FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Taiwan’s reunification countdown has begun Live-fire exercises that began on August 5 were not a drill but the real thing, namely a blockade of Taiwan that China can prolong at will-By Uwe Parpart and David Goldman

Posted By on August 10th, 2022

https://asiatimes.com/2022/08/taiwans-reunification-countdown-has-begun/

China’s People’s Liberation Army Eastern Theater Command said in a statement on Monday (August 8) that joint drills in the sea and airspace around Taiwan were continuing.

The notice did not specify the precise location of the exercises or when they would end. Whether the six danger zones for the August 4-7 exercises remain in effect is unclear. The PLA never officially announced the end of the war games.

The announcement will likely leave US officialdom as clueless – or at any rate pretend-clueless – as was betrayed by their statements when Taiwanese officials said Chinese aircraft and warships had rehearsed an attack on the island on Saturday.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby complained that the Chinese “can go a long way to taking the tensions down simply by stopping these provocative military exercises and ending the rhetoric.” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said China’s actions over Taiwan showed a move from prioritizing peaceful resolution toward the use of force.

By comparison, the statement by the Japanese Ministry of Defense that as many as four missiles flew over Taiwan’s capital, which is unprecedented, and that five of nine missiles fired toward its territory landed in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ), had the advantage of being factual and accurate.

What neither the White House nor Foggy Bottom appears to have grasped to date is that in the wake of House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “reckless” visit to Taiwan (Tom Friedman’s terminology in his New York Times column) the Xi government took the irreversible decision to “cross the Rubicon” and systematically force the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland.

Too willfully provocative was Pelosi’s action and too puny were the White House and National Security Council’s efforts to rein her in. Together they persuaded Beijing that this Washington or the next administration under Biden’s successor would continue to vitiate and ultimately aim to discard the One China policy.

Live-fire exercises that began on August 5 were not a drill but the real thing, namely a blockade of the island that China can prolong at will.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

As latest round of fighting ends, Israel’s Gaza strategy comes under scrutiny Israel’s current policy cannot assure its long-term security, and particularly that of its southern residents. By David Isaac

Posted By on August 10th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/as-latest-round-of-fighting-ends-israels-gaza-strategy-comes-under-scrutiny/

 “Operation Breaking Dawn” is being described as one of Israel’s most successful Gaza operations in recent years. “All goals have been achieved, whoever tries to harm us will pay with his life,” Prime Minister Yair Lapid said on Monday evening, addressing the nation. Yet some have questioned Israel’s current Gaza policy, which leads it into successive rounds of fighting with no end in sight. They say it’s time to develop a new strategy.

“How do we see the next 20 to 50 years? Are we really going to live with the reality where every six months to a year, half of Israeli society is always under fire?” asked Amir Avivi, CEO and founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF), an Israeli NGO comprising thousands of former security officers.

“The idea is we will hit the terrorists hard and then gain a few years of quiet, but we see it’s not working,” he told JNS. “They build themselves back very, very fast. And with each operation they’re able to shoot more rockets with more explosives and more accuracy, while developing other capabilities. We need to ask ourselves: Is this the reality that the people of Israel deserve?”

While the current operation focused exclusively on the smaller Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist group, it’s to Hamas and its growing strength that Avivi points as proof that Israel’s current strategy is a failure. “Hamas is projecting its power and ideology all over Israel and all over the region. It’s becoming the leading organization in the fight for Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. They are the heroes of the Palestinians and also of Arab Israelis in the north and the south. This has become a huge threat. It’s not just about Gaza anymore,” he said.

Avivi praised the latest operation on the tactical level, but not the strategic one.

“This is the paradox. When the army fights, there’s nothing like the IDF. It’s amazing. But when you look at the overall picture, the strategic picture, it’s terrible,” he said.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Rise of Wokeness in the Military Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, USA (ret.) – Director, Center for National Defense at the Heritage Foundation

Posted By on August 10th, 2022

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-rise-of-wokeness-in-the-military/

Thomas Spoehr is director of the Center for National Defense at the Heritage Foundation. He served previously for over 36 years in the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of Lieutenant General. He earned a B.A. from William and Mary, an M.A. from Webster University, and an M.A. from the U.S. Army War College. While in the Army, he served in numerous leadership roles, including senior positions in the Pentagon and Commandant of the Army’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear School. His operational experiences include service with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 1st Armored Division. He participated in the 1983 invasion of Grenada, and in 2011 he served as Deputy Commanding General, U.S. Forces Iraq.

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on July 20, 2022, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C. campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. 

Complaints by veteran soldiers about younger generations who lack discipline and traditional values are as old as war itself. Grizzled veterans in the Greek phalanx, Roman legions, and Napoleon’s elite corps all believed that the failings of the young would be the ruin of their armies. This is not the chief worry of grizzled American veterans today. The largest threat they see by far to our current military is the weakening of its fabric by radical progressive (or “woke”) policies being imposed, not by a rising generation of slackers, but by the very leaders charged with ensuring their readiness.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A New Iron Curtain Descends on Russia’s Jews Putin was supposed to be the Good Tsar. Instead he has closed the Jewish Agency. And now tens of thousands of Jews fear being trapped in Russia.

Posted By on August 9th, 2022

https://www.commonsense.news/p/a-new-iron-curtain-descends-on-russias?utm_source=email&triedSigningIn=true

Vladimir Putin was supposed to be The Good Tsar—the Russian president who, his KGB past notwithstanding, was a friend of the Jews. In Putin’s Russia, we could be billionaires and presidential advisers. We could go to shul. We could come and go as we pleased.

My in-laws, Chief Rabbi Pinchas and Rebbetzin Dara Goldschmidt, were evidence of that. From 1993 until this year, my father-in-law was the chief rabbi of Moscow; my mother-in-law founded a Jewish school there.

Since the Soviet collapse, in 1991, synagogues, schools, youth groups, and Jewish-owned businesses in Moscow had flourished. In 2007, Putin famously donated a month’s salary to the glitzy Moscow Museum of Tolerance, and the FSB (formerly the KGB) offered its support to the museum by providing documents from its archives. In recent years, a Jew wearing a yarmulke would have felt more comfortable walking in Moscow than in Paris.

Perhaps most importantly, young Jews had been able to do what Jews in pretty much every generation before would have found unimaginable: They could move to Israel. 

The symbol of this freedom of movement was a pale, yellow building on a little street called Bolshoy Spasoglinishchevskiy Pereulok, just across the street from Moscow’s famous Choral Synagogue. Inside was the Jewish Agency for Israel. 

The Soviets didn’t allow the Jewish Agency—which has outposts all over the world and is tasked with helping Jews immigrate to Israel—to open in Russia until 1989, just two years before the communist regime collapsed. Its opening in the very center of Moscow was a sign of a great and long awaited moment in Russian society. 

The Jewish Agency quickly became something of a magnet for young Russian Jews who would come to learn Hebrew, attend cultural events, and interview for a variety of programs that enabled them to go to Israel for high school or college.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Limits of Radical Protest Those fighting for social change today would do well to heed Bayard Rustin’s advice about how to build sustainable and effective political movements. Matt Johnson

Posted By on August 9th, 2022

https://quillette.com/2022/08/05/the-limits-of-radical-protest/

Bayard Rustin was one of the towering figures in the American civil rights movement. A democratic socialist and a lead organizer of the March on Washington, Rustin was also among the most forceful and compelling advocates for a sweeping set of social and economic changes intended to bring about what he described as “full racial equality.”

In February 1965—a year and a half after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and just seven months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act—Rustin published an essay in Commentary titled “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement.” This title captured a theme of Rustin’s work in the years to follow—he was a radical pragmatist who believed the campaign for civil rights was the starting point for a much larger struggle: the fight to build a fairer and more just society for all.

Rustin had just witnessed tectonic legal and political changes in the United States when he urged his fellow Americans to embark on this project. As he put it at the beginning of his essay, the “elaborate legal structure of segregation and discrimination, particularly in relation to public accommodations, has virtually collapsed.” But he argued that this merely marked the transition from one phase of economic and social mobilization to the next: “What is the value of winning access to public accommodations for those who lack money to use them? The minute the movement faced this question, it was compelled to expand its vision beyond race relations to economic relations, including the role of education in modern society.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Walkout at Milton Academy When high-school students can’t tolerate hearing the name of a book title, we know there’s a problem in education. Randall Kennedy and Harvey Silverglate Randall Kennedy and Harvey Silverglate

Posted By on August 9th, 2022

https://quillette.com/2022/08/08/walkout-at-milton-academy/

One of us, Harvey Silverglate, recently got “cancelled,” in a sense, for publicly mentioning a notorious term, often used as a slur. In one of those great ironies that characterize our historical moment, the impugned utterance was contained in a lecture on the importance of free speech in academia.

The situation unfolded on April 27th at Milton Academy, a prestigious private high school in Massachusetts. A student group, the Public Issues Board, had sponsored a multi-day series of panels and lectures on subjects of the students’ choosing. Silverglate was invited to give a talk on free speech and academic freedom, a subject in which he specializes.

Approximately two-thirds of the way into the lecture, Silverglate held up before the audience two books. One was entitled The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, which Silverglate co-authored in 1998. The book focused largely on the struggles to protect free speech in higher education. The other book was authored by a Harvard Law School professor, Randall Kennedy (the co-author of this article). The title of that book is Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, published in 2002 and recently updated.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

End of the Republic With the FBI raid on Trump’s home, America has fallen into the abyss. Robert Spencer

Posted By on August 9th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/end-republic-robert-spencer/

When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home on Monday, a key aspect of what made the United States of America great and free has been lost, and likely cannot be recovered. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson detested one another for years before their eventual reconciliation, but neither one used the agencies of the U.S. government to hound, persecute or discredit the other. Other bitter political opponents throughout the history of the republic have never before used the government’s own mechanisms of justice to do injustice to their foes. Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and their henchmen have brought America to a new phase of its history, and it is not likely to be one that is marked by respect for the rule of law or defense of the rights of individual citizens. Instead, we are entering an ugly age of authoritarianism, in which the brute force of the state is used to bend the people to the will of the tyrant.

Trump announced on Monday, “These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.”

The 45th president is not given to understatement, but the FBI raid on his home is much more than just unnecessary and inappropriate. It is criminal.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The MSM Suddenly Decides Elections Can Be Stolen… But Only by Republicans By Matt Margolis

Posted By on August 9th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/08/08/the-msm-suddenly-decides-elections-can-be-stolen-but-only-by-republicans-n1619144

The mainstream media gladly colluded with Democrats to insist that the 2020 election was the safest, fairest, and most secure election in the history of the world, the universe, and all dimensions in the multiverse. If you dare suggest that Biden stole the 2020 election, you are immediately declared a fringe conspiracy theorist and banned on social media.

But it looks like the media is starting to change its tune on the theory that our elections are secure and can’t be stolen. There’s just a tiny caveat: only Republicans can steal elections.

Bloomberg sought to find out which states are “most vulnerable to political election interference” and “what it means for elections this fall and in 2024, when the White House will once again be at stake.” I’ll save you all the details because the criteria were ridiculously biased. But, according to the exposé, reporters Ryan Teague Beckwith and Bill Allison looked at all the states, scrutinized election laws, consulted with experts, and while they claim the 2022 vote “should be fine” because election integrity laws in various states have stalled, Beckwith and Allison nevertheless insist that the 2024 vote could potentially be “stolen” should Trump loyalists win gubernatorial elections Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, and possibly Pennsylvania.

Why? Because these Trump loyalists questioned the results of the 2020 election and would probably steal the election for Trump in 2024.

As I’ve previously pointed out, despite the left’s insistence that the 2020 election was so secure and fair, many election irregularities have been discovered.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The FBI And DOJ Criminalizing Opposition To The Regime Is How The Republic Ends By: Joy Pullmann

Posted By on August 9th, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/08/criminalizing-opposition-to-the-regime-is-how-the-republic-ends/

A two-tier justice system is not a justice system. It is a totalitarian system. Its purpose is not justice but population control.

On Thursday, Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder decided it was the time to bring the subtext of the Jan. 6 show trials and related domestic security state activities into the open.

“My guess is that by the end of this process, you’re going to see indictments involving high-level people in the White House, you’re going to see indictments against people outside the White House who were advising them with regard to the attempt to steal the election, and I think ultimately you’re probably going to see the president, former president of the United States indicted as well,” Holder told SiriusXM host Joe Madison.

Holder noted that the U.S. Department of Justice he formerly headed is working with the illegally constituted Jan. 6 Commission towards this goal. We know these entities are also working with the FBI, whose head bit his thumb at congressional oversight repeatedly in a public hearing last week.

Locking Up Opposition Politicians Is What Putin Does

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mark Tapson :Inside the Horror of Islamic Sex Slavery – and the Real War on Women Bringing attention to the forgotten victims.

Posted By on August 9th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/shining-spotlight-real-war-women-mark-tapson/

Last week marked the seventh annual commemoration of the Yazidi genocide, though you wouldn’t know it from watching establishment media. Nor would you know that there is an ongoing genocide of Christians taking place in Nigeria, nor that throughout the Islamic world countless women and girls are enduring kidnapping, forced marriages, forced conversions of Christians to Islam, genocidal rape, and/or widespread sex trafficking even in countries that are supposedly our allies in the War on Terror.

To keep abreast of these crises, one needs to seek out the work of such concerned journalists as the Freedom Center’s own Raymond Ibrahim or Dutch journalist Sonja Dahlmans, who work desperately to bring international attention to the plight of the victims of an actual war on women.

I recently interviewed Ms. Dahlmans about these issues. She currently writes (in Dutch only) for the conservative political news site PAL NWS, and is studying Islam at the Melbourne School of Theology, where she will be starting her thesis.

For those readers who would like to help make a change – and to participate in the effort to protecting and liberating the victims of Islamic Jihad, sex slavery and rape, please contact Sonja on her Twitter at: @SonjaDahlmans.

Mark Tapson: Sonja, please tell us what the focus of your journalistic work has been in recent years, and why you’re passionate about it.

Sonja Dahlmans: I focus mainly on Christian persecution, but I have also written about persecution of the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria and of Hindu girls in Pakistan. Women and girls from these groups are often targeted in Islamic countries or regions. The abduction, rape, forced marriage and forced conversion (to Islam) of non-Muslim women and girls is a widespread problem. This is the subject I write about the most, because I am afraid it is still underestimated, although lately there has been more attention to it. Unfortunately not often in the mainstream media, the subject is almost only discussed on Christian (or other religious minority) pages or reports.