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WORLD NEWS

The Sound of Liberty in Cuba A new challenge to the Marxist regime. James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sound-of-liberty-in-cuba-11614366025?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet military empire, one of the world’s remaining communist dictatorships is facing a fresh challenge to its authority. And it couldn’t sound any sweeter.

Agence France-Presse reports:

In Cuba, where music and revolution are intertwined, a song by rappers boldly denouncing the communist government has found viral appeal online — but angered a regime that keeps close tabs on culture.

The song is called, “Patria y Vida,” or “Homeland and Life,” and has logged more than two million views on Alphabet, Inc.’s YouTube. Sarah Marsh and Rodrigo Gutierrez of Reuters have more on the popular new anticommunist anthem and the Miami-based musicians who helped make it happen:

Gente de Zona, Yotuel of hip-hop band Orishas fame and singer-songwriter Descemer Bueno collaborated on the song with two rappers in Cuba, Maykel Osorbo and El Funky, who are part of a dissident artists’ collective that sparked an unusual protest against repression outside the culture ministry last November.
“Homeland and Life” repurposes the old slogan “Patria o Muerte” (“Homeland or Death”) emblazoned on walls across the Caribbean country ever since Fidel Castro’s 1959 leftist revolution and expresses frustration with being required to make sacrifices in the name of ideology for 62 years.

“It’s over,” says the song’s chorus. What’s most striking is the song’s direct demand for freedom and blunt challenge to the dictatorship and its lies. “Advertising a paradise,” sing the performers, “while mothers cry for their departed children.”

Muslim Cleric Condemns Ban on Female Genital Mutilation Somehow he hasn’t gotten the media’s memo that FGM is un-Islamic. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/muslim-cleric-condemns-ban-female-genital-robert-spencer/

We’re constantly told in the West that female genital mutilation (FGM) is a cultural practice that has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, but as is always the case with the leftist establishment narrative, reality is otherwise. The latest reminder of that all-important fact comes from Gambia, where the learned imam Abdoulie Fatty (he isn’t one) has condemned – on Islamic grounds — attempts by human rights campaigners to ban FGM.

Gambia’s The Voice reported Monday that “one of the Gambian top Imams has condemned a ban on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the country and talked hard on campaign groups which he said are spreading falsehood about FGM everywhere.” Fatty chose the most important forum of any given week for Muslims, the Friday sermon, to issue this condemnation: he made his statements “as he descended on campaigners against FGM in his last Friday sermon (khutbat) at a Mosque in around Bartex prior the congregational Jumaat prayer.”

Fatty “emphasised that FGM has been in practice since the time of Prophet Ibrahim (ASW) and ‘it was witnessed by Prophet Muhammad (SAW) during his time, too.’”

“My dear Muslim people,” the genial imam exhorted his audience, “I am advising us on the fear of God – all of us, let’s follow the teachings of Islam. My dear Muslim people we used to hear it and hearsay and they have a wake campaign and that is the reason why we do this type of sermon anytime they came back but they will meet us like the sun in the sky.”

Mandatory Vaccinations Arrive in UK While Britain’s children face the mandatory swab. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/uk-and-mandatory-vaccinations-frontpagemagcom/

For once in our lives we Brits have made it to the top of a league table, but for all the wrong reasons.

According to academic types at the University of Oxford, Brits are enduring the sixth strictest lockdown in the world and the second harshest in Europe. Only Cuba, Eritrea, Ireland, Honduras, Lebanon and Peru have faced tougher lockdowns, and most of those places are no stranger to a military coup or a bread line or two.

It does not end with lockdown. Lockdown was never the destination. In Britain, lockdown was only ever a pathway to mandatory vaccination, using unmarked backroads to mask the destination. But we’ve finally arrived.

As things stand, mandatory vaccinations are not currently legal in the UK.

And yet, this week’s headlines included ‘No jab! No job!’, indicating that employers will mandate vaccinations in new work contracts, forcing the unvaccinated out of work.

If that weren’t enough, they are coming for our kids, too. Most parents with children in state schools received a letter just like this:

‘Students will not be allowed to enter the school or return to lessons until they have been tested once and found to be negative.’

In short, without a negative COVID test, your child is not coming in to school.

Everybody (Almost) Has a Last Stand By David P. Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/02/25/everybody-almost-has-a-last-stand-n1428214

There’s an old joke about the housewife who calls her husband on his cell phone during the evening commute. “Be careful, Dear,” she says. “The news says there’s a wrong-way driver on the Beltway.” “A wrong-way driver?” the husband shouts. “There are thousands of them!”

This came to mind while enjoying Michael Walsh’s superb book Last Stands: Why Soldiers Fight When All Is Lost. Freedom-loving men will fight to the death for all they hold sacred, and Michael’s book is adorned by a moving memoir of his father, a Marine officer during the terrible American retreat from the Chosin Reservoir. The book is enormously popular, and deservedly so.

But I should like to add a footnote to the story: Everybody (almost) eventually fights to the death. As Franz Rosenzweig noted in The Star of Redemption, every tribe sends its young men out to fight for its survival until one day they are defeated and the tribe is extinguished. That’s why nearly 150,000 languages have been spoken on Planet Earth since the dawn of man, and only a couple of thousand are left. Extinction is the norm.

Small neolithic peoples who encounter modernity are dying today. The BBC reported earlier this week:

The last male member of the Juma indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon has died after falling ill with Covid-19.

Aruká’s death last week is the latest blow to the group whose numbers were reduced from around 15,000 in the early 20th Century to only six people in the 1990s.

Aruká was the last surviving male of the group, but as BBC News Brazil’s Juliana Gragnani reports, his grandchildren have taken an unusual step to ensure his legacy is preserved.

Aruká’s exact age is not known but he was estimated to be between 86 and 90 years old. During his life, Aruká witnessed the decline of the thousands-strong Juma community which once fished, hunted and planted lands in the southern region of Amazonas state.

Following a series of massacres carried out by rubber tappers and the spread of deadly diseases, the Juma’s numbers dwindled until Aruká’s family was the only one left.

Biden: It’s Okay to Finance China’s Military by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17099/finance-china-military

Wall Street wants to finance the enemy, and the Biden administration is opening the door wide…. Beijing views the U.S. financial community as its channel to influence the highest levels of the American political system.

“It would be a tragic mistake for the new administration to postpone, dilute, or otherwise eviscerate implementation of the key provisions of Executive Order 13959. Doing so would only serve to enrich Wall Street and Beijing at the expense of American security, fundamental values, and investor protection.” — Roger Robinson, chairman of the Prague Securities Studies Institute, interview with Gatestone.

The People’s Republic of China is a unified state, so the investment ban should apply not only to companies the Trump administration designated but also to all state-owned enterprises. State enterprises are by no means separate businesses. The divisions among them are artificial, and all are tightly controlled by the Communist Party. Each one of these entities, therefore, is military-linked and Party-controlled.

China’s Military-Civil Fusion means the People’s Liberation Army “has the right to raid any non-military Chinese company for any technology it decides could advance its military strength.” — Richard Fisher, of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, interview with Gatestone

The Biden administration is allowing Wall Street to use the cash of “scores of millions, up to 160 million Americans” to “fund ICBMs targeting their families, to fund concentration camps in Xinjiang.” Most Americans will have no idea their retirement and other savings are being used to finance their own destruction…. financing China’s war on America.

Wall Street wants to finance the enemy, and the Biden administration is opening the door wide.

How can this be?

On January 26, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued General License No. 1A, which permits Americans to continue acquiring shares in certain companies associated with “Communist Chinese Military Companies,” known as CCMCs, until May 27. The previous deadline, set by the Trump administration, was January 28.

Muslim Life in 2021, as Predicted in 1921 by Daniel Pipes

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17096/lothrop-stoddard-muslim-life

The Muslim world “sunk to the lowest depth of its decrepitude” in the eighteenth century; “the life had apparently gone out of Islam, leaving naught but a dry husk of soulless ritual and degrading superstition behind.” Meanwhile, Europe discovered ocean routes, established economic hegemony, and exploited its power as “mistress of the world” to indulge in “recklessly imperialistic policies.” Its conquests of Muslim-majority lands prompted a massive “flood of mingled despair and rage” against the West.

The “great Mohammedan Revival” began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a “profound ferment” and a “stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind.” This process was well underway by 1921: “The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march.”

The “great Mohammedan Revival” began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a “profound ferment” and a “stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind.” This process was well underway by 1921: “The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march.”

Do not try to reduce causation to interests. Beliefs and passions count at least as much.

When Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) is still recalled, it is as a prominent racist who had a major but malign influence on the budding field of international relations, who acted as theoretician for the Ku Klux Klan, and who contributed the concept of Untermensch (sub-human) to the Nazis.

Stoddard, however enjoyed a high and favorable profile during the 1920s. He had earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and traveled widely. President Warren Harding praised him, and F. Scott Fitzgerald obliquely referenced him in The Great Gatsby.

Stoddard also wrote a prescient 1921 study, The New World of Islam, a survey of 250 million Muslims “from Morocco to China and from Turkestan to the Congo.” Despite his consuming racism, Stoddard impressively recognized trends underway in Islam. As Ian Frazier observed in the New Yorker, “Whatever his philosophy and methods, his guesses sometimes proved out.”

His book had a substantial impact on public opinion, including on such notable figures as the German strategist Karl Haushofer, the Lebanese pan-Islamist Chekib Arslan, the Indian scholar S. Khuda Bukhsh, and Indonesia’s President Soekarno. So, despite Stoddard’s well-deserved ignominy, his New World of Islam is well worthy of scrutiny on its centenary.

Brexit Diary: As BoJo Waffles, Tory ‘Dinosaurs’ Turn on His Fiancée By Stephen MacLean

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/brexit-diary-as-bojo-waffles-on-policy-critics/91429/

Not since the days of Benjamin Disraeli has a prime minister’s wife been cause for such conversation as has Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s fiancée. “Is Carry Symonds really a Downing Street manipulator — or a shrewd supportive partner?” asks the headline in the Times, though the Mirror suggests merely that she has become the prime ministerial hair-dresser who finally tamed the PM’s unruly mop.

I offer the comparison to Mary Anne Disraeli because Dizzy’s wife was quite the story in her day. In her case it was more bemusement — as with, say, Denis Thatcher, husband to Margaret — than hostility. Dizzy declared of his own wife, “She is an excellent creature,” with one of his few complaints being that “she never can remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans.”

Mrs. Disraeli, accompanying her husband to Westminster on the eve of a great debate, managed to get her finger caught in the carriage door and, though the pain was great, “went on chatting and laughing as if nothing had happened, lest his concern for her should prevent him from doing his best.” Assessed Dizzy at another point: “We have been married thirty-three years, and she has never given me a dull moment.”

The current controversy concerning BoJo’s fiancée, Carrie Symonds, is far less comical — or dull. One leading Tory think tank, the Bow Group, is calling for a “judicial review and inquiry” to look into the influence wielded by Ms. Symonds in affairs at Downing Street. “Symonds is unelected, unappointed, and unaccountable,” the Group asserted in a statement, and “has no constitutional powers to hold any role in governing the UK.”

Among the issues raised by the Bow Group, according to Breitbart London, is Ms. Symonds’ role in hirings and firings of officials and in forming Government policy. “The public take a very dim view of cronyism,” Bow’s chairman, Ben Harris-Quinney, contends; “democracy in Britain is and must always be sacred, and no one should be involved in running our country without accountability to the people.”

Pompeo: China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pompeo-chinas-reckless-labs-put-the-world-at-risk/

In today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, along with Miles Yu, his top China policy adviser write that “China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk,” and come right up to the line of outright declaring that the coronavirus pandemic is the result of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Pompeo and Yu don’t point to any new or smoking-gun evidence, but they do point to a few pieces of circumstantial evidence that haven’t gotten much attention. Perhaps most notably, the op-ed column declares, “in January 2021, the State Department confirmed that people had fallen mysteriously ill at WIV in fall 2019, and that WIV conducts secret bioweapons research with the PLA.”

This echoes the fact sheet issued by the department that began with the cautionary note that the U.S government did not know how the virus first jumped into humans, but then continued, “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

This past Sunday, President Trump’s former deputy national-security adviser, Matt Pottinger, said on CBS News’ Face the Nation:

We have very strong reason to believe that the Chinese military was doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory, going all the way back to at least 2017. We have good reason to believe that there was an outbreak of flu-like illness among researchers working in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the fall of 2019, but right — immediately before the first documented cases came to light.

China signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1984, which outlaws the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological weapons.

China claims that it is in complete compliance with the BWC; the U.S. government disagrees. In 2019, the U.S. State Department’s updated report on compliance with arms-control agreements concluded,

the People’s Republic of China engaged during the reporting period in biological activities with potential dual-use applications, which raises concerns regarding its compliance with the BWC. In addition, the United States does not have sufficient information to determine whether China eliminated its assessed biological warfare program, as required under Article II of the Convention.

The Denial of Evil Why it’s a moral obligation to know what communism did – and does. Dennis Prager

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/denial-evil-dennis-prager/

One of the most highly regarded books of the 20th century was Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death.” Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, the book is regarded as a classic for its analysis of how human beings deny their mortality.

But there is something people deny more than mortality: evil. Someone should write a book on the denial of evil; that would be much more important because while we cannot prevent death, we can prevent evil.

The most glaring example of the denial of evil is communism, an ideology that, within a period of only 60 years, created modern totalitarianism and deprived of human rights, tortured, starved and killed more people than any other ideology in history.

Why people ignore, or even deny, communist evil is the subject of a previous column as well as a Prager University video, “Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?” I will, therefore, not address that question here.

I will simply lay out the facts.

But before I do, I need to address another question: Why is it important that everyone know what communism did?

Here are three reasons:

First, we have a moral obligation to the victims not to forget them. Just as Americans have a moral obligation to remember the victims of American slavery, we have the same obligation to the billion victims of communism, especially the 100 million who were murdered.

As Iran plays chicken with Biden, it also moves closer to the bomb By Lazar Berman

https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-iran-plays-chicken-with-biden-it-also-moves-closer-to-the-bomb/

Tehran appears to be jockeying for position ahead of nuke deal talks by blackballing inspectors and threatening to increase enrichment, but the posturing carries dangerous risks.

With each step Iran takes to advance its nuclear program, a path out of the dangerous quagmire becomes even more murky.

On Tuesday, Tehran officially suspended its implementation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty Additional Protocol, which gave nuclear inspectors increased access to Iran’s nuclear program, including the ability to carry out snap inspections at undeclared sites.

“As of midnight tonight, we will not have… commitments beyond safeguards. Necessary orders have been issued to the nuclear facilities,” said Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s envoy to international organizations in Vienna.

A day earlier Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said that Tehran could enrich uranium to 60% purity if it so desired. US State Department spokesman Ned Price said the comment “sounds like a threat” and referred to it as “posturing.”

Analysts believe both the move to limit inspections and the enrichment threat are aimed at bolstering Iran’s negotiating position as it and US President Joe Biden’s administration maneuver ahead of expected talks aimed at bringing Washington back into the 2015 nuclear deal. But even if intended as bargaining chips, they carry the risk of moving Iran significantly closer to nuclear weapons capabilities.