RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17944/china-military-modernization

“[W]e are being more effectively challenged militarily today than at any…any other time in our history.” — US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, September 20, 2021.

China aims to “complete national defense and military modernization by 2035.” — Jamestown.org, March 26, 2021

China’s modernization of its military is taking place on all levels.

“The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] … seeks a force capable of winning a number of high-end regional conflicts, including the forcible unification of Taiwan, while dissuading, deterring, or defeating third-party military intervention.” — Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, before the Senate US Armed Services Committee, April 26, 2021.

“Hypersonic weapons, a full range of anti-satellite systems, plus cyber, electronic warfare, and challenging air to air missiles are all part of the growing inventory of Chinese capabilities.” — US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, September 20, 2021.

“In 2019, the private PRC-based company Ziyan UAV exhibited armed swarming drones….. During the past five years, China has made achievements in AI-enabled unmanned surface vessels, which China plans to use to patrol and bolster its territorial claims in the South China Sea.” — The Pentagon, Annual 2020 Report to Congress on the Chinese military.

“We’re not a decade ahead.” — Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman and CEO of Google and the chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, National Defense Magazine, October 30, 2020.

“Since 2010, I have been pounding the drum about how serious a threat the People’s Republic of China’s military modernization program is to the ability of the United States to project power into the Indo Pacific, and more broadly our ability to protect our interests and values around the world…. While America is still the dominant military power on the planet, we are being more effectively challenged militarily today than at any…any other time in our history.” These were the words of US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Convention on September 20.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17865/anne-marie-waters

Anne Marie Dorothy Waters is a politician and activist in the United Kingdom. She founded and leads the For Britain Party.

“We live in a UK where free speech is a thing of the past, our media is merely a mouthpiece of government diktats, and where decent people are demonized and smeared for holding informed opinions. We are in a Britain that resembles the communist Soviet Union: fear, censorship, excessive government control.”

“Please do not forget that many Muslims, especially women and children, are the victims, as well. Those people are entirely unrepresented.”

“We do not want to ‘Build Back Better’ as the globalists keep demanding; we want to Bring Back Britain.”

“The political and media elite are entirely wedded to the global project of bringing down nation-states. This cannot be done without mass migration.”

“We are a society of science, and reason, and evidence, and just as we achieve that, we open to the door to medievalism and are catapulted back in time. Secularism and free speech, equal rights between the sexes, the protection of children, all of this is being sacrifice for ‘political correctness'”.

“Most of these people are coming here illegally and this is simply allowed to take place while we watch. What is even harder to take is how these illegal immigrants are elevated above the native population. There are thousands of homeless British people in the UK, and yet illegal immigrants are housed in hotels until permanent accommodation is provided to them. No such relief or help is available to homeless Britons.”

“Now that we are about to receive a massive influx of Afghans, some of whom are already responsible for crimes throughout Europe, there are plans in place to give them homes, medical care, training and employment, and even free university attendance. Britons must pay thousands of pounds per year per year to attend university. It is a profound injustice.”

“White children are actively taught that they are racists, colonisers and oppressors.”

“First and foremost, we must stop the immigration. We cannot deal with these problems while the borders are still open…. The rights of terrorists and rapists are considered more important than the safety of the British public….We must scrap all ‘hate speech’ laws and allow our citizens to speak freely. We must enact laws that prevent the press smearing political candidates as ‘fascists’ for daring to tell the truth….We must… deport those who engage in honour violence, FGM, or child marriage… It is also absolutely essential that all of those who express support for jihad, who support terrorists, or who want sharia law, and who are not British citizens, are deported from our country…. These steps are just the beginning but if we were to take them, we would be in a completely different place. The world would no longer see Britain as a soft touch or a hub of jihad.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17941/france-nationalism-zemmour

Like Macron five years ago, Zemmour is seen as the outsider opposed to incompetent and corrupt insiders.

He seems unaware of the difference between American “secularism,” in which the state sees itself as protector of all religions, and the French laïcité in which the state regards all religions as potential or actual threats.

The problem that France faces comes from political groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafist groups, Khomeinist circles and home-grown militants radicalized through the Internet.

Although the next French presidential election is months away, the way the media in Paris along with French chattering classes are behaving, one might think that we are on the eve of polling day.

Turn on any TV channel and open any newspaper and you are likely to run into oodles of speculation about the journey to the Élysée Palace.

One reason may be even the main one, for this premature interest is a 63-year old journalist who has cast himself as a modern version of the Prophet Jeremiah to depict gloom and forecasting doom for French democracy.

The man in question is Éric Zemmour, who has been lurking on the margins of French journalism, always in minor roles for almost three decades and, yet, is now entering as the rising star of French politics on the right or, as his enemies claim, the far right.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17931/eu-iran-human-rights-violations

To execute political prisoners, Iran’s judiciary accuses defendants of vaguely defined charges labeled as “national security crimes.” These “crimes” include moharebeh (“enmity against God”), ifsad fil arz (“sowing corruption on Earth”), and baghi (“armed rebellion”).

It is not only the number of executions that is appalling, but also the nature of some of them. Executions have involved minor children, women and individuals from ethnic and religious minority groups. Although Iran has ratified the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, the government has made no effort to alter the country’s Islamic Penal Code, which allows girls as young as nine to be executed.

In addition, children, women and men are routinely tortured during interrogations and behind bars. They are forced to confess. They are denied access to lawyers and due process. They are denied family visits and medical care.

The ruling mullahs of Iran refuse to halt their executions and human rights violations, or to reform their repressive system, because they feel no pressure from the usually moralizing European Union. So they act with full impunity. The informed silence of the EU therefore makes it a willing accessory to their crimes.

It is beyond repulsive that the EU — the same EU that incessantly lectures the world about human rights — not only ignores the Iranian regime’s unspeakable human violations, but that it also happily continues to do “business as usual” with the leaders of Iran’s cruel and inhuman regime.

The European Union, which endlessly and hypocritically lectures the international community on human rights, is turning a blind eye on the Iranian regime’s expanding human rights violations.

EU special envoy Enrique Mora, despite the Iranian regime’s horrendous and brutal human rights abuses, traveled to Iran in October and discussed “mutual interests” with Iran’s leaders. Meanwhile, Iran’s regime has been executing people “at an alarming rate”, and, according to a recent report by Amnesty International, was “the top executioner in the Middle East” last year.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-sees-a-new-type-of-war-accusing-belarus-of-weaponizing-migrants-11636724990?st=xmc1a0uwn2fylgm&reflink=article_email_share

WARSAW—For years, thousands of U.S. and NATO troops have stood guard in Poland—a presence designed to deter an invasion by Russian troops and tanks.

This week, the Western alliance faced a less conventional challenge: At least 2,000 people from the Middle East trying to cross into Poland from Russia’s closest ally, Belarus.

European officials accuse Belarus of abetting human traffickers bringing migrants into their country and then of funneling the new arrivals toward the border in an effort to provoke a crisis—things Belarus denies.

Tensions are rising. Poland has deployed more soldiers along the frontier to keep the would-be crossers out. Russia says it views the troop movements as a threat and has responded by sending bombers to patrol over Belarus.

Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s authoritarian president, noted in a press conference that the Russian warplanes were capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

“What we are dealing with is a new type of war,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in a Facebook post Thursday. “This is a war in which civilians and media messages are the ammunition.”

Poland’s government says Belarus is engaged in an “act of hybrid aggression” to provoke a clash at the borders—playing out in full view of the world. Other Western officials say they think Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to create a dramatic spectacle and undermine the West, but stop far short of actual armed conflict.

The defense ministers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania warned Thursday of the risk of military confrontation. Russia, which has denied any involvement, said the European Union should speak with Belarus to resolve the crisis.

Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin said its neighbors’ military activities—particularly in Poland—are unrelated to the migrant crisis and may signal they “are ready to unleash a conflict in which they want to involve Europe in solving their internal political problems, as well as problems related to relations within the European Union.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17889/turkey-erdogan-sharia-alliance

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist ambitions seem to be seeking an international role in post-U.S. Afghanistan in alliance with the Taliban, Qatar, Pakistan and Malaysia. The trouble is, Turkey, among the new sharia alliance in the making, is the only country with institutional ties to the Western world.

Biden has weakened himself and his country so badly that the superpower was reduced to the point of being blackmailed by NATO’s only Islamist member. Turkey’s Defense Minister Hulusi Akar has made it clear: “If the U.S. is to be in the Middle East, it must cooperate with Turkey.”

Afghanistan is not Erdoğan’s only pro-sharia ambition after the U.S. withdrawal… Turkey ramped up its drone attacks on Yazidis in Iraq’s Sinjar district….. “The Turkish drone strikes increasingly threaten to undercut refugee repatriation inside Iraq and create space for the Islamic State to regroup, as the most effective Kurdish groups fighting ISIS are Sinjar’s grassroots Kurdish and Yazidi militias,” warned Michael Rubin in the Washington Examiner.

Erdoğan’s Islamist, neo-Ottoman ambitions are now taking a pro-sharia turn. That is bad news for the region to Turkey’s south and east. Worse, it is a slow-fuse time bomb for the West.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s lamentable decision to unilaterally withdraw from Afghanistan is paving the way for the emergence of a new sharia-based alliance, including NATO member Turkey — theoretically a Western ally. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist ambitions appear to be seeking an international role in post-U.S. Afghanistan in alliance with the Taliban, Qatar, Pakistan and Malaysia. The trouble is, Turkey, among the new sharia alliance in the making, is the only country with institutional ties to the West.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/frances-trump-bruce-bawer/

France’s next presidential election will take place in April, and the international media are already alarmed that the winner just might be a man named Éric Zemmour. He’s “shaking up France’s presidential race before it’s even begun,” warns the BBC. Among Zemmour’s unsettling views: he says “that France is being ‘submerged’ by migrants” and that the French media are “a propaganda machine that hates France.” In other words, he does that most unforgivable of things, in the eyes of the corporate media: he dares to tell the truth about certain uncomfortable subjects.

To the Financial Times, Zemmour is an “anti-immigration polemicist” whom “critics see” (yes, that cheap rhetorical dodge) “as a dangerous, Donald Trump-style provocateur” (because, after all, four years of Trump proved him to be a “dangerous…provocateur”) — “a TV talk-show star who rails against Muslims, immigration, feminism, crime and the supposed decline of France.” Like Trump, Zemmour “has focused on topics that attract intense interest from voters — especially immigration and crime — and packaged them in ways that favour the viral spread of his message.” Thus do the corporate media frame truth-telling as cynical vote-mongering.

In the Guardian you can read that Zemmour “claims foreigners have taken over whole neighbourhoods in France.” As if the banlieues that are no-go zones for non-Muslims weren’t an established fact! The other day France’s Chief Rabbi, Haim Korsia, who is known for his “commitment to interfaith dialogue,” called Zemmour – a Jew who goes to shul with his Jewish wife – an anti-Semite. Thus do the members of the establishment conspire to draw a cordon sanitaire around those who refuse to parrot the elite orthodoxy. Then there’s Hans-Georg Betz, a professor at the University of Zurich who studies “right-wing populism.” He accuses Zemmour of being “obsessed with Islam.” Yes, just like German Jews in the 1930s were obsessed with Nazism. For Betz, Zemmour

regurgitates ad nauseam all the familiar anti-Islamic tropes that have made the political fortunes of radical right-wing entrepreneurs in recent memory….These tropes posit that Islam is not only a religion, but also a political ideology, and as such totalitarian; that the basic principles of Western culture and civilization, such as democracy, freedom of religion and opinion, the equality of men and women, or the separation of church and state, are fundamentally at odds with Islam; and that Islam is all about submission and therefore incompatible with liberal democracy.

Funny how even now, as the writing on the wall (scrawled in Arabic with the blood of infidels) becomes easier and easier to read, academics like Betz still smile on Islam and depict people like Zemmour as “regurgitat[ing]…tropes” to make their “political fortunes.” Yes, the same tropes that made the political fortunes of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. Everything Betz says in his mocking representation of Zemmour’s opinions is objectively true: Islam is totalitarian; it is irreconcilable with Western principles; it is about submission. Most Frenchmen agree: as Robert Spencer reported here the other day, two-thirds of them believe that their nation will “definitely” or “probably” experience the process of total Islamization that Zemmour and others call “the Great Replacement” – a concept that academic elites dismiss as an extremist fantasy.  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17890/turkey-russia-orbit

Sanctions are mandated by law for “any entity that does significant business with the Russian military or intelligence sectors” — Office of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Chair Robert Menendez, Daily Sabah, September 28, 2021.

“Any new purchases by Turkey must mean new sanctions.” — U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, referring to a December 2020 U.S. decision to impose CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) on Turkey for its acquisition of the S-400 missile system, Twitter, September 28, 2021.

In addition, Ankara and Moscow would discuss Russian know-how and construction of two more nuclear energy plants for Turkey, in addition to a $10 billion nuclear reactor already being built on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

All that strategic planning will further increase NATO ally Turkey’s dependence on Russia, also Turkey’s biggest supplier of natural gas.

“Putin and his administration are well aware of Turkey’s weaknesses: a) economy goes from bad to worse; b) the Pandemic is not under control; c) gas prices on increase but Russia is ready to offer a friendly discount to Turkey; d) military acquisitions facing a hostile U.S. Senate.” — Eugene Kogan, a defense and security analyst based in Tbilisi, Georgia; to Gatestone.

“The Turkish president will continue to play a spoiler role within NATO and provide Putin further opportunities to undermine the transatlantic alliance and its values.” — Aykan Erdemir, former member of Turkey’s parliament and now based in Washington D.C., email to Gatestone.

[Erdoğan] will not step back from…. the Russia card in his hand, unless he sees that his love affair with Russia will come with a punishing cost.

Turkey has been a NATO ally since 1952. On October 6, NATO’s childishly naïve secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, praised Turkey as “an important ally [that] played an important role in defeating Daesh.” Both of his suggestions are grossly incorrect: Turkey is becoming an important Russian ally, not a NATO ally, whose irregular militia allies in Syria are the jihadist remnants of Daesh (Islamic State).

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/580503-irans-not-feeling-the-pressure-to-change?rl=1

All the focus on whether the United States and Iran will resume talks over resurrecting the 2015 global nuclear deal obscures an issue of equal importance: escalating skirmishes between Washington and Jerusalem on the one hand and Tehran on the other that raise the risk of miscalculation and, in turn, war.

In recent days, the United States flew a B-1B bomber over such key regional waterways as the Strait of Hormuz — a vital waterway for global oil shipping — the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal in a show of force that, at points along the way, was joined by aircraft from Israel as well as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.

That came after Iran reportedly directed a drone attack on a U.S. military outpost in Syria, causing much damage (but no casualties) and marking what the Washington Post called “the first major attack on U.S. troops in Syria by Iran.” Iranian-backed militias have repeatedly used drones to attack U.S. forces in Iraq.

Washington now considers Iran’s expanding arsenal of drones a bigger short-term threat to regional peace and stability than its nuclear and ballistic missile program. Within days of the drone strike in Syria, U.S. officials imposed sanctions on companies and individuals that it said had ties to Iran’s drone program.

Israel, meanwhile, continues to conduct airstrikes in Syria to prevent Iran from establishing a permanent presence there and from sending sophisticated weapons to its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. Now, Iran plans to send advanced anti-aircraft missile batteries to the region, which will complicate Israeli airstrikes.

While all of those developments raise the risk of miscalculation and war, so too does Iran’s continuing progress on its nuclear program.

Specifically, Iran is enriching uranium at near weapons-grade levels and maintaining stockpiles that far exceed what the 2015 deal allowed, restricting the access of international inspectors to its facilities, and seeking sanctions relief and other concessions before returning to the negotiating table.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told NBC News that its monitoring program in Iran is no longer “intact” because Iran has not repaired a camera at a key facility outside Tehran. Inspectors are relying on such cameras at key sites because, earlier this year, Iran stopped letting international inspectors conduct the snap inspections that the 2015 deal allowed for.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17916/new-fears-in-tehran

Major-General Hossein Salami, chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and keynote speaker in this year’s ceremonies, even claims that the US has already lost its global leadership position while a trio made of China, Russia and Iran is emerging as the new arbiter of human destiny.

Not responding [to an attack by Israel] would be a sign of strategic weakness and could encourage a fresh wave of domestic rebellion. Responding, on the other hand, could lead to a full-scale war for which the Islamic Republic is far from prepared.

What Biden does next could prove decisive.

If he surrenders too easily, he will re-energize Tehran’s old demons. If, on the other hand, he opts for empty huffing and puffing, he may miss a chance to help those who strive for regime change in Tehran.

What do you do when you want to do something and yet you feel embarrassed about doing it?

This is the question that the “Supreme Guide” of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, faced this week as he wondered how to deal with one of his annual rituals celebrating the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran and the holding of American diplomats as hostages on November 4, 1979.