RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16263/china-slave-labor-nike

In March, the non-partisan Australian Strategic Policy Institute, in a report titled “Uyghurs for Sale,” accused Beijing of forcing more than 80,000 Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities to produce products for Nike and 82 other brands.

The report’s accusations against Nike are damning. “A factory in eastern China that manufacturers shoes for U.S. company Nike is equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, and police guard boxes,” it noted…. There, people have been kept against their will in inhumane conditions. This facility, a Nike supplier for more than three decades, produces approximately eight million pairs of shoes each year.

U.S. law provides that products made with forced labor can be seized, but those made in horrific conditions in China and elsewhere routinely are cleared through Customs and end up on the shelves of American retailers.

“Slave labor.”

That is the term U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used on July 16 when speaking about China to television anchor Bill Hemmer on his Fox News show.

The polite phrase is “forced labor.” America’s top diplomat, however, was dropping the diplomacy and employing America’s most powerful weapon: Unvarnished truth.

The unvarnished — and horrific — truth is that the Chinese party-state has institutionalized slavery, ramped it up to industrial scale, and offered slaves to foreign companies. Moreover, compounding its crime, China picks its slaves from racial minority groups inside its borders.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16259/afghanistan-bounty-iran

Some U.S. media and politicians have been expressing their indignation of late over Russia’s alleged offers of bounty money to the Taliban for every American soldier it kills in Afghanistan…. These same journalists and political figures, however, never raise a similar accusation against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has been offering the Taliban bounty money to kill American servicemen for years.

One of Iran’s motivations in extending help to its erstwhile enemy, the Taliban, is probably to foil any U.S. effort to exercise influence in Afghanistan.

Iran also may be hoping to frustrate progress in armistice talks between U.S. and Taliban representatives currently being conducted in Qatar. Iran might wish to maintain its own historical influence in the Afghan provinces adjacent to Iran. Iran seems to have allied itself with those Taliban cells opposed to the talks and has hosted these radical Taliban groups in its eastern provinces bordering Afghanistan.

The real issue here is why the U.S. media, journalists, and politicians remain silent about it.

Some U.S. media and politicians have been expressing their indignation of late over Russia’s alleged offers of bounty money to the Taliban for every American soldier it kills in Afghanistan. This unsubstantiated story is then expanded to include an insinuation that the Trump Administration has failed to take action against Russia.

These same journalists and political figures, however, never raise a similar accusation against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has been offering the Taliban bounty money to kill American servicemen for years.

Iran’s bounty program for killing U.S. troops began as early as 2010. In one instance, a report indicated that a Taliban messenger was dispatched from Kabul to Iran to pick up $18,000 to be distributed to Taliban cells in Wardak Province, Afghanistan. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Terrorist Finance Targeting Center (TFTC) confirmed the relationship between the Taliban and its Iranian sponsors by sanctioning both parties. Money is passed from Iranian companies in Kabul to Taliban agents; Taliban offices in the Iranian cities of Mashhad, Yazd, and Kerman also help facilitate military and intelligence cooperation between Iran and the Taliban.

During the time when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, Shia Iran opposed Kabul’s radical Sunni regime. But after Al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan-based 9/11 attack on the United States, Iranian intelligence agencies began to open links both to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), for instance, issued Iranian passports to Al-Qaeda and presumably the Taliban.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2020/07/20/report-china-is-using-forced-labor-to-manufacture-face-masks-n666122

The New York Times reports that China is using what amounts to slave labor to manufacture face masks.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to drive demand for personal protective equipment, Chinese companies are rushing to manufacture the gear for domestic and global consumption. A New York Times visual investigation has found that some of those companies are using Uighur labor through a contentious government-sponsored program that experts say often puts people to work against their will.

The Uighurs are an ethnic minority in China, which is majority Han Chinese.

The report may shed some light on video we and many others posted last week.

The video dates to at least Sept. of 2019, and apparently shows Chinese government officers in black guarding Uighurs who are blindfolded and shackled, kneeling, before being loaded onto trains. The video reportedly originates in Xinjiang, the province in which the Uighurs live and are forcibly moved from to work in factories elsewhere. Interestingly, many of the officers in black are wearing face masks.