RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woke-chinese-communist-party-11615153949?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Chinese state media rarely deserves attention but lately it’s taken a notable and instructive turn. It is invoking the woke themes of American progressives as a propaganda weapon against the U.S.

“Canada, the UK and Australia, three members of the Five Eyes alliance, have recently taken action to put pressure on China. They have formed a US-centered, racist, and mafia-styled community,” said a Feb. 23 editorial in Global Times. “They are becoming a racist axis aimed at stifling the development rights of 1.4 billion Chinese.”

The Communist Party-run paper notes that the members of Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing network, “have a strong sense of civilization superiority.” U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton is a “neo-Nazi and extreme racist” and “the Trump administration is an extremely typical white supremacy government.” By resisting this bloc of English-speaking countries, the editorial concludes, “China is not only defending its own interests, we are also defending the diversity of the modern world.”

Note the use of “white supremacy” and “diversity” and “civilization superiority,” which come straight from the progressive critique of America as a country that is “systemically” racist and oppressive. The Global Times editors may be crude but they’ve obviously been reading the New York Times. Their dismissal of Mr. Cotton as racist is what you see on progressive Twitter.

The Chinese Military Threat

Communist China views the United States as its major adversary and is building an awesome military arsenal, with modern weapons, planes and missiles. China already has the world’s largest army (3 million men), 5,000 combat aircraft, and 300 nuclear warheads. The Chinese shopping list includes aircraft carriers, missile-equipped warships, nuclear attack submarines, fighter aircraft, and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads.

China is capable of buying such costly, warlike luxuries only because of the U.S. cash that flows from the pockets of Americans, known as our trade deficit, which has been running about $40 billion a year for some years. That’s enough money to build up a military/nuclear force capable of threatening the United States, as well as dominating the Pacific.

China’s expansionist aspirations are no secret. Now that China has pocketed Hong Kong, China can turn its avaricious eyes on Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Guam, and even threaten the sailors of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. When China was harassing Taiwan during its election, General Chi of the People’s Liberation Army crudely commented about China’s ability to deliver a nuclear warhead on Los Angeles.

A classified Air Force report released in May 1997 warned that China’s effort to build an advanced ICBM capability is “steadily increasing.” The report stated that this missile “will be a significant threat not only to U.S. forces deployed in the Pacific theater, but to portions of the continental United States and to many of our allies.”

China is determined not only to become a nuclear superpower but also a world-class industrial power, and the Communist bosses expect slave labor, theft, and U.S. folly to help them achieve those goals. They require a transfer of U.S. high technology as part of every business deal so that, in the next round, they expect to manufacture the goods without U.S. help and become a major exporter of cars, chemicals, steel, electronics, and aircraft. China has made several spectacular deals, which pretended to be merely commercial, but will vastly expand China’s military and industrial espionage and subversive capabilities.

The China Ocean Shipping Company (Cosco), a 600-ship global shipping company controlled by the People’s Liberation Army, is trying hard to acquire a 20-year lease on the U.S. Naval Shipyard in Long Beach. Clinton personally lobbied for the Cosco deal at a White House meeting in September 1995. U.S. taxpayers recently spent $500 million to modernize this deep-water port at the epicenter of our defense research and production in southern California. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) is trying to amend the Defense Authorization bill to stop the deal from going through.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/what-china-really-wants-a-new-world-order/?itm_campaign=headline-testing-what-china-really-wants-a-new-world-order&itm_

Translated speeches from a leading Beijing scholar-adviser provide a rare guide to the Chinese Communist Party’s plans for domination. Call it a rhapsody in red.

What does the Chinese Communist Party actually want? Sometimes, the regime’s plans can seem inscrutable. Other times, they are more blunt. The latter is certainly the case for one high-profile Chinese scholar serving the Party: Jin Canrong, the Chinese “State Master,” a professor at the Chinese People’s University in Beijing, a U.S. expert, and an adviser to the Chinese Communist Party’s Organization Department and United Front Department. It’s unclear how close he is to Xi Jinping. But he is one of the intellectuals sarcastically referred to in China as “the Emperor’s Literary Men” or “the State Masters.” He has spoken throughout China and is well-known among Netizens. That the U.S. State Department suspended the ten-year visa of this State Master, along with nine other Chinese scholars, in January 2020 suggests that Donald Trump’s administration must have been aware of him as well.

His speeches may reflect the thought of CCP leaders. In 2018, I first read the transcripts of two of his public speeches from two years earlier. I was greatly alarmed. His words contradicted all the beautiful public utterances of CCP leaders, such as, “We will never become a hegemon” and, “We have no intention to challenge the U.S. leadership.” That was the first time I was truly impressed by the degree of China’s power and ambition. I have kept the transcripts. As the U.S. reckons with the growing CCP threat not only to the U.S.-led international order but also to the U.S. itself, now seems a good time to share the content of these speeches.

The two speeches range widely and erratically. I am not attempting a complete translation. Instead, I am excerpting some parts relevant to the U.S., regrouping them into a “rhapsody” of six “movements.” A rhapsody is an epic poem, or part of one; a medley, with extravagance of ideas and expressions. That describes the two speeches excerpted here. They also serve as part of the ode of the CCP’s grand plan in the so-called “Chinese Century” to dominate the world. The State Master’s own words appear below in a different font from my notes or comments; my comments in the speech itself will appear in unitalicized brackets. The English translations are mine; I am responsible for their accuracy.

In 2012, at the CCP’s 18th plenary, it publicly announced two centenary goals. First, that, at the 100th anniversary of the CCP in 2021, all Chinese people will be free of poverty, and China will be a “well-off” society with per capita GDP of $10,000. Second, that, in 2049, at the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic, China will be a well-established socialist power with per capita GDP at $30,000. In Jin’s words, when the second goal is reached, “China will enter the club of developed countries.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/03/22/deter-beijing-from-attacking-taiwan/

Policies to keep great-power competition from becoming great-power conflict.

Over several decades, the People’s Republic of China has been coercing and intimidating Taiwan in an attempt to force “unification” of the de facto independent democratic island with the mainland. The U.S. has responded through mostly diplomatic means, working to help Taiwan avoid international isolation. But now the risk of a Sino–American military conflict over Taiwan is growing. Chinese Communist Party general-secretary Xi Jinping has stepped up his muscular rhetoric about “recovery” of what he views as lost Chinese territory, and his military is more ready than ever to act forcefully if called upon. But through coercive diplomacy the U.S. still has time to head off Chinese aggression. What is needed is a new diplomatic campaign backed by a quick strengthening of U.S. military posture.

On the matter of Taiwan, Xi is a dangerous man. His strategy for political survival inside the brutal, jungle-like CCP is to initiate constant political purges, mass campaigns to strengthen Communist Party ideology and discipline, crackdowns on dissent, and nationalistic adventures abroad, from Hong Kong to India. Taiwan is the logical next target, and Beijing is beating the drums of war.

On January 2, 2019, General-Secretary Xi declared that the annexation of Taiwan was necessary for China to achieve its “great rejuvenation” — his personal grand strategic ambition. Ending a commitment upon which the one-China policy was predicated, Xi also declared that China would not renounce the use of force to accomplish its Taiwan objectives. The CCP released a policy paper expanding on Xi’s claims. It said: 

Solving the Taiwan problem and achieving complete national unification is in the fundamental interest of the Chinese. It is obviously necessary for achieving the great Chinese rejuvenation. . . . China must be unified and obviously will be. . . . If anyone splits Taiwan off from China, China’s military will pay any price to totally defeat them. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/more_iranian_nuclear_cheating_uncovered.html

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors held its quarterly meeting last week. The meeting was one of several events taking place simultaneously that provide outlets for dueling recommendations about how the international community should approach the Iranian regime’s nuclear development and other malign activities.

On Monday, March 1, European political and business leaders met virtually with Iranian counterparts for the Europe-Iran Business Forum, a three-day event sponsored by the European Union and aimed at expanding bilateral trade relations without regard for the unresolved tensions over such matters as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. 

The next day, a news conference organized by the main Iranian opposition exposed new information about a major Iranian nuclear site, called Abadeh. The latest report by the IAEA says that it has found anthropogenic uranium particles at two sites in Iran, including Abadeh in Fars province.

Former US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Robert Joseph and former member of the European Parliament Struan Stevenson also spoke at the press conference.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/putins_former_chief_of_staff_calls_trump_a_champion_against_new_world_order.html

Sergey Ivanov, Vladimir Putin’s former chief of staff, currently on the Russian Federation Security Council, has weighed in on the “historical scale of the personality and achievements of President Donald Trump” in an op-ed for Eurasia Daily.  I have changed not a word of what he has to say.  In his national ideology, Putin warns repeatedly of the dangers from the “Transnationalists” (Proekt Rossiya [Project Russia], EKSMO Press, 2014).  The Russians are joined by the British with their Brexit and the French with their Front National led by populist Marine Le Pen.  Populism actually straddles the Atlantic, and Donald Trump is regarded as its hero.  

As Ivanov observes, if Joe Biden, the American Deep State, and the world global elites have called Donald Trump the “worst president in U.S. history,” well, it is because they know best who is the worst — for them.

In contrast, those on the Russian side of the world itself correctly see Donald Trump as perhaps the best president in the history of the United States, a “modern George Washington.”  As Ivanov explains, if the first president of America fought to lay the foundation of the nation and state, the beginning of American freedom, then Trump fought, still fights to preserve the legacy of the founding fathers, to defend freedom, so that in the end, he will not come to be the last truly elected president of the United States.  He, like Washington, is of the flesh of his people, 100% American, a classic self-made man, a living embodiment of the American dream.  Trump is a successful entrepreneur, a man of action, and a man of his word.  He built up America all his life and became its true national leader.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17128/m-zuhdi-jasser-interview

The Obama Administration handed hundreds of billions of dollars to the theocrats as well as an insurance of security, as well as a future with a nuclear bomb. These, along with thousands of troops and the empowerment of the terror group Hizballah, gave Iran’s leaders a green light to spread terror into Syria.

Some may appropriately say that no real democracies evolved quickly [in the “Arab Spring”] after centuries of tyranny. In fact, there may be a need for multiple revolutions before democracy can take hold. Perhaps, though, there can be a more methodical transition towards modernity with steady benchmarks of reform and liberalization, as we have seen done so successfully with the 2020 Middle East agreements.

The challenge, as always, will be in keeping it from being too slow to the point of fiction—which has been “Plan A” for the tyrants across the Middle East since World War II. They lie to the West about reforms in order to placate each new administration with a five- or ten-year plan while transitions in power in the West along with our short-term, societal “attention deficit disorder” give them a pass.

Regardless of whether a state’s approach is top-down or bottom-up, if its raison d’être is based in Islam and the primacy of Islamic law rather than on individual rights and the protection of minorities, as in secular liberal democracies, it will always be anti-freedom and illiberal.

We will have to watch very closely if there will be new interpretations from the pulpits of the grand mosque in Mecca, or mosques in Medina and across the country. The fact that we heard this coming from the pulpits in the Emirates and Bahrain is what made the Abraham Accords a reality to believe rather than doubt.

As for Biden’s foreign policy, he is already signaling that the Pentagon will focus on diplomacy first and the military second. So, the Pentagon is a branch of the State Department? If that is not “leading from behind 3.0”, I don’t know what is. Sources say he wants to “de-emphasize the military” and lift up diplomacy. If that vision is by openly weakening our defense programming, that will signal a green light actually to usher in more war, not less. Peace through weakness doesn’t work against thugs like Khamenei and Assad across the planet. We are thus likely to see a re-emergence of Islamist belligerence and a testing of the waters as they try to make gains against Biden’s apparent appeasement strategy.

It is my hope and prayer that our work will contribute not to what the Islamists want—a revivalism of the old—but rather a genuine reform towards a Western model of Islam based in infinite diversity of thought and protection of individual inquiry and their universal human rights, rather than the oppressive collective and the proverbial Islamic state.

Canlorbe: Dear Dr. Jasser, thank you for joining me. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are the first two Muslim women to serve in American Congress. Do you think they representative of the mentality of the majority of Muslims in America?

Jasser: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) are simply byproducts of the Islamist teams that recruited them and trained them in the art of ideology and dissimulation. Those teams include the alphabet soup of Islamist organizations—”Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups”—that exist in the United States. These include, for instance, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Future politicians, media pundits, or the many demagogic imams, they all rise up from within the Islamist populist movement in the West by telling insular Islamist communities what they want to hear while claiming to speak for all Muslims.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/03/05/iranian-opposition-reveals-another-undeclared-nuclear-site-n1430326

A previously undeclared nuclear site was scrubbed by the Iranian government in July 2019 prior to the arrival of an inspection team at the site in August of this year, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI) announced at a news conference on Tuesday. A report released by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on February 23 noted the presence of uranium particles at the site with no satisfactory explanation from Iran.

Ali Safavi, an NCRI foreign affairs committee member, told the media that the sanitized site was razed by the Revolutionary Guards but uranium traces were found, anyway.

Safavi also noted that this sanitization was noticeably similar to that which had been undertaken in 2004 and again in 2012 at two other sites that apparently had roles to play in the Iranian nuclear weapons program. In the first place, the regime received a request from the IAEA for inspection of the Shian-Lavizan site, but granted that request only after destroying onsite buildings and turning over the soil to depths as great as four meters, in an effort to conceal traces of nuclear material. In the second place, authorities began a thorough cleanup in 2012 for the Parchin military complex where they had installed an explosives testing chamber, then continued to hold international inspectors at bay until 2015.

In both cases, however, the presence of excess nuclear particles was nonetheless discerned by the IAEA. And now the process has repeated once again with respect to the Abadeh site. Safavi emphasized the repetitive nature of that process in Tuesday’s press conference and argued that it is part of a pattern of “duplicity, denial, deception, and cover-up” that has been ongoing for over 30 years and has proven to be “part of the regime’s DNA.”

The NCRI is the diplomatic wing of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), an Iran-listed domestic terrorist group. While the U.S. removed the terrorist designation from NCRI, the Biden administration is believed to be reconsidering that decision.

The NCRI’s credibility is solid, however. They unmasked the Iranian nuclear program as far back as 2002, exposing several nuclear sites previously unknown to Western intelligence.

Fox News:

As part of its findings, the NCRI said the site was first built by companies controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and was part of a project named Marivan, which it said involved a group called METFAZ that was engaged “in the research and construction of nuclear high explosive-devices.”

Additionally, the group noted that Dr. Saeed Borji, a top explosives specialist, worked with Fakhrizadeh, the regime’s former nuclear chief. It said Borji continues to conduct research for the regime’s nuclear program.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/family-life-uks-lockdown-katie-hopkins/

It’s fair to say people don’t necessarily see me as the homely type. I am built like a stick insect with biceps. I never talk about my husband or kids in public. And through a recent short-haired phase of mine, I managed to convince most God-loving Americans I was a full-blown lesbian.

It is true in part. I have been a catastrophic failure at much of what mothering is supposed to be. My first marriage lasted less than a year, leaving me as a single mother with two children under the age of two and a job that spanned both sides of the Atlantic.

(The beady-eyed amongst you will have spotted that any notion of saving myself for the wedding night went out the window around the same time I learned to drive. According to my mother, you aren’t supposed to have a two-year-old when you have been married for less than a year).

I have never been asked to be a godmother, ever. None of my friends have thought me worthy or capable enough of being the person to care for their child if the worst should befall them. When you are looking for a safe, capable, and secure pair of hands, my name is not the first name on the list.

I tell you all this not out of self-pity (though the failure to be a godmother to any living thing is quite the indictment) but because lockdown has not impacted us all equally at all. And I recognize that cancer sufferers, COPD patients, and the very elderly have had a bit of a rough time with this flu.

But spare a thought for ball-breaking bitches like me. We were not designed to be at home. At no point did I gain 350lbs after my wedding and start home-baking meringue pie and wearing aprons with frills on. And I have zero interest in life hacks for cleaning the slats in my window blinds. If they see a vacuum cleaner once a year, they can consider themselves blessed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-plays-up-ascendancy-over-west-as-it-sets-economic-path-11614854159?mod=world_major_2_pos4

HONG KONG—Fresh from declaring victories over the coronavirus and rural poverty, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is charting a new economic path aimed at sustaining China’s rise and entrenching his personal authority for years to come.

In recent weeks, state media has feted Mr. Xi as an astute and farsighted leader who has driven China’s success in eliminating poverty and anchored the nation’s stability while the U.S. and other Western powers reel from the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr. Xi and other officials have played up perceptions that “the East is rising and the West is declining,” underpinned by what they described as the Communist Party’s superiority in tackling crises and long-term challenges.

The image-building is set to continue over an annual legislative session that begins Friday, as Mr. Xi pivots from the poverty-alleviation drive to his next priority: building a modern, powerful nation by 2035.

In this “new expedition” to modernize China, the “risks and tests to be confronted will not be any less than in the past,” Mr. Xi told a group of midlevel party officials earlier this week. He renewed demands for fealty to his leadership, saying party members should show courage in enduring hardship and facing risks, and demonstrate their loyalty to the Communist Party through their actions.

Nearly 3,000 lawmakers are gathering in Beijing to review a new economic blueprint—known as the 14th five-year plan—and broad guidelines that would shape China’s growth model over the next decade and a half. Coming ahead of the party’s centenary celebrations in July, the weeklong conclave also offers Mr. Xi a platform for promoting the merits of his autocratic style over the foibles of Western democracy.