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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15216/china-influence-middle-east

In what could prove to be a serious challenge to the long-standing hegemony Washington has enjoyed in the region, Beijing is seeking to deepen its commercial ties in the Arab world, thereby encouraging Arab states to look to China to safeguard their future security needs rather than maintaining their traditional reliance on the US.

Beijing is particularly keen to stress China’s high-tech capacities in areas such as its position as a global leader in building 5G telecoms networks, as well as its Belt and Road Initiative, the ambitious economic plan to build trade networks across the world which is designed to deepen commercial ties with the Middle East.

The US, however, might bear in mind that “withdrawing from ‘forever wars'” might be seen by adversaries of the West as an invitation to move in.

The confusion among Arab leaders over the Trump administration’s policy towards its traditional allies in the region has opened the way for China to intensify its efforts to extend its influence in the Middle East.

In what could prove to be a serious challenge to the long-standing hegemony Washington has enjoyed in the region, Beijing is seeking to deepen its commercial ties in the Arab world, thereby encouraging Arab states to look to China to safeguard their future security needs rather than maintaining their traditional reliance on the US.

Beijing is particularly keen to stress China’s high-tech capacities in areas such as its position as a global leader in building 5G telecoms networks, as well as its Belt and Road Initiative, the ambitious economic plan to build trade networks across the world which is designed to deepen commercial ties with the Middle East.

Other aspects of China’s bid to expand its commercial interests in the region include Chinese-built communications networks, fast railways, state-of-the-art airports and ports costing hundreds of billions of dollars.

Many oil-rich Gulf states, such as the United Arab Emirates, have already developed close ties with Beijing, with Emirati ministers saying they are keen to advance bilateral relations with China.

https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/furey-the-rise-of-the-organized-muslim-vote-in-canada

A number of puzzled columnists and policy experts are currently trying to figure out why it was that Canada under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has broken with its tradition of voting down United Nations resolutions that denounce Israel and – as happened last week – joining the pile-on to condemn the only Jewish state in the world.

So far the working conclusion they’ve arrived at is that it was done because Trudeau covets a two-year seat at the Security Council and this is one way to win over votes at the notoriously anti-Israel body. That’s no doubt part of it.

There could be something else at play though: Maybe this is just what Canadian voters want. Or at least what one highly motivated and increasingly influential segment of the electorate wants.

In the months leading up to the election, a group called The Canadian Muslim-Vote (TCMV) was unapologetic in predicting the power the organized Muslim vote could yield over the 2019 federal election results.

“The Canadian Muslim community has the numbers to decide the winners and losers this election, which directly impacts the composition of the government we will have,” TCMV executive director Ali Manek wrote in a press release that went out on October 17 – just days before the election. “Muslim voters have turned out to the Advance Polls over Muslim Vote Weekend and we will be there on election day because we understand that we speak the loudest when we vote.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/brexit-ho/

The Tories have run a solid campaign so far, while Labour has stumbled.

After two weeks of Britain’s election campaign, which now has less than three weeks to run, the lack of excitement over its result is palpable. The national polls have been more or less steady since the starting gun was fired, with the Tories hovering around 40 percent support, Labour rising slightly to 30 percent, the Liberal Democrats stuck around 16 percent, and the Brexit party falling to single figures. The weekend saw a slight strengthening of all these trends, with the Tory percentage settling down in the mid-40s, for a lead over Labour of well into double figures. If repeated on Election Day, that would produce a solid Tory majority of about between 40 and 60 seats. As the pundits say, however, these figures could all change very rapidly under the influence of events.

The problem for all the opposition parties is that there haven’t been many events — at least not the kind that change political fortunes. Iain Martin, who edits the Reaction website, makes the original point that Britain’s parliamentary politics have been fizzing with such neurotic energy in the last two years that the conventional exercises of the election campaign — manifestos, leadership debates, extremists slipping through the net into candidacies, etc. — seem fairly dull by comparison. A truly big story was needed to provide a shock to the system and to disturb its slow, inevitable progress rightwards. Unfortunately for Labour, the biggest news story, and not just in the U.K., has been the scandal of Prince Andrew’s relationship with the late, disgraced financier, Jeffrey Epstein (and allegedly with at least one of the underaged women in Epstein’s entourage), which the prince’s BBC interview succeeded in the near-impossible task of making worse. It’s a scandal with legs that looks like running longer than the West End hit No Sex Please, We’re British. The strictly political effect of this scandal, however, has been to distract attention from the election altogether and so, in all likelihood, to freeze the Tory lead.