‘Jerusalem Is Our City,’ Turkey’s Erdogan Declares

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Thursday implied that Jerusalem belongs to Turkey, referring to the Ottoman Empire’s control over the city for much of the modern era.

“In this city that we had to leave in tears during the First World War, it is still possible to come across traces of the Ottoman resistance. So Jerusalem is our city, a city from us,” he told Turkish lawmakers during a major policy speech in Ankara. “Our first qibla [direction of prayer in Islam] al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are the symbolic mosques of our faith. In addition, this city is home to the holy places of Christianity and Judaism.”

The Ottoman Empire ruled over Jerusalem from 1516 to 1917. Modern Turkey, its successor state, has long stressed its enduring connection to the holy city, regularly condemning Israel’s alleged efforts to “judaize” it and the US administration’s December 2017 recognition of it as Israel’s capital.

Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel since the country’s founding, and the Jewish people have thousands of years of history in the city, backed up by extensive archaeological finds.

During a lengthy speech at the opening of the Turkish parliament’s new legislative session, Erdoğan spent several minutes lamenting the fate of Jerusalem and the Palestinians’ plight. (Read more from “‘Jerusalem Is Our City,’ Turkey’s Erdogan Declares” HERE)

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Report: Protests Erupt in Iran Backing Azerbaijan in Armenia Conflict (VIDEO)

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Protests erupted across several Iranian cities on Thursday in support of Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The demonstrations took place in cities including Tehran, the capital, and Tabriz, a city in Iran’s northwest near the Armenia-Azerbaijan border.

Videos posted online on October 1 appear to show dozens of people demonstrating in city streets while chanting slogans in Azeri, a Turkic language. Some of the chants included, “Karabakh is ours. It will remain ours,” Radio Free Europe (RFE) reported on Friday, adding that it could not verify the authenticity of the protest footage. . .

Azeris constitute Iran’s largest ethnic minority, with an estimated population of up to 20 million. Like Iran, Azerbaijan is nearly 99 percent Muslim, and both countries have a majority Shia population. Azeris are ethnically Turkic and have been incorporated into Iran’s population since at least the 19th century when a treaty divided Azerbaijan into a northern Russian portion and a southern Iranian portion.

According to RFE on Friday, over “100 people, including many civilians, have been killed since heavy clashes erupted on September 27” between Azerbaijan and Armenia in their disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. While the region legally belongs to Azerbaijan, its population is made up of majority Christian Armenians. (Read more from “Report: Protests Erupt in Iran Backing Azerbaijan in Armenia Conflict (VIDEO)” HERE)

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China’s Sadistic ‘One-Child Policy’ Inflicted Billions With Unspeakable Suffering

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From the start, especially in rural China, the policy was deeply unpopular. As traditional Chinese culture regards more children as indications of further blessings from heaven, even an authoritarian regime had to bow to pressure from time to time. The CCP made several exceptions over the years. For example, if one of the parents belonged to an ethnic minority, the couple could have two children; if the couple’s first child had disabilities, the couple could have another child.

To implement the one-child policy, Deng established a new bureaucracy called the National Population and Family Planning Commission. Unsurprisingly, in the ensuing years, the NPFPC grew into a giant bureaucracy with half a million full-time employees and 85 million part-time employees.

The NPFPC enforced the one-child policy through several means, including “birth permits” requiring married couples to apply for authorization before they could have a child. Children born without a birth permit couldn’t enter the household registration system, meaning they wouldn’t receive food rations and would face challenges enrolling in schools and finding regular employment later in life. . .

Couples violating the “one-child” policy were punished in numerous ways. The most “humane” punishment was a heavy fine that ranged between two to ten times the couple’s annual income. The wide range of fines reflected the fact that local NPFPCs had a great deal of latitude to decide the severity of punishment based on local culture, economic conditions, and most importantly, the zeal for the policy held by a given NPFPC enforcer. When dealing with poorer couples who couldn’t afford the fine, NPFPC enforcers would barge into homes, search for the couple’s most valuable possessions, and haul them away.

The cruelest punishment, however, was forced abortion. The last time I visited China, a friend told me that her neighbor was eight-months pregnant with her second child when the local NPFPC enforcers came to her house, dragged her into a car, and drove her to a local hospital to have an abortion. The nurses had to sedate the mother to perform the procedure. When the poor mother woke up and learned her baby had been murdered, she suffered a mental breakdown. She never recovered. (Read more from “China’s Sadistic ‘One-Child Policy’ Inflicted Billions With Unspeakable Suffering” HERE)

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Senators Probe Netflix Partnership With Chinese Genocide Denier

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Republican senators are demanding Netflix explain its decision to adapt a Chinese science fiction trilogy written by a Xinjiang genocide denier into an original series.

The senators, including Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Rick Scott (Fla.), are marshaling support against the streaming giant’s plan to adapt Chinese author Liu Cixin’s bestselling Three-Body Problem trilogy into a live-action series. Cixin defended his government’s brutal suppression of Muslim Uighurs in a 2019 interview with the New Yorker.

“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is committing atrocities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR),” the legislators wrote. “Sadly, a number of U.S. companies continue to either actively or tacitly allow the normalization of, or apologism for, these crimes. The decision to produce an adaptation of Mr. Liu’s work can be viewed as such normalization.”

Bela Bajaria, a Joe Biden campaign megadonor who gave as much as $500,000 to a group affiliated with the candidate, was in charge of “international content” when Netflix ordered the series. She now oversees all of Netflix’s original series across the world, according to the Wall Street Journal. Netflix, which did not return a request for comment, previously told the Washington Free Beacon that she “works on the series side of the business.”

Netflix’s collaboration with Liu reflects Hollywood’s willingness to cater to the massive Chinese market, even if it means turning a blind eye to the country’s human rights abuses. Disney’s recent live-action remake of Mulan even thanked Xinjiang authorities—some of them directly implicated in the Uighur crackdown—in its closing credit. Hollywood studios also routinely avoid topics that might anger Chinese censors, going so far as to change movie villains’ nationalities from Chinese to North Korean. (Read more from “Senators Probe Netflix Partnership With Chinese Genocide Denier” HERE)

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South Korean President Calls for Official End to Korean War

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South Korean President Moon Jae-in is urging an official end to the 70-year Korean War, a move he hopes will foster renewed progress toward peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Moon made the proposal during a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, which opened on Tuesday. While the direct fighting between the two Koreas ended in 1953 with an armistice agreement, North and South Korea have never formally ended the war, which began in 1950.

“The war must end, completely and for good,” Moon said in his address. “I hope that the U.N. and the international community provide support so that we can advance into an era of reconciliation and prosperity.” (Read more from “South Korean President Calls for Official End to Korean War” HERE)

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Pakistani Christian Sentenced to Death for Refusing to Convert to Islam

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In the depths of a squalid Pakistani jail cell – kept far from the rest of the inmate population at Lahore’s District Prison – a poor Christian factory worker is awaiting execution.

A judge convicted Asif Pervaiz, 37, of blasphemy and he was sentenced to death earlier this month. Those advocating for Pervaiz’s innocence claim it was not blasphemy and that he merely refused to buckle to pressure and convert to Islam.

“This is a tragic situation; the first case in Pakistan’s recent history where a Christian has been accused of blasphemy for refusing to embrace Islam,” Pervaiz’s attorney, Saif Malook, told Fox News. “This man, Asif’s boss, wanted him to leave Christianity, and Asif knew he would suffer a lot by saying no. But he kept his faith.”

Pervaiz’s nightmare began in 2013 after his supervisor, Muhammad Saeed Khokher, at the garment factory where he worked allegedly pressured him to become a Muslim on multiple occasions, according to Malook. When he refused, Khoker went to police with allegations that the devoted Christian had sent him “blasphemous” text messages defaming the Muslim Prophet Muhammed.

Khokher has since denied that he had attempted to compel his work subordinate to convert. In Pakistan, insulting the Prophet carries a mandatory sentence of capital punishment, and the court has vowed that Pervaiz will be “hanged by his neck until death.” (Read more from “Pakistani Christian Sentenced to Death for Refusing to Convert to Islam” HERE)

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‘Beyond a Doubt’: COVID-19 Pandemic Could Have Been Prevented If China, WHO Acted

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The coronavirus pandemic likely “could have been prevented” if the Chinese government acted more transparently and the World Health Organization wasn’t “complicit in the spread and normalization” of their propaganda during the outbreak’s early days, an audit from the House Foreign Affairs Committee reportedly says.

The 96-page document authored by Republicans in the committee — which the New York Post says it exclusively obtained Monday before its planned release — also reportedly calls for the resignation of WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom over his “detrimental impact on the COVID-19 response.”

“It is beyond doubt that the Chinese Communist Party actively engaged in a cover-up designed to obfuscate data, hide relevant public health information, and suppress doctors and journalists who attempted to warn the world,” it said, according to the New York Post.

“Research shows the CCP could have reduced the number of cases in China by up to 95 percent had it fulfilled its obligations under international law and responded to the outbreak in a manner consistent with best practices,” it added, while also saying “it is highly likely the ongoing pandemic could have been prevented.” . . .

The document also accuses WHO of ignoring warnings from Taiwan and Hong Kong about the risk of human-to-human transmission and then falsely claiming for weeks that Chinese researchers found “no evidence” of that happening, the New York Post reported. (Read more from “‘Beyond a Doubt’: COVID-19 Pandemic Could Have Been Prevented If China, WHO Acted” HERE)

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Report: North Korea Laundering Money Through U.S. Banks to Evade Sanctions

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North Korea has laundered money through US banks in an elaborate, years-long plot to evade international sanctions, according to a new report citing a leak of confidential documents from leading financial institutions.

The documents revealed that North Korea-linked organizations allegedly transferred more than $174.8 million illegally using shell companies and assistance from Chinese companies through US banks, including JPMorgan Chase and the Bank of New York Mellon, NBC News reported.

During that period, Washington had ramped up its sanctions against the Hermit Kingdom as Pyongyang pursued its nuclear and missile programs with vigor, according to the network.

Wire transfers from companies with shady ownership were made only days or hours apart in some instances, with amounts in round numbers and with no clear commercial reasons, according to the documents cited by NBC News. . .

Eric Lorber, a former Treasury Department official who worked on sanctions against the rogue regime during the Trump administration, told NBC News that “taken as a whole, you have what really, frankly, looks like a concerted attack by the North Koreans to access the US financial system over an extended period of time through multiple different avenues in ways that were fairly sophisticated.” (Read more from “Report: North Korea Laundering Money Through U.S. Banks to Evade Sanctions” HERE)

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Report: China Harvesting Data of Prominent Americans, Military for Intelligence

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By Breitbart. A recent report from the Washington Post claims that a Chinese data firm has been collecting the “digital crumbs” of data of prominent Americans and military members for some time. The company gathered data on 2 million people including 50,000 Americans with the “stated purpose of providing intelligence to Chinese military, government and commercial clients.”

The Washington Post reports that a Chinese company named Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Technology has been collecting the private information of prominent American citizens and military figures for the purpose of providing intelligence to the Chines military. This was discovered by an Australian cybersecurity consultancy firm that found a copy of the Chinese database left unsecured on the internet. The data appears to combine many sources together into one complete record on each individual, which the database claims will be used to provide “intelligence to Chinese military, government and commercial clients.” (Read more from “Report: China Harvesting Data of Prominent Americans, Military for Intelligence” HERE)

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Chinese Firm Harvests Social Media Posts, Data of Prominent Americans and Military

By The Washington Post. Biographies and service records of aircraft carrier captains and up-and-coming officers in the U.S. Navy. Real-time tweets originating from overseas U.S. military installations. Profiles and family maps of foreign leaders, including their relatives and children. Records of social media chatter among China watchers in Washington.

Those digital crumbs, along with millions of other scraps of social media and online data, have been systematically collected since 2017 by a small Chinese company called Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Technology for the stated purpose of providing intelligence to Chinese military, government and commercial clients, according to a copy of the database that was left unsecured on the Internet and retrieved by an Australian cybersecurity consultancy.

The cache, called the Overseas Key Information Database, or OKIDB, purports to offer insights into foreign political, military and business figures, details about countries’ infrastructure and military deployments, and public opinion analysis. The database contains information on more than 2 million people, including at least 50,000 Americans and tens of thousands of people who hold prominent public positions, according to Zhenhua’s marketing documents and a review of a portion of the database. (Read more from “Chinese Firm Harvests Social Media Posts, Data of Prominent Americans and Military” HERE)

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Israel Imposes Second Nationwide COVID Lockdown

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Israel is poised to enter another nationwide lockdown that would shutter schools, restaurants, markets, and more for two weeks, making it the first developed nation to shut down for a second time.

Cabinet ministers approved the second lockdown late Thursday, and it will be up for final approval Sunday with a full Cabinet vote. It would last for two full weeks, followed by two more weeks of stringent economic and social restrictions starting Sept. 18, Bloomberg reported Friday.

Israel successfully got the coronavirus under control in the spring and lifted the national lockdown in May. (Read more from “Israel Imposes Second Nationwide COVID Lockdown” HERE)

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