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September 2023

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Jimmy Lai’s 1,000 Prison Days The publisher’s bravery has exposed China’s false promises to Hong Kong.

By on September 26th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jimmy-lais-1-000-prison-days-china-ccp-arrest-sentence-kong-truth-freedom-protest-5feea2a8?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Jimmy Lai marks his 1,000th day in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison on Tuesday, an ignominious anniversary that should remind the world of Mr. Lai’s bravery and China’s disdain for international treaties and the rule of law.

Mr. Lai is the founder and owner of the pro-democracy paper Apple Daily, which the Hong Kong government confiscated without due process. What makes his sacrifice so compelling is that Mr. Lai could have avoided a prison cell by fleeing to one of his homes abroad.

China and its Hong Kong factotums have sought every way possible to target Mr. Lai for daring to advocate for freedom for Hong Kong’s people. The 75-year-old has been convicted for his peaceful participation in three protests, including a vigil to commemorate the Chinese victims of the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square.

He was also convicted on business fraud charges the U.S. State Department has rightly denounced as “spurious.” But his biggest trial, on national-security charges that could carry a life sentence, is scheduled for December. The government has denied Mr. Lai his choice of lawyer in the case.

Everyone in Hong Kong knows he will be found guilty—an example of how Hong Kong is following China’s dictates despite the promise Beijing made to Britain of autonomy for 50 years after 1997 in a formal treaty. The real question is how a city that holds political prisoners can purport to be a world financial center.

Mr. Lai is one of what the Hong Kong Democracy Council says have been 1,647 political prisoners since the start of the 2019 protests. While a financial center depends on the free flow of information and rule of law, in today’s Hong Kong people can be arrested for expressing the wrong opinion. Yuen Ching-ting was a 23-year-old student who in June was charged with posting seditious pro-independence posts on Facebook while studying at her university in Japan.

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The New Moral Order Is Already Crumbling Globalism, climate-change alarmism and cultural self-annihilation have all come under serious challenge. By Gerard Baker

By on September 26th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-moral-order-is-already-crumbling-climate-europe-immigration-australia-25d21439?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The new moral order our secularist elites have been busy constructing since the end of the Cold War is collapsing around them.

Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, and its failure to supply the needs of the people is discrediting it in the popular mind.

This new edifice has been built around three principal pillars: First, the ethical primacy of global obligation over national self-interest, in economic and geopolitical terms, but most directly and consequentially in a rejection of the morality of national borders and an embrace of something like open-door immigration. Second, a quasi-biblical belief in climate catastrophism, in which man’s essential energy-consuming sinfulness can be expiated only by massive sacrifice of economic progress. Third, a wholesale cultural self-cancellation in which the virtues, values and historic achievements of traditional civilization are rejected and replaced by a cultural hierarchy that inverts old prejudices and obliges the class of white, male heterosexuals to acknowledge their history of exploitation and submit to comprehensive social and economic reparation.

This fall, throughout the West, on three continents, each of these three pillars is crumbling,

In Lampedusa, the Italian island midway between Europe and Africa, and at Eagle Pass, Texas, and elsewhere along the visible and increasingly invisible frontiers that separate the global North from the South, the idea of permissive migration in an economically unequal world is being tested to destruction. Lampedusa was inundated last week with another surge of migrants from Africa, larger than the population of the island itself. In Texas, the influx across the border with Mexico became a torrent.

The demographic tsunami from the global South as the North’s population shrinks is in its early stages, and most people can see clearly what happens when leaders insist on a moral code that suggests our obligations to indigent foreigners are as great as those to our own citizens. It won’t survive the political backlash now under way in both Europe and America, as even U.S. Democrats and Brussels Eurocrats are slowly starting to grasp.

The second pillar, the moral imperative of self-abasing action to combat climate change, is falling too—most interestingly again in Europe and the U.K., where it has long been the official religion of the secularist priesthood.

Last week, Britain’s notionally Conservative government took a small but symbolically important step in climate apostasy, announcing some sensible tweaks to a program of regulatory decarbonization mandates, such as pushing back by a few years the phasing out of new gasoline-powered cars. The move was precipitated by the high and rising costs to ordinary citizens of these measures and didn’t actually involve—yet—a formal retreat from the ambitious goal of making the country “carbon neutral” by 2050. But the howls from almost the entire establishment were an encouraging sign that the priesthood knows its days are numbered.

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Why is Hamas Sending Palestinians to Die at the Border with Israel? by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on September 26th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19997/hamas-sending-palestinians-to-die

During the past few days, the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas has again been encouraging Palestinians living under its rule in the Gaza Strip to march toward the border with Israel and attack Israelis.

The latest attacks on Israelis by Hamas, however, appear to be less linked to Israel….

Hamas, instead of directing its grievances toward Qatar [for cutting grants to Hamas], responds by sending young Palestinian men to throw explosive devices, Molotov cocktails, and stones at Israeli troops near the border with the Gaza Strip.

Apparently, Hamas is hoping that the “Zionist enemy” (Israel) will come to its rescue by putting pressure on Qatar not to cut its financial grant. With many of its leaders sitting in Doha, Hamas must be rather fearful about coming out in public against Qatar.

The official said that civil servants, including senior Hamas officials, have not received full salaries because of the reduction in the financial grant. Hamas, in other words, is admitting that the renewed violence is not linked to Jerusalem or the Temple Mount, but to its leaders’ desire to obtain more funds from Qatar.

The real blackmail, however, is coming from Hamas. First, Hamas is implying that if it doesn’t get the funds, it will accuse the Qataris of collaboration with Israel, harming the Gulf state’s image in the Arab and Islamic countries. Second, Hamas is openly stating that it will continue to send Palestinians to attack Israeli soldiers near the border if the Qataris do not resume the financial aid.

Will the international community call out the Hamas leaders for sending young men to their deaths for the sake of the money being witheld? Based on experience: not likely. Far more likely is that we will hear loud and bitter condemnations of Israel for “opening fire” at Palestinian protesters along the border with the Gaza Strip.

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China and Russia: The New Axis of Evil by Con Coughlin

By on September 26th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19987/china-russia-axis-of-evil

Xi has been eyeing the South and East China Seas, coopting the Solomon Islands, building and militarizing his own artificial islands, and threatening not only Taiwan, but neighbours such as Australia, India and Japan.

It is more than twenty years since then US President George W. Bush first identified an “axis of evil” of rogue states that threatened global security, and now a new alliance of malign states is taking shape with Russia and China acting as its new lynchpins.

Back in 2002, when Bush first articulated his notion of rogue nations in his State of the Union address made in the wake of the September 11 attacks, he identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as states that, together with their terrorist allies, “constitute an axis of evil…by seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.”

Putin seized and occupied territory in Georgia in 2008, and Ukraine in 2014 (Crimea) and 2023, not to mention his relentless bellicosity towards the Baltic states and eastern Europe.

There are mounting concerns… in Western security circles that in return for providing any uplift in military support for Russia, Kim wants Moscow to provide technical assistance for his missile and satellite programmes, which would seriously enhance North Korea’s ability to threaten the West with its nuclear arsenal.

Any attempt by Russia to help improve North Korea’s military strength will also benefit China’s Communist rulers: it will provide North Korea with the ability to intensify the threat that all three countries pose to the US and its allies — and to global security.

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NO POSTING ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2023

By on September 24th, 2023

In observance of Yom Kippur.

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President Joe Biden: Stop the Second Armenian Genocide by Uzay Bulut

By on September 24th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19989/second-armenian-genocide

After besieging and starving 120,000 Armenians of the South Caucasus Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) since December 2022, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military offensive against Artsakh on September 19, subjecting the capital Stepanakert and other cities and villages to intensive fire using heavy artillery and drones.

“My Facebook feed is full of pictures of missing children since yesterday. Most of them were at schools when the Azerbaijani military attacked so they were separated from their families. The lack of electricity, mobile and internet disruptions complicate the search efforts.” — Anush Ghavalyan, journalist in Armenia, on X (formerly Twitter), September 20, 2023.

Artsakh has never been part of independent Azerbaijan. Artsakh — ruled by Armenian monarchs, and even by Persian rulers — has always preserved its Armenian identity.

Today, Azerbaijan is falsely claiming Artsakh as Azeri land, on the pretext that in the 1920s, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, as part of his strategy of divide and conquer, decreed that Artsakh should be part of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic as an autonomous oblast (province) even though Christian Armenia could not be less compatible with Muslim Azerbaijan.

“Failure to stand up to Azerbaijan could also result in an escalation that leads not only to the total destruction of the Armenians of Artsakh but also to a wider war in the region as Azerbaijan and its ally Turkey pursue territorial ambitions in southern Armenia and northern Iran.” — Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, on X (Twitter), September 19, 2023.

The US government also has influence regarding Azerbaijan. President Joe Biden can discourage any such expansionist projects with one strong phone call to Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev, by urging him to stop the invasion of Artsakh and Armenia if he does not want serious consequences. Those could include U.S. sanctions on Azeri government officials and an end to U.S. military assistance to Azerbaijan. The latter would be consistent with the FREEDOM Support Act. The US should also send a humanitarian airlift to the starving population of Artsakh — consistent with America’s heralded tradition of aiding at-risk populations.

The frightening question is: Is the US internationally regarded as having leadership anymore?

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Nixon and Kissinger: Bringing China in from the Cold Daryl McCann

By on September 24th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/09/nixon-and-kissinger-bringing-china-in-from-the-cold/

Henry Kissinger celebrated his hundredth birthday on May 27 this year. Xie Feng, China’s new ambassador to the United States, helped the former Secretary of State—described by Xie as an “old friend” of China—to mark the big day by personally congratulating Kissinger at his home in Connecticut. A few weeks later it was the centenarian Kissinger calling on the Chinese—with Chairman Xi no less—at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, the very place he had met Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971 to jumpstart the normalisation of relations between the US and China. The symbolism of 2023 was not lost on Beijing’s top officials, who emphasised the need for “peaceful co-existence” between the two superpowers. Kissinger, who claims to have made 101 trips to China since 1969, worries that all the good work he and Richard Nixon did back in 1971-72 to lay the foundations for an effective long-term relationship between Washington and Beijing is being undone, and that we are headed for a Sino-US war. A naysayer might counter that the work he and Nixon did is why we might be heading for war.

President Nixon’s state visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), from February 22 to 28, 1972, really was “the week that changed the world”—as Nixon proclaimed after numerous Mao-tai toasts on the final night of his stay. Kissinger, with his formidable intellect, played a crucial role in delivering Nixon’s pro-Beijing gambit. Twice he went behind the Bamboo Curtain to prepare the way for the historic assignation between his boss and Mao Zedong. Nevertheless, it is commonly accepted, even by Kissinger, that Nixon was first to articulate the advantages of conciliation with Communist China. From a pragmatic point of view, always an important aspect of Nixon’s political thinking, there were a multitude of reasons why such conciliation might be timely, many of them concerning the Vietnam War. When running for office in 1968, Nixon promised the American people he would seek “an honourable peace” in Vietnam. Not that he was alone in this. By the end of his time in office, even President Johnson was positioning himself as a prospective peacemaker, if only to help Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, in the 1968 election. In fact, John A. Farrell, in his well-documented and mostly non-jaundiced biography, Richard Nixon: The Life (2017), provides convincing evidence that Nixon “threw a monkey wrench” into Johnson’s attempt to spur negotiations with Hanoi in October 1968. Nixon, allegedly, convinced South Vietnam’s President Thieu to delay peace talks until after the election. Farrell comments: “Given the lives and human suffering at stake, and the internal discord that was ripping the United States apart, it is hard not to conclude that, of all Richard Nixon’s actions in a lifetime of politics, this was the most reprehensible.”

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Age and the Passing of the Torch: Sydney Williams

By on September 24th, 2023

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

For Queen Elizabeth, 1992 was her annus horribilis. I had my own – far less significant – diem horribilis last Sunday. Unlike Elizabeth’s year, some of what happened to me was, surely, age related. I had tested positive for Covid that morning. Then, feeling groggy and with slurred speech, I fell twice. Apart from a bumped head, bruised hip and ego, no damage was done. Nevertheless after the second fall, we called health services. Shortly thereafter I was taken by ambulance to a clinic and later to Middlesex Hospital. Tests showed no signs of a stroke or brain injury, and on Tuesday I came home, with a cane but that was because of the bruised hip.

The effects of age are not necessarily chronological, and they differ greatly from one individual to another. My father died at 58, while his father died one day shy of 90 and his mother at 92. While they became physically frail, both had their wits until they died. Cancer, heart disease, and senility are more common as one ages. Muscles lose tone and bones become brittle. But there are those like Henry Kissinger who are physically able and mentally alert at 100. Many people don’t let age stop them.  The Wall Street Journal, last June 25th, published an article, “Why High-Powered People are Working in Their 80s.” In it they quoted data from the Census Bureau that roughly 650,000 Americans over 80 were working last year. My younger brother who turns 81 in October continues to work as a partner in an investment firm. My father-in-law went to work most every day as an admiralty lawyer, until he died at 77. Old age, mental acuity, and employment are not incompatible. For some, but not for all.

While Republicans have been vocal about the President’s physical and mental failings – based on visible evidence of dementia – the question of age has now been raised by Independents and Democrats. An August CNN poll conducted by SSRS found that “roughly three-quarters of Americans say they’re seriously concerned that Biden’s age might negatively affect his current level of physical and mental competence…” On the other hand, Alex Keyssar of the Harvard Kennedy School takes a more nuanced view. According to the July 17, 2023 issue of the Harvard Gazette, he “believes Democrats who cite age as a major election concern are probably really expressing ‘a desire for energetic leadership, a force for new ideas, new spirit, and new energy.’” Perhaps. But it seems more likely that the Democrat leadership is concerned that fibs, gaffes, and stumbles now define Mr. Biden – not good for his re-election chances, especially when his Vice President’s approval numbers are lower than his.

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Why Did Taxpayers Fund Antisemitic Hatefest at Penn? Where is the demand that the taxpayer funds be returned and an investigation launched into how a Pennsylvania agency was deceived? Lori Lowenthal Marcus

By on September 24th, 2023

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/363150/why-did-taxpayers-fund-antisemitic-hatefest-at-penn/

Despite a sea of protests, the “Palestine Writes” festival at the University of Pennsylvania, which features a parade of convicted Palestinian terrorists, terrorism apologists and antisemites such as Roger Waters, whose concerts feature inflatable pigs marked with a Star of David and Waters dressed as a Nazi, will proceed as planned. 

That has been widely covered. What has received little attention, however, is that the anti-Jewish hatefest is funded in part by Pennsylvania taxpayers through a grant issued by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In other words, Pennsylvania taxpayers are helping fund this river of hate. 

After public opposition rose about the event, the Council claimed its support was merely for an “anthology” of Palestinian writers. Now, backed by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, the Council has demanded that its insignia be removed from the festival’s website and promotional materials. 

Removing a state logo, however, is hardly enough while the money remains in the pockets of the celebrators of Jew hatred and government defrauders. Where is the demand that the taxpayer funds be returned and an investigation launched into how a Pennsylvania agency was deceived? 

Just to recap the reason for all this, here’s a list of some of the speakers at this hatefest disguised as literary festival: 

Mays a/k/a Mayss Abu Ghosh, a convicted terrorist, works with the terrorist groups Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and explicitly supports violence as the “only road to Palestine.” 

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Corbin K. Barthold Chronicler of the Realm With his History of England, Peter Ackroyd has produced the work of a lifetime.

By on September 24th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/chronicler-of-the-realm

The English rarely maintain intensity in political matters,” writes Peter Ackroyd in the sixth and final volume of his History of England. “Sooner or later, their instinct is to wipe the sweat from the demagogue’s collar and propose a soothing cup of tea.” The English “still live deep in the past,” and “[c]ontinuity, rather than change, is the measure of the country.” Yet a country’s history is a tale that its people tell themselves. “Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance,” and “the writing of history is often another way of defining chaos,” Ackroyd observes. We choose what goes on the list.

How we choose is an increasingly contested issue. Almost 70 years ago, Clement Attlee mockingly proposed that Winston Churchill rename his History of the English-Speaking Peoples “Things in History That Interested Me.” Today, grand-sweep narrative history is even more out of style. But if anyone is still allowed to chronicle a nation, that chronicler is Ackroyd, and the nation his native England. He has produced acclaimed works on Chaucer and Shakespeare, Newton and More, Blake and Dickens. He has written books about English ghosts, English rivers, English imagination, and, naturally, London, the great English city. The History of England, whose entries appeared between 2011 and 2021, is the work of a lifetime.

The basic outline of English history is quickly told. Hunter-gatherers and tribal peoples occupied what is now the island of Great Britain for hundreds of thousands of years. Little is known about them. They are “races without a history,” Ackroyd says; before the coming of the Romans, “all lies in mist and twilight.” Not for nothing did Churchill begin his history with his famous line about the proconsul of Gaul, Gaius Julius Caesar, turning his gaze upon Britain. Yet we know surprisingly little about the Roman period, either. “The Roman governance of England lasted for 350 years,” Ackroyd reflects, “and yet it is the least-known phase in the country’s history.” The only famous figure of the era was not Roman. Boudica, queen of the Iceni, burned Londinium to the ground in A.D. 61. A layer of oxidized iron—the residue of Boudica’s rage—can still be found under the city’s streets.

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