RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/hong-kong-christians-fear-reprisals-chinese-communist-party/

The restrictions under which they may practice their faith increasingly resemble those of their coreligionists living in the mainland.

Hong Kong’s Christians fear reprisals from China’s Communist Party. A national-security law was passed on June 30 by China’s Standing Committee, superseding Hong Kong’s legislature. For China’s Communist Party, this measure was necessary to guarantee stability after more than a year of protests in Hong Kong. The new law ends the region’s autonomy and the hope that the demands of pro-democracy protesters will be met any time soon. Christians who participated in the demonstrations now believe that they will be targeted if they don’t toe the party line.

In mainland China, Christians who defy the Chinese government’s attempts at control of their churches reportedly face persecution, arrest, and detention. Underground churches are destroyed and crosses burned. Translations of the Bible must be approved by China’s Communist Party and often modified to meet its demands. In Hong Kong, however, Christians enjoyed religious freedom guaranteed by the region’s legal independence, which provided its citizens basic rights including freedom of expression and religion. Christians, more than 10 percent of Hong Kong’s population, held peaceful rallies during the protests by singing hymns to affirm their faith. Thousands took to the streets, and many Protestants and Catholics united to defend a common cause with pro-democracy protesters.

The national-security law in Hong Kong now prohibits secession, sedition, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces. Those terms are so broadly defined that they can be used arbitrarily to prohibit any form of dissent. What worries religious minorities, and Catholics and other Christians in particular, are the law’s collusion and subversion and clauses.

The sedition clause effectively prohibits Christians from criticizing the Chinese government. Before the national-security measure was passed, many Christians in Hong Kong had spoken out against injustices in mainland China. “Now, many refrain from voicing any concerns toward issues that can be defined as ‘state secrets,’” a Catholic lawyer who works in a financial-regulatory body told me. Like others quoted in his article, she asked for anonymity, for fear of reprisals.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/latest-racists-white-rape-victims-muslims-raymond-ibrahim/

The widespread notion idea that, whenever the races clash only minorities can ever be victims, is hardly limited to the recent protests/riots in America.  Elements of such thinking often appear in other, especially bizarre contexts.

For example, British women, including actual rape victims, who draw attention to the phenomenon of “Asian” (Muslim Pakistani) sex grooming gangs, are also under attack by the “woke” establishment.

Recently in the UK, Sarah Champion (pictured above), a Labor politician and MP for Rotherham (the epicenter of sex grooming), was accused of “fanning the flames of racial hatred” and “acting like a neo-fascist murderer.”  Her crime?  She had dared to assert that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.”

The same elements accusing Champion of being a “murderer” also characterized the UK’s anti-extremism program, Prevent, as being “built upon a foundation of Islamophobia and racism.”

A few weeks earlier, an article titled, “I was raped by Rotherham grooming gang—now I still face racist abuse online,” appeared.  In it, a British woman (alias, “Ella”) revealed that her Muslim rapists called her “a white c*nt, a white wh*re, and a white b*tch,” during the more than 100 times she was raped in her youth by the Pakistani grooming gang.

“We need to understand racially and religiously aggravated crime if we are going to prevent it and protect people from it and if we are going to prosecute correctly for it,” she said in her recent interview: 

Prevention, protection and prosecution—all of them are being hindered because we are neglecting to properly address the religious and racist aspects of grooming gang crimes….  It’s telling them that it’s OK to hate white people.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-way-to-curb-chinese-intimidation-11594680594?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Facebook, Google and Twitter announced this month that they will refuse to comply with customer-information requests from Hong Kong authorities until the companies review the implications of a new Chinese security law designed to suppress dissent in the territory. If the tech companies don’t cave in, it will be a rare instance of Western businesses standing firm against Beijing’s intimidation.

Corporations typically kowtow, fearful of losing access to China’s massive market. International airlines, including American, Delta and United, changed their websites so that Taipei isn’t listed as being in Taiwan. The general manager of the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets apologized for tweeting an image that read “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” Mercedes-Benz apologized for an English-language Instagram post that included an innocuous quote from the Dalai Lama. The Big Four accounting firms issued statements criticizing Hong Kong protests after some of their employees took out an ad supporting them.

Using its economic power to pressure Western corporations is a key element of Chinese statecraft. The Communist Party keenly appreciates that Western entities are far more credible than Chinese government or media. China scrutinizes statements by Western companies, focuses on those that are even mildly critical of its behavior, and threatens them on social media with economic retaliation and blacklisting.

Such threats often appear to emanate from private Chinese citizens. But given the government’s heavy censorship of Chinese social-media platforms, they inevitably bear the party’s imprimatur. Moreover, the Chinese government almost always backs up the statements attributed to its citizens, waging a joint campaign, so that the language of these “private” complaints tracks Communist Party propaganda.

Beijing also attempts to suppress authentic Chinese voices critical of its human-rights abuses. One of us (Ms. Lin) represented Canada in the Miss World 2016 finals in Washington. The London-based Miss World Organization—most of whose sponsors are Chinese companies—isolated her from the media during the pageant and threatened to disqualify her after she was seen speaking informally to a Boston Globe columnist. The ban on her contact with journalists was ameliorated only after intense public pressure.