RUTHFULLY YOURS

To say that the Japanese ruled Taiwan well is a misstatement…efficiently and brutally are better words. Furthermore, there is a lesson from Taiwan. Nixon/Kissinger betrayed Taiwan by accepting Communist China’s goal of absorbing Taiwan into “one China.”Jimmy Carter removed the US Embassy to Peking, ducking principles and loyalty to Taiwan a productive, capitalist nation building real democracy. The United Nations effectively barred Taiwan from independent membership. Taiwan persevered with its building of democracy, and stuck to its guns on independence…good for them.Israel should pay heed….rsk
When the leaders of China and Taiwan met last weekend for the first time since 1949, the unseen presences in the room were the ghosts of Mao Zedong, the Communist Party’s Great Helmsman, and his bitter rival, the gaunt Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. They had been adversaries in the Chinese civil war for more than two decades, before Mao’s victorious peasant revolutionaries took power in Beijing that year.

Chiang was driven into exile on Taiwan, taking with him his Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang. The enmity of Mao and Chiang endured across a Cold War frontier—for a time, their troops hurled shells and propaganda messages at each other across the narrow strait separating Taiwan from the mainland—but they always shared a dream, born of their long struggle: “One China.”

The unification of China and Taiwan has been the sacred mission of every Communist leader since Mao, including the current president, Xi Jinping. And though the idea of “One China” today commands virtually no popular support on Taiwan, which prizes its fledgling democracy, it nevertheless clings to life as a legacy within the Kuomintang, the party of the country’s current president, Ma Ying-jeou.

The sophistication, resources and scale of Friday’s attacks in the heart of Paris underscored to officials across the globe that the challenges of containing extremist violence have reached a new level, and that the calculus of the Western effort against terrorism had fundamentally changed.

European governments in the past few months have sought various means to guard against national security threats, with some erecting barbed-wire fences to stem the flow of migrants, while others, including France, devoted hundreds of millions of euros to strengthening electronic surveillance systems.

Friday’s attacks highlight the weakness of those strategies in a world where global extremism flows across nations. It also raises questions about transnational agreements on open-border travel that have been a bedrock of modern Europe. In his first comments to the nation after the attack, French President François Hollande announced the closing of his country’s borders.

French authorities didn’t immediately name a culprit, but the nature of the attacks left little doubt they were the work of a well-organized terrorist group. A French official said Friday the attacks were “unfortunately well-prepared and coordinated.” The apparent use of explosives and the likelihood that a significant number of people were involved were particularly alarming to U.S. counterterrorism officials.

The international campaign to degrade and defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria is showing its first signs of real life in nearly a year. And not a moment too soon. As we went to press Friday night, a wave of shooting and bombing attacks in the streets of Paris was another grim reminder that what used to be called the war on terror is escalating—and still global.

On Friday the Pentagon reported that it was “reasonably certain” it had killed Mohammed Emwazi, the ISIS executioner better known as Jihadi John, in an airstrike in eastern Syria. Among Emwazi’s many victims were American journalists Steve Sotloff and James Foley, Japanese reporters Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto, and British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning.

If confirmed, Emwazi’s death will deprive ISIS of its most notorious spokesman and puncture jihadi illusions that their Mideast strongholds are immune to U.S. reprisals. It also comes on the heels of ISIS’s loss of the Iraqi city of Sinjar after an assault by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters supported by U.S. air power. The Yazidi city had been mostly empty of inhabitants after ISIS massacred some 2,000 of its people, causing a mass exodus. Retaking the city will help Kurds sever the links between the ISIS strongholds of Raqqa in eastern Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq.

“If only we Arabs,” they wrote, “who kill people cruelly and wholesale, cared as much about people as the Jews care about animals.” We often hear Arabs privately saying, “the Zionists have never done to us what we do to ourselves.”

Every Palestinian youth knows that the weekly riots at the “traditional friction points” serve as social events, later used by Palestinians operatives for propaganda.

As our elders have said for years: “Falastin [‘Palestine’ in Arabic] begins with falas [bankruptcy] and ends with teen [mud].”

Palestinian bloggers were amazed when Israelis protested the cruel slaughter of chickens in poultry-packing plants, and during epidemics. “If only we Arabs,” they wrote, “who kill people cruelly and wholesale, cared as much about people as the Jews care about animals.”

Civilian cameras often record events of startling cruelty carried out in Arab countries, in areas of conflict. We often hear Arabs privately saying, “The Zionists have never done to us what we do to ourselves.” This is usually said by Syrians, who have hated the Jews for generations, when they give their thanks for the medical treatment they receive in Israel. Despite the hatred fostered by Hamas, after the most recent military operation, many Gazans admitted that the IDF did in fact warn civilians before attacking terrorist targets protected by “human shields.”