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kennyn-77

Hundreds of Taiwanese extradited to China, says report - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-59486286

china taiwan extradition sovereignty

shared by kennyn-77 on 02 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • A new report by a human rights group has found more than 600 Taiwanese arrested overseas have been deported to China in recent years.
  • Safeguard Defenders says the practice was being "used as a tool to undermine Taiwan's sovereignty".Taiwan, which considers itself an independent nation, has long insisted that Taiwanese arrested abroad should be sent back to the island.But Beijing sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that is a part of China.
  • It argues several nations are breaching international human rights laws in following extradition treaties with Beijing, and singled out Spain and Kenya for extraditing the most number of Taiwanese people to China.China in the past argued that the Taiwanese suspects in some cases should be extradited to China as their victims included mainland Chinese.
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  • Under the "One China" policy, Beijing has insisted that any country that wants diplomatic relations with China must first break official ties with Taiwan. This has resulted in Taiwan's diplomatic isolation from the international community.
Javier E

Putin's Challenge To The American Right - 0 views

andrewsullivan.substack.com/...tins-challenge-to-the-american

putin right-wing authoritarian invasion nostalgia sullivan

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • It’s not so much Putin’s trashing of international law, his unhinged rehashing of post-Soviet grievances, his next-level Covid paranoia, the foul murders of his opponents, or his brazen embrace of shelling hospitals that has so deepened the damage to the Putin brand among the West’s new Russophiles. These atrocities and madnesses they have long found ways to live with
  • No, it’s Putin’s failure — thus far — to actually win the war he started that’s so damning. It’s one thing for a dictator to be deemed cruel; and quite another — and far more dangerous — thing for him to be seen as incompetent.
  • “They’re gonna keep peace all right.” Think of the depth of the cynical callousness that has to lie behind such a smirk. Notice that for Trump, Putin is not just a thug but a smart one, and the possibility of his brutal incursion into a sovereign neighbor state was, in Trump’s mind, “wonderful.” And cheap: “He’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.”
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  • With Trump, evil is always better when it’s also a bargain.
  • Until as recently as January this year, “62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.” That’s the primrose path down which the GOP led its supporters — seeing Putin as a more legitimate president than Biden.
  • Steve Bannon summed it up: “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.”
  • over the years, this drumbeat of love for the Russian dictator shifted the views of many grassroots Republicans. In the wake of Trump’s personal infatuation with Putin, the murderer’s favorability among Republicans jumped from 10 percent in 2014 to 37 percent by December 2016.
  • For besieged social conservatives and Christianists in America, Putin loomed like some phantasm of strange hope.
  • Putin’s blunder has revealed, in fact, that the West has a unique new weapon in the history of global warfare that can end wars almost before they begin: an economic kill-switch. The vast and complex set of financial, economic, and travel sanctions that the West unveiled this past fortnight and is imposing on Russia — effectively removing it from international banking and most international trade — is something no country can survive for very long.
  • If you’re Bannon, you can still try and wing it, but the sheer sight of bombed hospitals, murdered children, homeless seniors, and mortar explosions in residential neighborhoods tends to shape public opinion overnight.
  • Secondly, and perhaps most important, Putin is failing. He looks weak. The visual of a vast, stalled, vulnerable convoy of trucks on its way — or not — to Kyiv is now a metaphor for Putin’s presidency.
  • Putin has also done something no US president has been able to do in decades: rally Europe around NATO, get NATO countries to re-arm (finally), and give them a new and pointed mission: the deterrence of Russia
  • The last two weeks, to put it mildly, have pummeled this narrative. It’s happened in a couple of ways. The first is that there really is no legitimate defense — even at CPAC, the fetid armpit of the Trump right — of sending troops and tanks into a neighboring country to teach it a lesson in submission to Mother Russia
  • if the EU is able to ramp up nuclear power (as France and Britain are), allow more fracking, and keep its investment in renewables surging, Russia’s entire carbon-based economy will have an expiration date attached to it.
  • None of this was supposed to happen. The West wasn’t supposed to unite this expeditiously; the EU wasn’t expected to find a new and confident voice; Russia’s access to global finance wasn’t supposed to be severed overnight; and a senile American president wasn’t supposed to corral a massive coalition to marginalize and isolate Russia on the global stage.
  • “Everything the [far right] wanted to perceive as decadent and weak has proven strong and brave; everything they wanted to represent as fearsome and powerful has revealed itself as brutal and stupid
  • so a president recently celebrated as a mastermind on the world stage has allowed his ancient fantasies of imperial glory to kick-start his own country’s economic and social collapse. Putin emerges from this as neither smart nor strong; he is, in fact, dumb and increasingly weak.
  • That’s why he’s a useful insight into what reactionism actually is. It’s not really a politics; it’s a mood. It’s not really about the problems of the present; it’s about living in an imagined past, and believing that you alone can restore it by some mystical rhetorical magic.
  • It’s about “subscribing to a worldview that combines Orthodox Christian mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism.
  • Trump longs for the 1950s in America — just as Putin longs for the USSR of the same period
  • Wrapped up in nationalism, provoked by left-extremism, corralled by skillful demagogues, this longing can be a path to power. It can bring tyrants into office. But it cannot work in practice — because the world is different now. We live in 2022. America will never have the cultural and relative demographic homogeneity of the 1950s again. Never.
  • “White nationalism” in the most ethnically diverse democracy in human history is a kind of insanity — perpetuated by woke leftists and sad rightists. No wall, no president, no new immigration policy, no mass deportations, no book-bannings and no neo-Nazi rallies will bring it back. It’s gone.
  • globalization as a whole will not be undone. And because it will not be undone, exclusion from it will effectively remove any country from great power status in the foreseeable future. And so Putin has had his bluff called as well. If the sanctions hold, the danger from Russia henceforth will come from desperation, not ambition.
  • d this is often the risk of reactionary movements. The backlash they provoke can be lethal to their cause.
  • If Trudeau tried to freeze the bank accounts of political opponents, the West has chosen to cut an entire country off from global finance — to precipitate its collapse. The scale of this organized global cabal and the immensity of its power should alarm anyone. Putin’s hyper-nationalism has actually generated the most potent globalist power grab since the Cold War. And made it look reasonable.
Javier E

Skepticism Grows Over Israel's Ability to Dismantle Hamas - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-hamas-war-military.html

israel hamas

shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • “I think that we have reached a moment when the Israeli authorities will have to define more clearly what their final objective is,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said this month. “The total destruction of Hamas? Does anybody think that’s possible? If it’s that, the war will last 10 years.”
  • Since it first emerged in 1987, Hamas has survived repeated attempts to eliminate its leadership. The organization’s very structure was designed to absorb such contingencies, according to political and military specialists
  • In addition, Israel’s devastating tactics in the Gaza war threaten to radicalize a broader segment of the population, inspiring new recruits.
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  • Analysts see the most optimal outcome for Israel probably consisting of degrading Hamas’s military capabilities to prevent the group from repeating such a devastating attack. But even that limited goal is considered a formidable slog.
  • Hamas is rooted in the ideology that Israeli control over what it regards as Palestinians lands must be opposed by force, a tenet likely to endure, experts said.
  • “As long as that context is there, you will be dealing with some form of Hamas,” said Tahani Mustafa, senior Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank. “To assume that you can simply uproot an organization like that is fantasy.”
  • The Israeli military said this week that it had killed about 8,000 Hamas fighters out of a force estimated at 25,000 to 40,000. But it is unclear how the count is being made
  • “They’ve been saying this for a while, that Hamas is collapsing,” Mr. Milshtein said. “But it’s just not true. Every day, we’re facing tough battles.”
  • The group’s top echelon are believed to be sheltering, along with most of its fighters and the remaining hostages, in deep tunnels. Although the Israeli army has said that it demolished at least 1,500 shafts, experts consider the underground infrastructure is largely intact.
  • The tunnels, built over 15 years, are believed to be so extensive, estimated at hundreds of miles long, that Israelis call them the Gaza Metro.
  • “From a professional point of view, I must give credit to their resilience,” he said. “I cannot see any signs of collapse of the military abilities of Hamas nor in their political strength to continue to lead Gaza.”
  • A string of Israeli assassinations of Hamas political, military and religious leaders also failed to weaken the group. It won control of Gaza in free Palestinian elections in 2006, then evicted its more moderate rival, the Palestinian Authority, in a bloody conflict the next year.
  • For Israel, the aim is first to dismantle the government, then to disperse the fighters and eliminate the commanders and their primary subordinates, the Israeli official said.
  • “The top leadership can disappear at any time because they can be killed, they can be arrested, they can be deported,” he said. “So they developed this mechanism of the easy transfer of command.”
  • Trying to eliminate Hamas entirely would require fighting from street to street and house to house, and Israel lacks both the time and personnel, said Elliot Chapman, a Middle East analyst with Janes, a defense analysis firm.
  • The Gaza fight has been compared to the campaign to wrest Mosul, Iraq, from the Islamic State less than a decade ago, but there are significant differences.
  • Notably, Hamas is organic to Gaza — it grew out of frustration with the mainstream factions abandoning the armed struggle against the Israeli occupation. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, and according to its founding charter, is committed to its destruction.
  • Some Gazans curse Hamas, even taking to the airwaves or social media to do it, despite the organization’s history of repressing opponents. Other Gazans, however, say that they still back “the resistance,” and Hamas has long attracted support by providing services like schools and clinics.
  • “The right way to think about it is to degrade the organization to the point that it is no longer a sustainable threat,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired C.I.A. officer who specialized in Middle East counterterrorism.
  • “You cannot just have a strategy of killing everybody,” he added. “You have to have that day-after scenario.”
lilyrashkind

Ukraine's Muslim Crimea Battalion Yearns for Lost Homeland | World News | US News - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...alion-yearns-for-lost-homeland

ukraine

shared by lilyrashkind on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • YASNOHORODKA, Ukraine (Reuters) - Standing amid the charred remains of a roadside hotel on a major highway near Kyiv, Isa Akayev explained what drove him to build his Muslim volunteer unit and fight for Ukraine.
  • Many Tatars opposed Moscow's annexation of Crimea, which had followed the overthrow of a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president amid mass street protests.Their suspicion of Moscow has deep roots. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the mass deportation of Crimea's Tatars - Akayev’s grandparents among them - in 1944, accusing them of collaboration with Nazi Germany.They were only allowed to return with their descendants in the 1980s - as Akayev did from Uzbekistan in 1989 - and many welcomed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union as a liberation.
  • become a fully-fledged unit of Ukraine's army.Dozens of other volunteer battalions sprang up in 2014 and began helping Ukraine's unprepared regular army to fight in the Donbas. They included two Chechen units, a Georgian one, and several with a right-wing nationalist ethos. Some have since disarmed while others have joined the regular army.Russia has been scathing about such units. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on the eve of the war that providing shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to former volunteer battalions was evidence of a "militaristic psychosis".A Ukrainian presidential envoy said in March that such volunteer battalions now numbered more than 100. Ukraine's government celebrates them as heroes, celebrating their exploits on an annual volunteers' day.
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  • Moscow, which in 2016 banned the Mejlis, a body representing Crimean Tatars, rejected the report's findings. It says a March 2014 referendum legitimised its "incorporation" of Crimea.The Crimea battalion performed reconnaissance against Russian forces around Yasnohorodka, a village 25km west of Kyiv, and later in nearby Motyzhyn, Akayev said."The residents here were initially very scared when they saw us because they didn't know who we were. We had to shout 'we are Ukrainian'... then people started slowly coming out of their homes and they gave us tea."
  • "We wanted to buy this place, to build a Crimean Tatar school and a mosque here... It didn’t come to anything, and then this happened," Akayev said, gesturing at the building’s charred remains which he said was the result of Russian shelling."I (still) dream about this project, but really I just want to return home to Crimea."
Javier E

Israel in talks to resettle Gazans in Africa - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...ment-plan-for-gazans-nqgj2rfvs

israel gaza africa palestinian deportation plans

shared by Javier E on 04 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the US State Department, said President Biden’s administration “rejects recent statements from Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza”. Smotrich had called for Gaza’s population of two million to be reduced to 100,000 or 200,000.
  • “This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible,” Miller said. “Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel.”
  • War cabinet discussions on the “day after” scenario in Gaza have been repeatedly postponed, with Netanyahu refusing to discuss plans for the past two months.
Javier E

Trump's Campaign Has Lost Whatever Substance It Once Had - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678727

trump campaign 2024 substance slogan

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was, among other things, one of the most impressive displays of branding on a large scale, in a short time, ever. There were hats. There were flags. And above all, there were slogans.
  • “Make America Great Again.” “Build the wall.” “Lock her up.” And later, “Drain the swamp,” which Trump conceded on the stump that he’d initially hated. No matter: Crowds loved it, which was good enough for Trump to decide that he did, too.
  • One peculiarity of Trump’s 2024 campaign is the absence of any similar mantra. At some recent rallies, neither Trump nor the audience has even uttered “Build the wall,” once a standard. Crowds are reverting instead to generic “U-S-A” chants or, as at a recent Phoenix rally, “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!,” which has a winning simplicity but doesn’t have the specificity and originality of its predecessors.
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  • In their place, Trump’s stump speech has become dominated by grievances about the wrongs he believes have been done to him and his promises to get even for them. It doesn’t quite create the festive atmosphere of eight years ago, when many attendees were clearly having a great time. Where the new, more prosaic feeling lacks the uplift of the past, though, it has still managed to generate enough enthusiasm
  • The lack of catchy slogans might not matter if they were just slogans. But in 2016, they were a symbol of Trump’s willingness to talk about things that other candidates, including other Republicans, shied away from.
  • Regarding the war in Gaza, he has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for the conflict to end quickly—but on Israel’s terms.
  • He had several such policy positions, including breaking with the bipartisan consensus on free trade, pledging to protect Social Security and Medicare, and claiming to have opposed the Iraq War from the start.
  • The focus on the wall also showed that he was willing to deploy (putatively) “commonsense” ideas that other politicians weren’t. This helped Trump to appeal not just to Republicans but to disaffected voters of all stripes
  • Where Trump once trumpeted his appointment of justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he is now fumblingly trying to formulate a position on abortion that doesn’t alienate either his base or swing voters, mostly relying on ambiguity
  • Trump is emphasizing fewer big transformational ideas compared with 2016. His promises are a scattershot collection of ideas targeted at particular segments of the electorate: ending taxes on salary earned from tips, defending TikTok (a platform he once tried to ban), declassifying files on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, rolling back fossil-fuel regulations. Although he promises to clamp down on the border and deport undocumented immigrants, you won’t catch a “Round ’em up” chant at his rallies. And Project 2025, his allies’ proposal to overhaul the federal government by massively expanding political patronage, doesn’t lend itself to a bumper sticker.
  • Trump allots a great deal of his stump speech to mocking Biden as incoherent and senile (sometimes awkwardly) while also warning that Biden’s administration has made the United States a failed nation, and that his reelection could be fatal to the country. The disconnect between the images of Biden as doddering fool and as evil schemer is one that Republicans have struggled to reconcile but that Trump has concluded doesn’t need resolving.
  • Grievance is not a new note at Trump rallies, but four and eight years ago, he used to talk about other people’s grievances and promise to redress them. Now the grievances are largely his own
  • One big problem for Clinton was the criticism that she had no compelling goal for her candidacy other than that she wanted to be president. Trump’s campaign now is about nothing so much as his desire to be president.
  • Even Project 2025 is about the accumulation of executive power itself, rather than any particular policy goal
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