Displaying posts published in

December 2020

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Beijing Tests Joe Biden Will the President-elect speak up about China’s jailing of Jimmy Lai?

By on December 19th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijing-tests-joe-biden-11608334532?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

No one should mistake what the jailing of Jimmy Lai and other Hong Kong champions of democracy signals: China is testing Joe Biden.

Mr. Lai is the founder of one of Hong Kong’s most popular newspapers, Apple Daily. Now he’s in jail facing several charges, including one from a new national security law that China bullied through. We know China was enraged when Mr. Lai met with American politicians on trips to Washington in 2019, including Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the basis of the national security charge is that he’s encouraged foreign governments to impose sanctions on Hong Kong and Beijing.

Mr. Lai has been denied bail and publicly exhibited in shackles. Ta Kung Pao, the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece in Hong Kong, says he should be extradited to the mainland for trial. Friends worry that would be a death sentence for the 72-year-old publisher.

President Xi Jinping is hoping to intimidate Hong Kongers into silence and testing whether Mr. Biden and his aides will look the other way at these and other abuses. So far Mr. Xi must be pleased at the lack of response.

One of the Trump Administration’s achievements was to recognize that China has become America’s primary adversary. It steals U.S. technology, monitors and intimidates critics on American university campuses, engages in massive spying, claims new territory in the South China Sea, and threatens U.S. allies in Taiwan and Australia. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has pushed back, from condemning China’s incarceration of the Uighurs to sanctioning officials responsible for the crackdown in Hong Kong.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

A Second Zionist Jew’s Exit from New York Times Opinion Page Is Called ‘Disgrace’ By Ira Stoll

By on December 19th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/12/18/a-second-zionist-jews-exit-from-new-york-times-opinion-page-is-called-disgrace/

A second openly Zionist staffer has exited the New York Times editorial page as the newspaper’s publisher interviews candidates for the editorial-page editor job.

In June, a Republican senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, wrote a Times op-ed headlined “Send in the Troops,” calling for the deployment of the US military to quell what the article called an “orgy of violence” and “rioters and looters” in American cities following the death in police custody of George Floyd. More than 800 Times staff members signed a letter protesting the article’s publication, and more than two dozen New York Times employees called in sick to protest the op-ed.

New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet resigned after the publication of the Cotton article, but others sought to blame its appearance on two Jewish opinion-page staffers, Bari Weiss and Adam Rubenstein. I covered the episode at the time under the headline “Republican Senator Writes New York Times Op-Ed. Zionist Jews Get Blamed.”

“‘Blame Weiss and Rubenstein’ is the NYT’s new motto, and unlike its previous one, actually accurately describes what the paper aims to do every day of the week and twice on Shabbos,” quipped Seth Mandel, executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.

Weiss left the Times in July, complaining of “unlawful discrimination” and “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.” Now Rubenstein has also departed. He did not reply to a message asking why, but Weiss, on Twitter, wrote that he “was hung out to dry by his own colleagues.”

Continue reading →