Tag Archives: freedom

Crimea and the Golan Heights

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A writer to the Letters to the Editor in a recent Wall Street Journal, actually tries to equate Israel’s hold on the Golan Heights with Russia’s occupation of Crimea and of the People’s Republic of China’s seizure of the South China Sea.

And he’s serious.

Approval of Israel’s seizure lends support to Russia’s claims that the Ukrainian territory seized by Russian “separatists” now belongs to Russia, as does Crimea. President Trump’s stance also gives sanction to China’s seizure and fortification of islets in the South China Sea.

This is just idiotic. Israel’s seizure and retention of the Golan Heights was a defensive move: terrorists acting with Syrian (at least tacit) approval, along with the Syrian army, were using that higher ground to shoot at Israel and Israelis.

No one was shooting at Russia from anywhere in Ukraine; Russia’s seizure and occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine is nothing but a gun-point land grab.

No one was shooting at the People’s Republic of China from anywhere at all, much less from the South China Sea. The PRC’s seizure and occupation, and militarization of the occupied islands, are nothing but a gun-point land and sea grab for the resources in and under the Sea and from which to threaten the surrounding nations.

There’s no equivalence here.

Inconsistent

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Venezuela’s interim President—and only legitimate President—Juan Guaidó has sent his emissaries, his ambassadors around the globe to represent his government to other nations, as ambassadors are designated to do.  He has sent Otto Gebauer to Germany to represent his government to the German government.

There’s the rub.  Germany recognizes Guaidó’s presidency, but that government refuses to recognize his ambassador.

For the purposes of conducting official talks, on March 13 the government described him as the “personal representative of interim President Juan Guaidó….”

The rationalization for this inconsistency has been articulated by the Social Democratic Party’s Helge Lindh (and per his resume, Head of Working Group “Strengthening Foundations” (together with Andreas Bialas MdL):

Recognizing Guaidó was a political decision and a signa.  But, in the current situation, it doesn’t make sense to confirm Guaidó’s shadow ambassadors, as that ignores the fact that the power remains with Maduro and his system.

Sadly, Maduro’s ability to cling to power is facilitated by this willingness to continue to recognize—to tacitly support—his power. This paralysis also contributes to Germany’s maintaining Maduro’s policy of denying entry into Venezuela even the most basic survival foods and medicines, solely on the basis of their originating from the wrong nations.

It’s time for Germany to get off the dime, accept Gebauer as Venezuela’s ambassador, and eject the Maduro man.

Germany’s Hans-Joachim Heintze, of the Ruhr University Bochum’s Institute for International Law, is worried about America’s past gunboat diplomacy and doesn’t want Germany to make the same mistakes.  This is another misguided rationalization, here borne of Germany’s guilt complex over a four generations removed war.

Still, if Germany truly is worried about our unilateral action (of which there has been very little related to the current crisis), Germany should work with the OAS and with individual South American nations—particularly Brazil and Colombia, who are bearing the brunt of the flow of Venezuelan refugees—to assemble a South American military coalition to enter Venezuela, force Maduro out, and allow the Guaidó government to function.

Dithering serves only to prop up the thug to the continued abuse of the Venezuelan people.

Risks

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Or, perhaps, threats.

Take careful note of this tweet from Matthew Brennan.  Not only does this system know who Brennan is without any input from him (this time).  It knows where he is and where he’s going.

Imagine that identification and tracking ability in the hands of Government.  The government in the tweet is the PRC’s, but that’s not the only government spreading surveillance systems around the nation like butter on warm toast.

 

H/t to ralf.

The Nature of an Enemy

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This is the nature of the People’s Republic of China which the Left—our own and Europe’s in particular—pooh-pooh as not actually utterly antithetical to our values, our liberties, even our independence from PRC domination.

After locking up as many as a million people in camps in Xinjiang, Chinese authorities are destroying Uighur neighborhoods and purging the region’s culture. They say they’re fighting terrorism. Their aim: to engineer a society loyal to Beijing.

The rationalization for this purge comes from Shohrat Zakir, Chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the Communist Party of China’s Deputy Party Committee Secretary for Xinjiang:

Ethnic unity is the lifeline of all ethnic groups in China and the foundation of economic progress in Xinjiang[.]

And that unity must be a Sinicized unity. This is the lesson the men of the People’s Republic of China government think they’ve learned from the Jinjiang and Mongol conquering of China.

That Sinicization requirement is illustrated by this:

“We can’t have a culture anymore,” said a Uighur resident of Urumqi who works at a state-owned resources company. He said he stopped visiting his local mosque after officials came to his house to confiscate his Quran. “No one goes any more. It’s too dangerous,” he said.

Anything other is evil and must be stamped out.

It’s a long article, but RTWT.

When the Bad Man Comes

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Forty-nine people were murdered in their house of worship in Christ Church, New Zealand last Friday. The thug

slaughtered worshipers at Al Noor [mosque] in a roughly two-minute rampage within that building. He then left for about two minutes before re-entering the building and firing on people on the ground for a further minute.

Left and came back.  Then he drove five miles across town to another mosque and started in again.

The butcher was active for thirty-six minutes before police arrived—that’s thirty-six minutes from the first call to the police, not from the start of the shooting.

When the bad man comes and seconds count, the police will be only minutes away.

Our Progressive-Democrats want to disarm us with their idiotic gun “control” laws.  New Zealand’s gun laws already require a citizen to satisfy the local police in order to get permission to bear any arm at all, and they want to tighten gun laws further.

The nature of this pseudo-logic is succinctly laid out by Rogério Mendonça of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Brazilian Congress:

The logic of the left is always the same: if a crazy guy uses guns to kill people, the solution is to take guns away from people who have nothing to do with what happened[.]

This would be criminal were it not so self-evidently insane.

Mendonça then supplied the right answer:

Now imagine if a decent person had been armed at that school [referring to a Brazilian school attack in which eight children were murdered]. They could have stopped the attack from ending in the bloody way it did.

Just as is often done in the US; after all, the first responders are those already at the scene.  However, these successful defenses don’t get the publicity that mass killings in gun free zones get.