RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/leftist-is-alarmed-at-trump-hopes-for-mideast/91254/

“Angels are rare, if they exist at all, in the Middle East. Yet if Israel can find true peace, even with imperfect regimes, the region would be better off. One side benefit: some Arab leaders begin to realize that, beyond entrepreneurship and high-tech, emulating Israel’s liberal ethos could be useful for them as well.”

No sooner has the Arab-Israel Spring started to blossom than the Leftists are up in arms. Gulf capitals now formalizing relations with Jerusalem are, they complain, ruled by non-democratic bad guys. Exhibit a: Bahrain, where a Sunni minority, backed by Saudi Arabia, rules over restive Shiite population.

Bahrain has just announced that it will join the United Arab Emirates Tuesday at a White House ceremony, where President Trump and his top Mideast aide and son in law, Jared Kushner, are scheduled to host Prime Minister Netanyahu and the U.A.E.’s foreign minister, Abdullah bin Zaid. In the event, the first peace agreement between (now two) Arab countries and the Jewish state in a quarter century will be sealed with hand shakes.

Mr. Trump hints of more to come. Saudi Arabia, vying for leadership in the region, is the big prize. The U.A.E., and certainly Bahrain, wouldn’t have signed on without its blessing, but, even as it allows for Israeli flights over its skies, Riyadh has yet to join them.

Critics won’t be inaccurate in noting the failures of the Gulf’s emirates, sultanates ,and theocracies involved in this breakthrough. Yet haven’t those same critics for years insisted that “you make peace with enemies”? Don’t they push the line that there can be no true peace before Jerusalem comes to terms with the Palestinian Authority, which similarly fails the paragon-of-democracy, benevolent-ruler test?

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/is-trump-on-the-way-to-a-historic-mideast-peace

President Trump’s announcement today that Bahrain will be the latest Arab country to recognize Israel starts to make it look like we could be on the way to a Mideast Peace. It would be unwise to get ahead of events, but it would also be unwise not to recognize at least the possibility that is coming into view. Predicting this development Thursday, Mr. Trump declared, “You could have peace in the Middle East.”

The announcement by the White House today comes in advance of what was already shaping up as a remarkable event for Tuesday, when Mr. Trump is due to host at the White House the signing of the entente between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Prime Minister Netanyahu will be there, as will U.A.E.’s foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Now, the White House says, Bahrain will be there, as well.

We don’t mind saying that we were opposed to Mr. Trump’s pursuit of a Middle East peace. It was nothing personal. We’ve opposed nearly all American efforts to play the so-called “honest broker” in the Middle East. Our preference has been to back Israel and wait for the rest of the region to come around (or not). Pursuing peace by getting between the Jewish state and her enemies does more harm than good.

Yet Mr. Trump has impressed us with his sagacity. We first tipped our hat to it two weeks into his presidency, when we issued an editorial called “Trump’s Iran Strategy.” It had quickly become apparent that he was going to focus, as we put it, “less on the Palestinain predicament and more on winning the war against jihadist Islam.” He was going to side with the Sunni Arabs against Shiite Iran.

In that feud we don’t have a strong view. It did, though, put Israel’s Arab neighbors in the thrall of, in Mr. Trump, an exceptionally strong backer of Israel. Mr. Trump’s redemption of his campaign promise to move our Israel embassy to Jerusalem put the Arabs in a position that they would have to choose. It did so more emphatically than any recent démarche we can think of.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-middle-eastern-wall-crumbles/

Israeli National Security Advisor Meir Ben-Shabbat, U.S. President’s senior adviser Jared Kushner and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates Anwar Gargash hold a meeting in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates August 31, 2020. (Photo: UAE Government)

U.S. President Donald Trump’s policy successes in the Middle East consist primarily of opening artificial floodgates and allowing for the passage of political currents already moving. That is not a small thing—Norwegian parliamentarian Christian Tybring-Gjedde agreed, nominating the president for the Nobel Peace Prize for the Israel-UAE normalization deal dubbed the “Abraham Accord.”

History is not a series of dates (high school students to the contrary). Dates are simply points in a process: July 4, 1776, D-Day and V-E Day, the “Abraham Accord” and the treaties with Egypt and Jordan that preceded it. They are the result of streams of percolating events, allowing for shifting times, tides and armies. A country or a politician or a terrorist can throw up a roadblock. It may forestall movement for a time, but ultimately, perceived national interest and the threats to those interests will undermine a wall that has lost its relevance.

American neutrality was firmly in control in 1939, but the tide turned to helping our British friends and Russian allies in 1940. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor (another date) America had changed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/showdown-in-the-mediterranean-11599780440?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Aegean Sea surface temperatures naturally can reach the 80s, but the region has come to a boil this summer. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s confrontation with Greece over maritime claims could be resolved through diplomacy. The question is whether Mr. Erdogan wants to negotiate or simply assert Turkish power.

Territorial disputes around the Turkish coast and several nearby Greek islands existed long before Mr. Erdogan took office, but the Turkish leader’s growing belligerence has caused the latest round of tension. He unilaterally claims vast chunks of territory for Turkey and has escalated by sending exploration vessels into disputed territory with support from the navy. Each side has legitimate claims but Ankara justifies bad behavior with nationalist rhetoric.

“They’re either going to understand the language of politics and diplomacy, or in the field with painful experiences,” Mr. Erdogan declared Saturday. While leaders usually reserve such language for adversaries, Mr. Erdogan was threatening a NATO ally. The alliance hoped relations between Greece and Turkey would improve when they joined in 1952, but the two have come close to war three times since the 1970s. Tensions worsened as gas was discovered around the Eastern Mediterranean in recent years.

Turkey also has issues with Cyprus, which belongs to the European Union but not NATO. Ankara invaded the island in 1974 and is the only country in the world to recognize Turkish-speaking Northern Cyprus as a state. The south wants to cut deals with foreign energy firms but Ankara demands the north gets a share. Separately, Turkey wants economic rights in waters Cyprus sees as its own.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/2020/09/10/greek-turkish-rivalry-again-near-the-boiling-point-n913668

Almost daily, Greek and Turkish aircraft and ships fight mock battles over disputed oil and gas rights in the eastern Mediterranean.

Since the loss of much of the Christian Balkans to the Ottomans in the 15th century, Greece and what would later become modern Turkey have been rivals, outright enemies, and often at war.

Mutual NATO membership and shared Cold War fears of Soviet Russia did not stop the two from almost going to war after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

Still, the current escalation seems weird. Most territorial claims and disputes over borders were settled almost a century ago, and the two countries have had mass population exchanges.

Why, then, does the divide still run so deep?

Turkey is a Muslim country and was once the Ottoman Empire that ruled much of the Islamic world. Greece is still surrounded by Muslim countries.

Turks are quick to remind everyone that from the late 15th century to the early 19th century, most of Greece and the Aegean Islands belonged to the Ottoman Empire.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-withdrawal-agreement-debacle?token=

After announcing that the British government was introducing legislation to override parts of the Brexit withdrawal agreement that it concluded with the EU last year, Boris Johnson told the Commons yesterday that this would provide

a legal safety net to protect our country against extreme or irrational interpretations of the protocol that could lead to a border down the Irish sea in a way that I believe, and I think Members around the House believe, would be prejudicial to the interests of the Good Friday agreement and prejudicial to the interests of peace in our country. 

In response to the objection that the Prime Minister had signed this agreement containing the wording of this protocol, his spokesman said the agreement was “not like any other treaty”. This was because it was sealed 

at pace in the most challenging possible political circumstances to deliver on a clear political decision by the British people and with the clear overriding purpose of protecting the special circumstances of Northern Ireland. It contains ambiguities and in key areas there is a lack of clarity. It was written on the assumption that subsequent agreements to clarify these aspects could be reached between us and the EU on the detail.

The previous day, when the storm over this broke, Boris Johnson was reported as being about to tell EU leaders that the Brexit divorce deal was “contradictory”. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16311/woke-jew-hatred

Twitter itself plays a significant role in promoting anti-Semitism.

Despite thousands of complaints, Twitter left most of the rapper’s (Wiley’s) tweets up for six days and only decided to ban him for life after a 48-hour boycott of the platform by thousands of British users, including Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Twitter has even tried to claim that the genocidal variety of Jew hatred, the kind at which Iran’s leaders excel, does not violate its rules.

It appears that the self-righteous outrage of the wokerati is absent when the person at the receiving end of racism is a Jew.

Jew hatred in the United States has grown more prevalent in recent years.. In 2019, there were 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents, according to a May report by the Anti-Defamation League. It was the highest number in 40 years. The incidents included 61 physical assault cases, 1,127 instances of harassment and 919 acts of vandalism.

Antisemitism is also peaking in several European countries: In 2019, Germany, with 2,032 incidents, saw the highest number of anti-Semitic crimes in nearly two decades. The United Kingdom registered “a record number” of anti-Semitic incidents in 2019 for the fourth year in a row with 1,805 incidents — “the highest number ever logged in a calendar year and a 7% increase on 2018”, according to a report in The Guardian. In France, anti-Semitic attacks surged by 74% in 2018 compared to the previous year and an additional 27% in 2019. One violent attack in 2018 was the brutal murder of Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old French Jewish Holocaust survivor, who was murdered in her Paris apartment by two men, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they stabbed her 11 times and set her apartment on fire.

The growth in anti-Semitism comes a mere 80 years after millions of Jews were rounded up in Europe and subjected to enslavement, mass shootings, “medical experiments”, and industrial mass murder in Nazi concentration camps, for no other reason than being Jewish.

In our hypersensitive, hyper-racialized “woke” culture, where speaking obvious truths such as “all lives matter” will get you immediately cancelled, terminated from your job and classified as racist, one would assume that the rise in anti-Semitism would prompt maximum outrage. Promoting anti-Semitism, however, rarely gets anyone — apart from the occasional white supremacist — cancelled. This double-standard continues despite hate speech being generally considered completely unacceptable and dangerous, as reflected in the policies against hate speech of the social media and tech giants.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16485/china-threatens-dumping-treasuries

China’s Communist Party publicly talking about an American default is… essentially a declaration of intent to destroy the American economy. Washington should fight back.

No amount of persuading, cajoling or badgering has worked to convince China to accept agreements and norms.

Trump can hasten the departure of businesses from Chinese soil with tariffs and administrative measures restricting international commerce. The loss of access to the U.S. market would shake China. Last year, China’s merchandise trade surplus against America amounted to 81.8% of its overall merchandise trade surplus, showing extreme dependence on the American market…. Trump can also order American companies to end their technical cooperation agreements with Chinese entities, prohibit portfolio investments in Chinese markets, and end all sales of tech products.

China may not recover from such actions. Case in point: There is now talk that Huawei Technologies, which six months ago looked as if it would take over the world’s 5G networks, may go out of business because it is having difficulty buying chips to install in equipment

Many Americans have been intimidated, saying Washington cannot oppose China because it owns Treasury debt. That is a hollow threat… The net result of China carrying through on its threat is to leave U.S. Treasury obligations in the hands of countries far more friendly to the United States.

On September 3, the Global Times, the Communist Party tabloid, reported that Beijing was “likely” to sell some or all of its U.S. Treasury holdings.

More important, the paper suggested the United States might for the first time ever default on its debt obligations.

China is certainly trying to destabilize the United States, and it looks as if it’s about to declare total economic war on America.

Beijing has tipped its hand. The question for the Trump administration, therefore, is whether America should strike first.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/prague-mayor-zdenek-hrib-stands-for-freedom/

Vaclav Havel was the leading dissident in Communist Czechoslovakia, and the first president after the Fall of the Wall. All over the world, he became a byword for freedom, democracy, and human rights. There is still a Havel tradition in the Czech Republic, even if it is not the dominant one.

Havelians, if you will, traveled to Taiwan last week, in a show of support for that brave, beleaguered democracy. Communist China was very unhappy. The trip was a “despicable act,” said a Chinese foreign-ministry spokesman. The foreign minister himself, Wang Yi, said that the delegation’s leader — Milos Vystrcil, president of the Czech senate — would “pay a heavy price.”

A second foreign-ministry spokesman, however, pointed out that the Czech government had “distanced” itself from Vystrcil and his delegation. They did not “represent the government’s policy,” said the spokesman — and he was absolutely right.

The Czech president, Milos Zeman, is a warm supporter of the Chinese government, and of the Russian government as well. This shows the split in Czech society (and Europe more broadly). I will have more to say about Zeman, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin in due course.

Zeman said that the senate president had engaged in a “childish provocation.” He further said that the senate president would be excluded from any further foreign-policy briefings by the government.