Displaying posts categorized under

WORLD NEWS

US is chasing China’s tail on 5G Super-fast data speed is not the point. The future is in robots talking to each other and response is the key David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/2021/05/us-is-chasing-chinas-tail-on-5g/

NEW YORK – Chinese manufacturers have installed about 5,000 private 5G networks and will add tens of thousands more this year as 5G broadband enables Fourth Industrial Revolution applications, according to mainland industry leaders.

China already has 70% of the world’s installed 5G base stations and 80% of the world’s 5G smartphone users.

The global chip shortage and US sanctions against Chinese telecom equipment firms such as Huawei and ZTE have slowed China’s 5G buildout to some extent but 5G infrastructure already covers all of China’s major cities. 

China will add between 500,000 to 800,000 new 5G base stations to the 792,000 in place at the end of February, according to industry sources. 5G’s impact on productivity as well as profitability will come from downstream applications, not the network buildout as such. 

“It doesn’t make any sense for the West to pour billions of dollars into alternatives to China’s 5G technology,” one Chinese executive told Asia Times.

“It’s too little too late, and it focuses on the wrong areas. Trying to invent an alternative ecosystem isn’t going to work. I would have expected the United States to say, ‘Let’s transform industry, let’s be more competitive.’

“The US is great at analytics with firms like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. That’s what should have been done.”

5G, as I argued in my 2020 book You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, is the railroad of the 21st century – a carrier technology whose importance lies in the other technologies it makes possible.

French Judiciary Frees Extremist Antisemitic Murderer by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17349/france-antisemitic-murder

The murderer, under the influence of an illicit substance, was immediately sent to a mental institution, not to prison. Who decided that? Usually, a person arrested after a crime and found to be “under the influence” is arrested, placed in a cell to sober up, then charged by a judge. Why was this case not treated the same way?

Judge Ihouelou repeatedly violated the most basic rules of her profession by behaving in a strikingly biased way. First, she refused to allow any reconstruction of the crime. She ruled that reconstructing the crime would be “traumatic” for the criminal. She also refused to meet the lawyers of the victim’s sister and children to hear what they had to say.

How could a Court of Appeal validate an investigation in which a reconstruction of the crime never took place; in which the lawyers for the family were never heard, and at the end of which, the decision was rendered solely on the basis of a psychiatric report written months after the facts; based mainly on the statements of a murderer, and contradicted by another psychiatric report?

“[T]his affair… is also the illustration for those who might still need it, of the vital utility of Israel so that justice is done to the Jews all over the world…. due to the failure of French justice”. — Raphaël Nisand French radio commentator, Tribune Juive, April 25, 2021.

A verdict based on an “acute delirium” leading to no longer being responsible for one’s actions is medically unacceptable, because cannabis does not induce delirium, but only suspends inhibitions. “The murderer,” he wrote, “clearly discerned the reference text which could guide his action, and far from creating confusion in him, cannabis only helped to lift ordinary inhibitions. The poison did not alter his behavior and his judgment, it magnified them”. — Charles Melman, renowned French psychiatrist and founder of the International Freudian Association, Tribune Juive, May 5, 2021.

Paris, April 4, 2017. 4:00 am. A man breaks into the home of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old retired Jewish physician and educator. He beats and tortures her for over an hour while reciting verses from the Quran and repeatedly shouting, “Allahu Akbar!” [Allah is the greatest!”]. He uses anti-Semitic slurs and calls her “Sheitan” (Satan). He throws her from the balcony of her apartment and she falls to the ground, three floors below, dead. The police arrest him.

What happened was an unspeakable antisemitic murder. It was also the start of a process that brought to light once again the many serious and shameful dysfunctions that mark today’s France.

The murderer, Kobili Traore, an immigrant from Mali who became a French citizen, is a recidivist criminal who had already been arrested and sentenced by the courts 20 times for violent assaults. He was nonetheless free. His only known professional activity is, in two words: drug dealer. He told the officers who arrested him that he is a drug addict and had smoked marijuana in the hours before the murder.

Blinken and a Repeat of ‘Eyeless in Gaza’ Saga by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17417/gaza-iran-blinken

Ali Khamenei asserts that he has received “a divine pledge that total victory is on the way”, and demands that the two groups continue the fight until “our holy land is cleansed of the existence of the usurper”.

The daily Kayhan, reputed to reflect Khamenei’s views, claims that Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets and missiles could now reach 75 percent of the Israeli territory. The aim now is to increase that to 100 percent which, if combined with the Lebanese Hezbollah’s rocket and missile arsenals, could pave the way for the “total victory” that Khamenei demands.

In other words, at least part of the misery that Gazans suffer is due to the no-holds-barred civil war between Fatah and Islamist Jihadis led by Hamas.

The “urgent aid package” that Khamenei promises includes none of those things. The “Supreme Guide” couldn’t care less how Gazans live or die; he is only interested in how many rockets and missiles they can launch against Israel, providing him with a bunker to boast about and hide the fundamental weakness of his shaky regime.

What if Gazans don’t want their tiny chunk of God’s earth to be a bunker for foreign potentates in search of cut-price glory…?

Blinken should not throw money where it ends up in the hands of Hamas, which pursues jihad as part of a global terror organization.

“The advanced bunker of the Resistance Front”. This is how official media in Tehran describe the Gaza Strip as it emerges from its latest mini-war against “The Zionist enemy”. Needless to say, Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, regarding himself as leader of the “Resistance Front,” is already looking forward to the next round of this sordid duel. In messages to Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and Ziyad Nakhalah of the Islamic Jihad for the liberation of Palestine, “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei asserts that he has received “a divine pledge that total victory is on the way”, and demands that the two groups continue the fight until “our holy land is cleansed of the existence of the usurper”.

Tehran media claim that “the great victory” supposedly achieved by Hamas and Islamic Jihad is, to a large extent, due to financial, material and training support from the Islamic Republic.

The daily Kayhan, reputed to reflect Khamenei’s views, claims that Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets and missiles could now reach 75 percent of the Israeli territory. The aim now is to increase that to 100 percent which, if combined with the Lebanese Hezbollah’s rocket and missile arsenals, could pave the way for the “total victory” that Khamenei demands.

Last January, the “Supreme Guide” ordered the allocation of an extra $200 million to the Quds Force, the body in charge of “exporting revolution”. And last week, the Islamic Majlis, Tehran’s ersatz parliament, increased the budget of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps by over 60 percent. Khamenei’s spending spree is premised on the hoped of a quick lifting of US and other sanctions, which have produced the worst cash flow problem the 41-year-old regime has ever seen.

Turkey’s Collateral Damage: Its Jews by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17399/turkey-damage-jews

The loss of 232 Muslim lives in Afghanistan did not make even a single column inch of news in the Turkish media.

Once again, it is wartime for Palestinian terrorists, a wake-up call for the usual Turkish hostility, and hard times for the few thousand Turkish Jews squashed in between the bitter truth and their fear of a potentially dangerous autocrat.

In a 2015 study, the Anti-Defamation League found that 35 million out of an adult population of 49 million Turks, or 71%, harbored antisemitic attitudes, compared to an average 49% in the entire Muslim world. Statistically speaking, a 22 percentage point difference from the average is a significant deviation. In Turkey’s case, the deviation is also empirically visible.

In this year’s Middle East clashes, as in the past several years, Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey globally championed the Palestinian cause. A jogger could be fined for breach of lockdown rules but the police welcomed thousands of protesters in front of Israeli diplomatic missions in Istanbul and Ankara. A couple set their car on fire in front of the Israeli Consulate building in Istanbul “in the name of our Muslim brothers who are tortured in Gaza.” This was said despite that it was actually Hamas — a terrorist group that, since 2007, has held the Palestinians hostage as human shields, both to protect its weapons and to show dead babies to the television cameras — that began firing 4,300 rockets into a country the size of New Jersey: Israel. The Israelis were not returning fire at the Palestinians, they were returning fire at the terrorist groups shooting at them: Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. “Why,” as the magazine Spiked asked, “won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?”

Erdoğan, referring to Jewish people, said on May 17: “It is in their disposition that they are only satisfied by sucking blood” — a comment that triggered a duel of words between Ankara and Washington.

When the Mob Came for the Jews of Baghdad We heard screams all through the night. Today only four known Jews remain in Iraq. By Joseph Samuels

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-mob-came-for-the-jews-of-baghdad-11622237901?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

I was 10 when mobs attacked the Jewish community of Baghdad, my community, with cruel and unimaginable violence. Rioters maimed, raped, killed and robbed the unsuspecting Jews. This massacre, which began June 1, 1941, was called the Farhud, Arabic for “violent dispossession” or pogrom.

The seeds of the Farhud had been sown two months earlier. On April 1, a pro-Nazi coup d’état overthrew the pro-British Iraqi government and seized power. The coup was staged by Rashid Ali al Gaylani, an Arab nationalist and former Iraqi prime minister, supported by four army generals, and aided by Fritz Grobba, a former German ambassador to Iraq. This dangerous group was further stoked by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who deeply hated the Jews. Anti-Semitic propaganda began to appear in the daily newspapers and in broadcasts on Radio Baghdad. It was intended to inflame the Muslim population and rally support for the new regime.

The Jewish community bore the brunt of this explosive combination of Arab nationalism, Nazi propaganda and anti-Semitism. In the weeks after the coup my family stayed home most of the time, huddled around the large console radio. We listened with disbelief to reports of Jews being arrested and accused of anti-Iraqi sentiment and of spying for the British. I shook just thinking of the torture being carried out to extract false confessions.

On May 31, 1941, the British army arrived at the outskirts of Baghdad. The pro-Nazi government collapsed quickly, but al Gaylani and his co-conspirators escaped to Iran. The Jewish community in Baghdad felt a sense of relief, especially as it coincided with the eve of the Shavuot festival, commemorating the time when God gave us the Ten Commandments. We had good reason to rejoice.

But that high spirit didn’t last long, and joy reverted to pain and sorrow. The absence of a functioning government created a power vacuum. Across the country, chaos and lawlessness followed.

The Farhud erupted early Monday morning, June 1. Soldiers in civilian clothes, policemen and large crowds of Iraqi men, including Bedouins brandishing swords and daggers, joined in the pillage, helping themselves to loot as they plundered more than 1,500 Jewish homes and stores. For two days, the rioters murdered between 150 and 780 Jews—exact counts aren’t known—injured 600 to 2,000 others, and raped an indeterminable number of women. Some say 600 unidentified victims were buried in a mass grave. All through the night we heard their screams. We heard gunshots too, then sudden quiet. Unarmed and unprepared to defend themselves, Jews were vulnerable and helpless. I was shaken, desperate and angry.

Punished in Hong Kong for Texting the Press A pro-democracy lawmaker is denied bail for speaking to the WSJ.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/punished-in-hong-kong-for-texting-the

China wants to silence Hong Kongers even as it persecutes them. A court judgment released Friday shows that a judge penalized former pro-democracy lawmaker and journalist Claudia Mo for speaking to Western journalists, including our own Jillian Melchior.

Police arrested Ms. Mo, along with nearly the entire opposition movement, in January. She and 46 others are charged with conspiracy to commit subversion under the national security law for organizing or participating in an informal pro-democracy primary election last July. Judge Esther Toh denied Ms. Mo bail in April, and the world learned why on Friday.

The national security law prohibits “collusion” with vaguely defined foreign forces and states that defendants may not receive bail “unless the judge has sufficient grounds” to believe that they “will not continue to commit acts endangering national security.” As a reason to keep Ms. Mo behind bars, prosecutor Maggie Yang described Ms. Mo’s WhatsApp correspondence with these pages, the New York Times, Bloomberg and the BBC.

In a court filing explaining her denial of bail, Judge Toh quotes from an Oct. 1, 2020, conversation Ms. Mo had with Ms. Melchior about 12 Hong Kongers who were captured after they tried to escape to Taiwan by boat.

Ms. Mo told Ms. Melchior: “The detention and treatment of the 12 Hong Kong protesters serve as the ultimate warning and threat to Hongkongers about what one can face if you’re caught. The new security law and the spate of arrests have worked as a scare tactic, probably fairly successfully—at sending a persistent political chill around the city.” Every word of that is true, and it was hardly a secret.

Coming Soon: China’s Navy Patrolling Off New York by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17414/coming-soon-china-navy-patrolling-off-new-york

Chinese planners are not only thinking of the continent [Africa], they are also eyeing islands in the Atlantic, specifically Terceira, one of the Azores.

On that island, part of Portugal, there is a port and, of even greater interest, Air Base No. 4. Better known as Lajes Field, the facility is jointly operated by the U.S. Air Force and its Portuguese counterpart.

If China controlled the base, the Atlantic would no longer be secure…. Chinese planes could patrol the northern and central portions of the Atlantic and thereby cut air and sea traffic between the U.S. and Europe. Beijing would also be able to deny access to the nearby Mediterranean Sea.

Pentagon budget cutters have been scaling back activities at Lajes, making it a “ghost base.” As a result, Lajes is ripe for China to take it over.

China could get a base even closer than [Lajes]. About 90 miles east of Palm Beach, on Grand Bahama Island, a Hong Kong-based business is spending about $3 billion on a deep-water container facility, the Freeport Container Port.

Sri Lanka is perhaps the model for China’s militarization of the Bahamas. In addition to the overly large facility in Freeport, there is a Chinese-funded port on Abaco Island, also part of the Bahamas. The port in Abaco is essentially useless from a commercial point of view and could fall into Beijing’s hands.

China, therefore, could have two naval bases close to Florida, unless the Biden administration moves fast to block Chinese penetration of the Bahamas.

At the moment, America is, with trade and investment, strengthening a hostile Chinese regime, which has declared the U.S. to be its enemy. Last year, America’s two-way trade with China totaled $560.1 billion.

China is scouting for a naval base on the west coast of Africa. In the near future, therefore, Chinese ships could be regularly patrolling off America’s East Coast.

In recent testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, General Stephen Townsend, commander of U.S. Africa Command, has been sounding the alarm.

At the moment, China’s only offshore military base is in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. The facility is near some of the world’s busiest shipping routes, including those going through the Suez Canal.

Townsend believes the People’s Liberation Army Navy is surveying locations on Africa’s west coast, from Mauritania in the north to Namibia in the south. “Now they’re casting their gaze to the Atlantic coast and wanting to get such a base there,” the general told the Associated Press.

Africa is important in its own right. “Located at the crossroads of the world, Africa watches over strategic choke points including the Strait of Gibraltar, the Strait of Sicily, the Red Sea, the Bab al Mandeb, and the Mozambique Channel,” General Townsend points out in a publicly released 2021 Posture Statement for Congress. “The land mass of Africa is larger than the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe combined.”

The African continent is home to 11 of the 25 fast-growing economies and is the world’s most demographically vital region.

Blinken and Netanyahu: Ships Passing in the Night The first meeting between the U.S. secretary of state and Israel’s prime minister laid bare a series of problems that politely slipped past one another. That is not the end of them. By Shoshana Bryen

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/27/blinken-and-netanyahu-ships-passing-in-the-night/

After their meeting in Jerusalem on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made what were supposed to be “soft” public statements. The politely worded remarks deliberately slid past serious policy differences, but those differences cannot and should not be hidden. Moreover, they should form the basis of conversation between the two allies in the future.

Blinken laid out four reasons for his visit to the region. 

First, “to demonstrate the commitment of the U.S. to Israel’s security.” This needs no comment.

Second, “to start to work toward greater stability and reduce tensions in the West Bank and Jerusalem.” 

Blinken didn’t mention the six weeks of intense Palestinian Authority (PA) incitement to violence, including speeches and music videos promising glory for those who killed Jews. A music video was repeatedly broadcast in which Palestinians declared, “I fired my shots, I threw my bomb, I detonated, detonated, detonated my [explosive] belts . . . My brother, throw my blood on the enemy like bullets.” Mahmoud Abbas’ religious affairs ministry told viewers, “Islam does not want you to be submissive to others,” and “if you die fighting, you go to paradise; if you kill the enemies, they go to hell.” Check out the “TikTok Intifada.” 

This, of course, caused tension for Palestinians who believed Israel ultimately would respond. But in addition, Blinken might have noted the tension in Israel resulting from that same incitement, and the ensuing violence, along with the periodic addition of terrorist Hamas rockets being fired into civilian neighborhoods.

The third reason, said Blinken, was “to support urgent humanitarian and reconstruction assistance for Gaza, to benefit the Palestinian people.” 

Joe Biden did say Hamas would be kept away from the reconstruction money and materiel, but it is unclear how that will be enforced and who will do the enforcing, as the PA has absolutely no control over what Hamas does in Gaza. Neither does the United States. Nor does the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Nor do the usual European donors, who are, this time, showing some skepticism about pouring more money down the hole. 

Central and Eastern Europe Help Show the Path Forward As the post-Trump American Right continues to cohere and slowly finds itself, it should look to the likes of modern-day Poland and Hungary for some concrete pointers. Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/27/central-and-eastern-europe-help-show-the-path-forward/

I’m writing from Warsaw, Poland, making for both my first time venturing behind the old Iron Curtain and my first trip back to Europe since the onset of COVID-19. Despite the overcast weather endemic to this part of the globe, the mood on the ground is unmistakably buoyant.

Poland, along with its fellow Visegrad Group member Central European nations of Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic—and perhaps also including nearby Austria—has emerged as a perhaps unlikely ground zero in the fight to save Western civilization from a debilitating and increasingly all-encompassing liberal decadence.

The sad history of the region continues to pervade daily life here. Locals routinely respond to questions about what sites tourists should visit in one of two ways: “The Nazis destroyed everything in the war” or “The Soviet occupation ruined everything.” Few regions in the world know totalitarian repression and occupation like this area of the blood-soaked European continent does. The Visegrad states, which have rarely tasted national independence over the vicissitudes of the past millennium, felt the full brunt of both Nazi fascism and Soviet Communism in all-too-recent memory.

The silver lining, and the reason this region is so interesting from a contemporary economic and geopolitical perspective, is that out of the joint tyrannical fires of Nazism and Communism were forged, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a robust appreciation for the integrity of the independent nation-state and the importance of Judeo-Christian-inspired societal goals, such as family formation and fortified communitarian ties.

Put more simply, the four Visegrad states and Austria have emerged as veritable redoubts of traditional Western values and substantive political priorities, such as national borders, immigration properly limited to promote assimilation and intergenerational cultural stability, and the transcendental meaning and fulfillment that only religion can provide.

It’s Getting Bad for the Jews By Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/its-getting-bad-for-the-jews/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=also-from-author&utm_term=first

Thoughts on the rising hostility in the United States and in Europe

 F or the past couple of years, there have been reports about an uptick in “random” assaults in New York. Men are just walking along a street in Brooklyn, and they get sucker-punched. Except it isn’t random. The victims are Orthodox Jews. This growing uptick in assaults has been punctuated by mass killings at Jewish synagogues in San Diego, Pittsburgh, and upstate New York. In recent weeks, as a conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza has become the occasion for a coming-out party for a newly confident anti-Zionist wing in the American Left, we also see newly confident thugs assaulting Jews in Manhattan’s Diamond District while shouting slogans about Palestine.

This is a scandal beyond words. Secular and religious Jews are formed to be sensitive to these upsurges in hostility and violence because their history as a people in exile tells them that these spasms of violence do not just subside. They tend to grow and grow until Jews are finally forced to emigrate. Jewish life is dying out in Paris precisely because of a growing pattern of street harassment and assaults that are punctuated by terrorist attacks aimed at killing masses of Jews at synagogues and kosher supermarkets. Parisian Jews are leaving for Israel. There was a time they might have left for New York. I expect that for many Jews, the realization that New York could go the way of Paris would be the bitterest pill to swallow.

Speaking of the Europeans, what’s going on there is also a scandal. The news of rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel, and Israel launching attacks on the positions from which they are fired, set off major protests in European cities. Now, criticism would be one thing. The state of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces, and even the Israeli people are just that — people — and they are capable of folly, prejudice, and cruelty like any other. And the Palestinians are people too — many of them living in a situation that is abjectly miserable. Imagine both resenting Israel and having the foreign government of Iran pay for the thugs of Hamas to be your political leadership while you seek satisfaction and try to make a life for your family.

But these protests in European cities are not focused on legitimate criticisms of Israel. In North London, a group of Muslim men drove a kind of convoy through a Jewish neighborhood, shouting slogans such as, “F*** the Jews, rape their daughters.”

But crude as this was, there is something more scandalous about the protests in Europe. Muslims might at least feel like a party to the Israeli–Gaza conflict, in some way. What’s truly disturbing is the mass of secular Europeans who come from long lines of native residents in their countries joining in.

It brings up the question of why Israel’s actions bother Europeans so much. The oppression of the Kurds by Turkey occasions not a peep of protest. You’d think it might, given European connections to Turkey through NATO and other European Union–led deals about migration. Or the fact that the tyrant Recep Erdogan travels to European capitals and holds massive campaign rallies to capture the votes of Turkish men and women who live abroad. If the motor is a kind of anti-Americanism — American support for Israel is often brought up at these European protests — then why not protest the humanitarian disaster that has been Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, which causes starvation and has exacerbated the worst cholera outbreak in modern history?