevolence.

In the wake of Covid-19, Pope Francis writes that the “fragility” of global capitalism has made the world more fragmented and unable to deal with the pandemic. But is that really true?

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Erdogan Seeks To Relitigate Defeat Of Turks in WWI by Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on October 7th, 2020

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/erdogan-seeking-to-relitigate-defeat-of-turks/91289/

Does it matter that Turkey appears to think that it can relitigate the outcome of World War I? That’s the question observers were forced to confront last week when its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, opened that country’s parliament with a speech about the status of Jerusalem.

The Islamist government Mr. Erdoğan heads is among the leading boosters of the Palestinian war against Israel’s existence, as well as an ally of the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. The Turkish leader’s remarks, though, weren’t framed as a response to American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or the peace and normalization agreements reached between the Jewish state and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Rather, he offered an argument that Jerusalem belongs to the Turks, rather than the Jews or the Arabs.

Neither Israel nor the United States is worried that Turkey will try to implement this absurd ambition. Yet the Erdoğan government’s recent moves, coupled with its outrageous statements, do call into question the Trump administration’s apparent belief that Turkey can or should be encouraged to continue on its present course.

The Jerusalem speech is — like Turkey’s alleged role in encouraging a renewal of fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and its aggressive attitude towards the efforts of Greece, Cyprus, and Israel to work together on natural gas exploration in the Mediterranean — a signal that can’t be ignored. Either Mr. Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden will need to be as focused on the threat from Turkey in the future as they are on Iran.

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Is It Possible to Curb the Extreme Bias of the BBC? By Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld

Posted By on October 7th, 2020

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/bbc-bias-israel/

For decades, there has been a steady stream of complaints about the BBC’s anti-Israel bias. Yet other than criticize the BBC publicly, there was little anyone could do. That may have changed. In June 2020, Tim Davie became the BBC’s new director general. He wants to make the BBC’s reporting impartial. This would be a good occasion for the publication of the secret 2004 Malcolm Balen report about BBC reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Former Israeli ambassador to the UK Zvi Shtauber told me in an interview in 2005:

The BBC is a problem in itself. Over the years I had endless conversations with them. Any viewer who looks at the BBC’s information on Israel for a consistent period gets a distorted picture. It doesn’t result from a single broadcast here or there. It derives from the BBC’s method of broadcasting. When reporting from Israel, the mosque on the Temple Mount is usually shown in the background, which gives viewers the impression that Jerusalem is predominantly Muslim.

Shtauber summed up his remarks by saying it was almost a daily task for him to react to BBC distortions about Israel.

There has been a steady stream of complaints for decades about the BBC’s anti-Israel bias—more than enough to fill a book. Camera UK maintains a special monitoring site solely to focus on the BBC’s anti-Israel bias.

Here are a few recent examples. Senior BBC producer Rosie Garthwaite is working on a new documentary critical of Israeli actions in East Jerusalem. She has admitted to sharing inaccurate pro-Palestinian propaganda on social media. She deleted a false map from her personal Twitter account that greatly overstated alleged Palestinian land loss to Israel, and she has been accused of sharing other false or controversial claims about Israel on social media. Garthwaite has wrongly suggested that Gaza has only one border, and that that sole border is controlled by Israel. This is just a sampling of her anti-Israel propaganda.

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Letter Calls for Withdrawal of ‘1619 Project’ Pulitzer By Stanley Kurtz

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/letter-calls-for-withdrawal-of-1619-project-pulitzer/

An open letter released today and signed by 21 scholars and public writers calls on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.” The letter is posted at the website of the National Association of Scholars here. (I am one of the signatories.)

The letter revisits the sorry tale of the 1619 Project’s errors and distortions and invokes these in calling for the revocation of the prize. The recent revelations that The New York Times stealthily edited out the signature claim of the project—that the advent of slavery in the year 1619 constitutes our country’s “true founding”—were, however, the immediate occasion for this letter. As Phillip Magness (another signatory) has shown, Nikole Hannah-Jones has several times denied ever claiming that 1619 was our true founding, although in fact she has made this latter claim repeatedly.

These actions on the part of both the Times and Hannah-Jones are profoundly irresponsible and disturbing. How can we explain them?

Jonah Goldberg has suggested that the Times may have undertaken its stealth edits, “out of a partisan desire to deny Donald Trump and his fans a talking point.” There is some evidence in support of this suggestion.  As Wilfred McClay (another signatory) notes in Commentary Magazine, leaked transcripts of internal meetings at the Times suggest that the 1619 Project may have been part of a strategy designed to help elect a Democratic president by highlighting America’s (allegedly) endemic racism. Not long after President Trump effectively made American history a campaign issue in his Mt. Rushmore address this July, Hannah-Jones began to deny that she or the 1619 Project had ever asserted that the year 1619 was America’s “true founding,” citing the stealthily edited text of the project as evidence. (See especially the exchange with Ben Shapiro here.) The Hannah-Jones interview on CNN that helped kick off the controversy over the stealth edits took place the day after President Trump attacked the 1619 Project in his address to the White House Conference on American History. This suggests that Hannah-Jones was willing to jettison the most notable claim of her project—even to the extent of denying that she had ever made it—once that claim began to seem like a campaign liability.

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Pulitzer Board Must Revoke Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Prize Peter Wood

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/pulitzer-board-must-revoke-nikole-hannah-jones-prize

The National Association of Scholars has agreed to host this public letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board. The letter calls on the Board to rescind the prize it awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones earlier this year. I am one of the 21 signatories.  A hard copy has been mailed to the Pulitzer Committee as well as a digital copy.

—Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars

We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.” That essay was entitled, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” But it turns out the article itself was false when written, making a large claim that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motive for the American Revolution, a claim for which there is simply no evidence.

We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.”

When the Board announced the prize on May 4, 2020, it praised Hannah-Jones for “a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.” Note well the last five words. Clearly the award was meant not merely to honor this one isolated essay, but the Project as a whole, with its framing contention that the year 1619, the date when some twenty Africans arrived at Jamestown, ought to be regarded as the nation’s “true founding,” supplanting the long-honored date of July 4, 1776, which marked the emergence of the United States as an independent nation.