RUTHFULLY YOURS

TAIPEI—In 1996, when China tried to intimidate voters on Taiwan by firing missiles close to the island, U.S. President Bill Clinton swiftly sent in two aircraft-carrier battle groups. His blunt message to Beijing: back off.

America was at the zenith of its power, while China was virtually defenseless at sea and in the air, so the Pentagon could afford to act with swagger. A conflict, had China been foolish enough to provoke one, would have exposed its chronic military backwardness. Confronted, Beijing was forced to yield.

Today, a gathering crisis in the South China Sea over China’s massive island building underscores how dramatically the military balance has shifted in East Asia, not just over Taiwan but everywhere within reach of Chinese missiles, fighters and submarines. The U.S. isn’t shying away; it is planning a naval challenge any day now around the Spratly Islands, where China has equipped one of its dredged platforms with a runway long enough to land military jets. But the White House has been agonizing for months about the risks.

Don’t expect aircraft carriers. They’re now targets for the world’s first operational antiship ballistic missiles. Besides, shock and awe isn’t part of any rational game plan these days against China, whose military spending has been growing by an annual average of 11% since 1996, narrowing the military gap with America faster than almost anybody thought possible.

Ali Mohammed Al-Nimr, arrested in Saudi Arabia at the age of seventeen, has been sentenced to beheading and crucifixion.

Last week, two Saudi human rights activists were sentenced to jail for illegally establishing a human rights organization, questioning the credibility and objectivity of the judiciary, interfering with the Saudi Human Rights Commission (one can imagine what that is like), and describing Saudi Arabia as a police state.

Karl Andree, a 74-year-old British grandfather and a UK citizen who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for the last year, is due to receive 350 lashes for unpardonable crime of being caught with some homemade wine.

British Justice Minister Michael Gove has now reportedly insisted that the UK could not possibly enter into a contract to train Saudi prison guards.

The naïve Western leaders are those who expect our countries to carry on with “business as usual” with a regime that sentences our citizens to flogging, and that beheads and crucifies political dissidents.

The naïve politicians are those who think the publics of the West do not know what a human rights sewer Saudi Arabia is, or think that we will put up with it. If that were ever the case, that time is over.

Is international opinion on Saudi Arabia finally shifting? For years, one of the great embarrassments and contradictions of Western diplomacy has been the intimacy of the West’s relationship with the House of Saud. Of course, both Britain and America have some responsibility for installing and then maintaining the Saudi royal family in their position. Were it not for this circumstance, in addition to the world’s largest oil reserves, the people we now call the Saudi royal family would be neither richer nor any more famous than any other group of goat-herders in the region.

Kenya’s president told CNN over the weekend that the United States’ pressure on his country to ensure gay rights is not in sync with where his society is.

On his summertime visit to the country, President Obama spoke with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta privately on the issue and publicly in a joint press conference.

“As an African-American in the United States, I am painfully aware of the history of what happens when people are treated differently under the law,” Obama said then. “I’m unequivocal on this.”

“I’ve been consistent all across Africa on this. I believe in the principle of treating people equally under the law. The state should not discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation.”

Kenyatta said in an interview aired Sunday that this pressure isn’t taking into account the wishes of Kenyan society.

“Let me make it clear to you, I’ll put it this way. All right? Think first and foremost we’re all saying that whatever society you come from, the principal aim is that you must give the people, you know, their right to choose. Now, where we are, and on the level of development that we are at, I am not saying that these people don’t have their rights. That’s not what I’m saying. I am just saying that the majority, the majority in our society do not wish to legalize this issue of gay rights,” Kenyatta said.

Mama Merkel’s Muslim ‘Migrants’

Everything which is now taking place before our eyes threatens to have explosive consequences for the whole of Europe. Europe’s response is madness. We must acknowledge that the European Union’s misguided immigration policy is responsible for this situation.

Irresponsibility is the mark of every European politician who holds out the promise of a better life to immigrants and encourages them to leave everything behind and risk their lives in setting out for Europe. If Europe does not return to the path of common sense, it will find itself laid low in a battle for its fate.

– Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban

The crowds are gone from the Keleti central train station, and few middle-eastern faces now appear on the streets of Budapest. But the recent tidal wave of humanity – whether deemed “migrants,” “refugees” or, more accurately, “unarmed invaders” – has left a new resolution implanted in Hungary and, indeed, this part of Europe that once labored under the Muslim yoke. And that impression is: this much and no more.