RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20302/taiwan-voters-just-cut-china-xi-jinping-down-to

The Taiwanese, especially after seeing how Beijing suffocated Hong Kong in the past four years, do not want to be ruled by the Chinese regime.

Xi Jinping at the moment must be fuming. In his 2024 New Year’s message, he signaled he is soon going to annex Taiwan. “China will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” the Chinese leader declared in a paragraph that appears to list what will happen this year.

The people of the small island of Taiwan are not afraid of large China. They are an inspiration to free people everywhere.

The results are in. Taiwan’s voters stood up to China and all its war talk of recent weeks.

Vice President Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party won the presidency on Saturday in a three-way race with 40.1% of the vote. Hsiao Bi-khim, recently Taipei’s representative in Washington, was elected vice president.

New Taipei City Mayor Hou Yu-ih, of the opposition Kuomintang received 33.5%, and Ko Wen-je of the new Taiwan People’s Party came in third with 26.5%.

The election was historic. For the first time since 1996, when the island republic held its first democratic presidential election, a party has won a third straight presidential term.

Previously, the DPP, as the governing party is known, and the Kuomintang or KMT, traded the presidency every eight years.

https://www.ft.com/content/bc1b9521-8381-4fb8-aebd-80846a18085d?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9

Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive party won an unprecedented third term in office on Saturday as voters defied China’s warnings against electing presidential candidate Lai Ching-te, whom Beijing called a dangerous separatist. With more than 90 per cent of votes counted, Lai had won 40 per cent, according to the Central Election Commission. Hou Yu-ih from the Kuomintang, the largest opposition party, had 33.5 per cent of the vote and Ko Wen-je from the smaller Taiwan People’s party had attracted 26.5 per cent.

Although the DPP lost its parliamentary majority and Lai’s vote was more than 17 percentage points lower than President Tsai Ing-wen’s when she was re-elected in 2020, the party won a higher share of votes for its nationwide list of legislators-at-large than expected. It is the first time since Taiwan began holding free and direct presidential elections in 1996 that any party has held power beyond two four-year terms.

In a reference to Lai’s failure to win an absolute majority and his party’s loss of its majority in parliament, China said the result “shows that the DPP does not represent majority public opinion on the island”. The Taiwan Affairs Office, the Chinese government department implementing Taiwan policy, said: “We will work with relevant political parties, groups and people from all walks of life in Taiwan to promote cross-Strait exchanges and co-operation, deepen cross-Strait integrated development and jointly promote China culture, promote the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations and promote the great cause of the reunification of the motherland.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20299/iran-ballistic-missiles

Because of the apparent lack of oversight from world leaders, especially the United States, the rising provision of ballistic missiles by Iran to non-state actors –including terrorist and militia groups, as well as rogue states — now presents a significant source of concern for global security.

The regime continues to hide behind its proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Those are Iran’s human shields. That is why they have proxies in the first place: then it is the proxies doing the dirty work and being attacked, not Iran.

Unfortunately, unless Iran’s leaders themselves feel seriously disrupted, why would they ever stop? The Obama and Biden administrations tried giving Iran billions of dollars in “carrots.” Clearly that was a flop. The answer, all the same, is not: “Maybe there weren’t enough carrots. So next time, we will give more of them!”

To stabilize the Middle East, it is essential to apply ongoing pressure on the Iranian leaders themselves, to disrupt their accelerating programs to produce nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them, and to convince them, the old-fashioned way, that their hegemonic dreams of taking over the Middle East simply will not work.

One of the key but lesser-known reasons behind the immense expansion of Iran’s ballistic missile program in the last few years can be attributed to the U.S. Treasury Department declaring in October 2021 the removal of sanctions on Iran’s Mammut Industrial Group and its subsidiary, Mammut Diesel. These companies had previously faced sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in September 2020 due to their identified roles as “key producers and suppliers of military-grade, dual-use goods for Iran’s missile programs.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-u-k-launch-air-strikes-against-houthi-rebels-in-response-to-attacks-on-ships-in-red-sea/

The U.S. and Britain launched air strikes in Yemen on Thursday in response to the Iran-backed Houthis’ recent attacks against vessels in the Red Sea.

The strikes came hours after White House national-security spokesman John Kirby called on the Houthis to “stop these attacks” and warned that the group would “bear the consequences for any failure to do so.”

The militants have launched 27 attacks on vessels in the Red Sea since November 19, the U.S. military said earlier on Thursday. The group says the attacks are in protest of the Israel–Hamas war.

The retaliatory strikes targeted a source of the group’s attacks, Bloomberg News reported, noting that heavy explosions were seen in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and the port city of Al Hudaydah. The attacks were carried out with support from Australia, the Netherlands, Bahrain, and Canada, while the U.K. contributed aircraft.

President Biden confirmed the strikes in a statement on Thursday evening, explaining that the action was “in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea — including the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles for the first time in history.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20297/qatar-built-hamas-terrorism

If the ruler of Qatar really wanted to end the hostage saga, all he has to do is issue an ultimatum to Hamas that if the hostages are not released within, say, 48 hours, he will expel all the Hamas leaders who are still in Qatar and stop funding and providing political support to the group. Arab dictators are not known to be merciful toward those who defy them.

Apparently, Qatar does not feel that it is under any pressure from the Biden administration to end the ordeal of the hostages.

If Hamas released the hostages and laid down its weapons, the war would end tomorrow. However, with Biden and Blinken handling both Iran and Hamas’s patrons in Qatar with kid gloves, Doha and Tehran have no reason whatever to stop it.

The Biden administration is evidently continuing to pretend that Qatar, the Gulf state that funds and sponsors Hamas, is an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Qatar, in addition to the billions of dollars it has been pouring on Hamas, is still hosting several leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist terror group, whose members, on October 7, 2023, beheaded, raped, tortured, burned alive more than 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped hundreds more.

Not only is Qatar far from being a neutral mediator, it is massively biased in favor of Hamas and other Islamist terror groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/houthis-still-attacking-ships-in-the-red-sea/

Remember last week when the White House issued a joint statement that called for “the immediate end of these illegal attacks” in the Red Sea? The attacks are still happening.

Military Times reports that American jets from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, three U.S. destroyers, and one U.K. destroyer shot down 18 drones, two cruise missiles, and an anti-ship missile in an attack on Tuesday.

Fortunately, nobody was injured or killed. Eventually that fortune will run out if these attacks persist. The U.S. has a massive technological advantage over the Houthis, but even the best equipment doesn’t have a perfect success rate. U.S. sailors have been under attack in the Red Sea.

U.S. Central Command counts Tuesday’s attack as the 26th by the Houthis on commercial shipping since November 19. It described Tuesday’s barrage as a “complex attack” and stated that the weaponry used was “Iranian designed.”

The White House statement from last week said, “The Houthis will bear the responsibility of the consequences should they continue to threaten lives, the global economy, and free flow of commerce in the region’s critical waterways.” Six days later, they are continuing to do all of those things. Will the 27th Houthi attack on commercial shipping be the one that leads to consequences? The 28th? The 29th?

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/09/hamas-pa-and-unrwa-educate-gaza-schoolchildren-for-jihad/

American policymakers must grasp the preaching of hatred, violence, and Islamist supremacy woven into Gaza education.

Gaza Strip schools fostered the depraved sensibility that fueled the Oct. 7 butchery perpetrated by Hamas jihadists in southern Israel. While Hamas exercised dictatorial authority over the whole of jihadist indoctrination in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority (PA) produced the textbooks and lesson plans, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in significant measure administered the schools. The defeat of jihadism in Gaza will not be complete without a fundamental reorientation of its educational system.

Given U.S. interests in Middle East stability in general and the post-Israel-Hamas war reconstruction of Gaza in particular, American policymakers must grasp the preaching of hatred, violence, and Islamist supremacy woven into Gaza education. One obstacle is that many U.S. diplomats – even more the younger career foreign service officers who staff them – will have been indoctrinated at American universities in opinions and ideas that bear an uncanny resemblance to certain ugly dogmas championed by the jihadists.

IMPACT-se (Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education) provides indispensable English language documentation of the training for terrorism inscribed in UNRWA Arabic language textbooks and other Hamas educational materials. The training falsifies history, encourages submission to government-sanctioned doctrines, and fosters loathing of Jews, Israel, America, and the freedom and democracy central to the West. Hamas’ savage rampage on Oct. 7 through Israel’s border communities was not a hideous departure from central tenets of Gazan education but rather gave faithful expression to them.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20279/houthi-iran-attacks-red-sea

The Biden administration needs to understand that, when it comes to dealing with autocratic states like Russia and Iran, brute force is the only language they understand, whereas the slightest hint of weakness will be gleefully exploited to their benefit.

It would be preferable to have Iran concerned about US action, whether military or addressing the regime’s hold on power.

Rather than worrying about the response US-led military action might provoke from Iran, the US and its allies need to demonstrate that they will decisively confront the terror tactics adopted by Iran and its proxies, and authorise the uncompromising military action that will end the Houthis’ attacks on key shipping routes once and for all.

If the Biden administration is really serious about tackling the threat posed by Iran-backed Houthi rebels to international shipping in the Red Sea, it needs to authorise the type of decisive military action that will deter the Iranian proxy from undertaking further attacks.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20276/iran-will-go-nuclear

If the US fails to remove Iran’s nuclear capability — and not just (literally) buy time to enable it — the catastrophes that follow will surely go down as US President Joe Biden’s legacy, as well as the legacy of those around him.

From the Iranian regime’s perspective, the failure of the Western powers to counter its nuclear program serves as the most explicit endorsement one can provide that it should continue developing its nuclear-weapons without any fear of negative consequences.

Tehran evidently just uses these funds to expand its influence in various regions, including Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and South America.

Should the Biden administration persist in pursuing a leadership approach perceived as lacking in strength, and should the Biden administration continue to pursue a strategy characterized by conciliation and concession towards the Iranian regime, 2024 will mark the year that the Islamic Republic of Iran acquires nuclear weapons, heralding a pivotal development in their military capabilities and devastating, far-reaching repercussions for regional and international security. If the US fails to remove Iran’s nuclear capability — and not just (literally) buy time to enable it — the catastrophes that follow will surely go down as US President Joe Biden’s legacy, as well as the legacy of those around him.

Iran has substantially increased its production rate of uranium, which, after tripling its output in the past few weeks, is now nearing weapons-grade levels, according to a recent report from the International Atomic Energy Agency.