RUTHFULLY YOURS

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Pentagon said Thursday that there have been “very serious incidents” of the Chinese interfering with flights at the U.S. base in Djibouti by pointing laser beams into the cockpits.

“There have been two minor injuries,” spokeswoman Dana White told a press briefing. “This activity poses a true — a threat to our airmen.” The C-130 crew members suffered eye injuries.

White said the U.S. government has “formally demarched the Chinese government, and we’ve requested that the Chinese investigate these incidents.”

The U.S. has had a military presence in Djibouti since 2002; the Horn of Africa location at Camp Lemonnier allows for counterterrorism operations and regional training.

In 2017, China opened up an outpost in Djibouti as well, close to the American base.

White didn’t have a total number of the laser-pointing incidents, but “it’s enough that we’re concerned, that we demarched them and we’ve asked them to investigate it. It’s a serious matter. And so we’re taking it very seriously.”

On the proximity of Chinese base to the American base, White said “these are sovereign questions” and “the Djibouti government is free to work with who they want to.”

Russia’s aggression into Ukraine came in direct violation of its obligations under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

“After four years of war, Russia has at least 260,000 troops deployed along the Ukrainian border,” ready to advance. — Oleksandr Turchynov, Chairman of Ukraine’s National Defense and Security Council, April 13, 2018.

The First Deputy Head of the Ukrainian Security Service, Viktor Kononenko, recently reported that Russia might be planning another attempt to destabilize Ukraine in the fall “under the pretext of protecting the Russian-speaking population”.

This April marks the fourth year of the ongoing war in Ukraine between the Ukrainian military and Russian backed separatists in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine, also known as the Donbas region. Prior to the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine in April 2014, Russia annexed Crimea.

Russia’s aggression into Ukraine came in direct violation of its obligations under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Under the memorandum, in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons, Russia reaffirmed its “obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine” and promised that none of its weapons would ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

Now, the question of further Russian or Russian-backed military operations in Ukraine has surfaced. In March, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko asserted that Russia has been strengthening its military presence on the border of Ukraine. According to Poroshenko:

“For more than one year, we have been repelling Russia’s military aggression on the front line… In his latest report General Zabrodsky reported in detail on the strengthening of the military presence of the Russian Federation along our border and continued stay of Russia’s regular troops in the occupied territories”.

Poroshenko explained that the Russians have, since 2014, deployed and reorganized their forces in a way that will be able to support a rapid invasion both from the north and from east of Ukraine. “Several mechanized divisions are fully prepared for intervention,” he said.

Speaking in English to reach the widest international audience possible, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu presented Iran’s own documents, videos, blueprints, and files, proving what opponents of the Iran agreement stated three years ago: Iran lied about its nuclear weapons development. Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Iran continues to lie.

You may well know that Iran’s leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons. You can listen to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei: “I stress that the Islamic Republic has never been after nuclear weapons.” … Well, tonight, I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time.

After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret nuclear files. In 2017, Iran moved its nuclear weapons files to a highly secret location in Tehran. …

So this atomic archive clearly shows that Iran planned, at the highest levels, to continue work related to nuclear weapons under different guises and using the same personnel. …

Iran was required by the nuclear deal to come clean to the International Atomic Energy Agency about its nuclear program. This was an explicit condition for implementing the nuclear deal. Iran has to come clean. So in December 2015, the IAEA published its final assessment of what it called the military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program. This is the report. …

Here’s what Iran actually told the IAEA. It said, Iran denied the existence of a coordinated program aimed at the development of a nuclear explosive device, and specifically denied – get this – specifically denied the existence of the Amad plan. The material proves otherwise, that Iran authorized, initiated, and funded Project Amad, a coordinated program aimed at the development of a nuclear explosive device. …

In the last two weeks, stunning developments, one right after another, have suggested the possibility that the Korean War armistice will be turned into a peace treaty, North Korea will surrender its most destructive weapons, and the two Koreas will merge into one state.

How did peace break out in perhaps the world’s most troubled region? You can thank, in large measure, President Donald Trump. That does not mean, however, that he will be able to turn the promising situation he created into an enduring peace. In short, Trump the disrupter must become Trump the disciplined leader.

Last Saturday, Kim Jong Un, seemingly unprompted, promised to suspend “mid-range and intercontinental ballistic rocket tests” and to close his “nuclear test site in northern area,” a reference to the Punggye-ri facility. Hours ago, the office of South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced that Kim will allow foreign observers to witness the closure of the site next month.

Friday, Kim and Moon, at their historic summit, signed the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity, and Unification of the Korean Peninsula. The declaration, among other things, signals the intention of the two Koreas to formally end the Korean War by signing a peace treaty, expresses the desire for reuniting the two Korean states, and commits both leaders to rid their peninsula of nuclear weapons.

Given Turkey’s inhospitable treatment of non-Muslims throughout the ages, it is the height of hypocrisy for its foreign minister to complain about Europe’s attitude towards Muslims, which has been the opposite of Islamophobic.

To refresh Çavuşoğlu’s memory, a review of Turkey’s record is in order.

By proposing to block all criticism of Islam on the grounds that it is “extremist, anti-immigrant, xenophobic and Islamophobic,” Çavuşoğlu is revealing that he would welcome banning free speech to protect a religious ideology.

At an event held in on April 11 to unveil the 2017 European Islamophobia Report — released by the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research — Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Çavuşoğlu called on EU governments to criminalize Islamophobia.

“There is no ideology or terminology called ‘Islamism’; There is only one Islam and it means ‘peace,'” he declared — incorrectly: salaam means peace; Islam means submission. He also claimed that populist politicians are “increasingly engaging in extremist, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and Islamophobic rhetoric to get a few more votes,” and that “centrist politicians are… using a similar rhetoric to get back the votes they have lost.”

Urging all politicians to recognize Islamophobia as “a hate crime and a form of racism” in their constitutions, Çavuşoğlu accused European judiciaries of applying a double standard by not paying as much attention to Islamophobia as they do to anti-Semitism. Using the Holocaust as an analogy, he continued: “There is no need to relive Auschwitz or wait for Muslims to be burned in gas chambers like Jewish people.”

Last week, Emmanuel Micron, I mean Macron, visited Washington, had dinner at the White House, and gave a speech on Capitol Hill in which he referred to Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast as a novel, identified the French architect of Washington, D.C., whom Americans know as Pierre L’Enfant, by his middle name, Charles, and attributed a famous line by Ronald Reagan to Teddy Roosevelt. The line in question was the one about how freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.

There was, in fact, a good deal of rhetoric in his speech about freedom – and the threats thereto. Given what’s going on in France these days, that would only make sense. But his approach to his country’s – and the West’s – current travails was, to say the least, curious. On 9/11, asserted Macron, “many Americans had an unexpected rendezvous with death.” How poetic! How French! And how inappropriate a way to refer to thousands of people being evaporated one fine Tuesday morning. He made it sound as if death by jihad had been their divinely ordained destiny – as if the hijackers of those planes had been instruments of some cosmic will.

Macron went on to mention the “terrible terrorist attacks” that have struck his own country in recent years. “It is a horrific price,” he pronounced, “to pay for freedom, for democracy.” Meaning what? In what sense are such attacks the “price” we “pay for freedom”? Did Macron mean something like what London mayor Sadiq Khan meant when he said that living with terrorism is “part and parcel of living in a big city”? I’d say the people who died on 9/11 were paying for American leaders’ blithe indifference to the existential danger of Islam – and that those who’ve died in more recent terror attacks in Europe were paying for their own leaders’ cowardly irresolution (or outright defeatism) on the subject.

Macron might have said something gutsy about his fellow politicians’ culpability in the violent deaths of terrorist victims. But no. Like every other European-establishment political hack, he posed as a hero of freedom. Some hero: he didn’t dare breathe the word Islam or Muslim or even jihad. But what else to expect from a man who, as French author Guy Millière noted in March, has called for Arabic to taught in every French high school, for “cathedral mosques” to be built in every major French city, and for enhanced measures to be taken against critics of Islam?