Why diplomacy won’t be enough in latest Mid-East escalation
Israel is once again under attack. The Hezbollah terror organisation escalated its aggression against Israel on September 21, launching a series of attacks that targeted civilian population centres deep inside Israel, leaving devastation in their wake.
In recent days, Hezbollah significantly expanded the range of its rocket attacks, reaching past Tel Aviv and putting more than half of Israeli citizens in danger. But that’s not all.
Last week, Hezbollah’s top commanders held a high-level meeting in which they planned a large-scale terror attack against Israeli communities, one that would mirror the horrific massacre of October 7. Israel acted to prevent this attack and protect its citizens from an imminent threat.
The current conflict initiated by Hezbollah began on October 8, without any provocation from Israel, with frequent attacks launched from southern Lebanon, a territory Israel fully withdrew from in 2000. This aggression follows more than 11 months of rocket fire, which has claimed the lives of dozens of Israelis, including 12 innocent children murdered during a soccer game. These attacks have turned the northern border regions of Israel into a death zone, displacing some 70,000 Israelis from their homes, and creating a humanitarian and security crisis that cannot be ignored.
In the face of Hezbollah’s onslaught, Israel is doing what any sovereign nation would: defend the safety and security of all its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike. Every state has the duty to protect its people from assaults originating from enemies beyond its borders. Israel is fulfilling this obligation within the framework of international law and will continue to do whatever is necessary to ensure its citizens can return safely to their homes.
The international community is increasingly aware of Hezbollah’s destabilising role in the region. Designated as a terrorist organisation by numerous countries including Australia, the United States, member states of the Arab League, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Hezbollah took an active part in the massacres committed by the Syrian regime and is a focal factor of chaos in the region.
Hezbollah’s relentless offensive is, of course, driven by Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. Iran’s fingerprints can be found not only on Hezbollah but also on Hamas, the Houthis, and a network of Shia militias across the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Iraq. Iran’s proxies are actively working to spread violence and mayhem. The Iranian regime has long sought to destabilise the region, imposing its radical ideology through violence to control the Middle East.
However, Iran’s ambitions go far beyond. Its influence extends into Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It threatens global security, including by providing drones and missiles to attack Ukraine, as it supports efforts that undermine peace and stability worldwide.
There is still a possibility to stop Hezbollah’s aggression and restore regional stability through diplomacy. This is how:
First, the international community must designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organisation. The world must increase sanctions on Iran, target the Ayatollah regime’s financial, military and terror networks. The IRGC is the nerve centre of Iran’s global terrorism operations. By sanctioning and isolating this entity, the international community can cripple its ability to finance and direct groups like Hezbollah.
Without this crucial step, Iran will continue to evade accountability, enabling it to pursue its destabilising goals unchecked.
Second, the UN Security Council must enforce Resolution 1701, which mandates the withdrawal of Hezbollah forces in Lebanon to the north of the Litani River. This resolution was passed to end Hezbollah’s stranglehold on southern Lebanon and prevent its attacks on Israel, yet Hezbollah continues to operate freely in that area, with Iran’s full support.
Hezbollah’s domination of Lebanon, its occupation of southern Lebanon, its reign of terror against Israeli civilians, and Iran’s unrelenting support for this terrorist organisation and its malevolent activities must be confronted. Israel stands at the forefront of this battle, defending not just its citizens but the security and values of the free world.
As a career diplomat, I truly believe in the importance of diplomacy and the role it can play in bringing Hezbollah’s aggression to a halt. But we must act now. Those truly committed to peace and stability in the region must designate the IRGC as a terrorist organisation and push for the immediate implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701, before it’s too late.
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Javier Milei Slams the UN for ditching freedom for socialism
Milei’s first speech before the General Assembly held little back.
The chainsaw-wielding Libertarian took a proverbial axe to the ideological weeds choking the life out of the UN’s original mandate. Castigating the UN for abandoning freedom in favour of socialism, Milei rejected Project 2030, stating that Argentina will not participate in the UN’s promotion of collectivism.
This once liberty-centric organisation, Milei asserted, has replaced the cooperation of Nation States protecting God-given freedoms and the right to life with:
‘…a model of supranational government of international bureaucrats who seek to impose a certain way of life on the citizens of the world.’
Project 2030, and The Summit of the Future, he added, ‘…is nothing other than the deepening of this tragic course the UN has adopted.’
Such as the UN’s plan to ‘define a new social contract on a global scale, redoubling the commitments of the 2030 Agenda’.
The project is socialist in nature, Milei argued.
He also said that Project 2030 undermines the sovereignty of nation states and violate people’s right to life, liberty, and property. Applying more socialism to cure the consequences of socialism, only deepens the problem, he protested. ‘World history,’ the Argentine President declared, ‘shows that the only way to guarantee prosperity is by limiting the power of the monarch.’
This coexists with ‘guaranteeing equality before the law, defending the right to life, liberty, and property of individuals’. Quoting Isaiah 2:4, Milei pointed to the Biblical foundations of the United Nations, stating that the UN’s early success was being negated by a mutating bureaucratic structure.
The UN, he continued, had stopped watching over the principles outlined in its founding declaration. What was once a ‘shield to protect the Kingdom of Men was transformed into a multi-tentacled Leviathan’. Milei argued that the UN no longer pursues peace but rather imposes an ideological agenda on its members.
As an example, he cited the adoption of the Agenda 2030 goals which he indicated were obeyed for privileged interests.
Milei then accused the UN of ditching the principles outlined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This, he said, had distorted the role of this institution, and put it on the wrong path.
‘The organisation born to defend human rights, has been one of the main promoters of the systematic violation of freedom.’
He also said that Covid lockdowns should be considered a crime against humanity and then took the UN to task for elevating murderous dictatorships to the Human Rights Council. ‘This house,’ Milei thundered, ‘put ’Cuba and Venezuela on the HRC without question. This is same house that claims to defend women’s rights, puts countries that punish their women for showing their skin, on the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.’
‘This same house,’ Milei continued, ‘that has systematically voted against the State of Israel, the only country in the Middle East defending liberal democracy. All while demonstrating a total inability to respond to the scourge of terrorism.’
Then his speech turned to the issue of the UN promoting collectivist policies that turn countries into ’perpetual debtors’ enslaved to what he referred to as the agenda of global elites. Here Milei described the World Economic Forum’s tutelage as useless.
Milei called out what he said were ridiculous policies such as Net Zero and advocacy of Malthusian eugenics which harm, above all, poor countries.
Implying that high abortion rates announced a bleak future, the Argentine President scolded the General Assembly for advancing ‘sexual and reproductive rights, when the birth rate of Western countries is plummeting’.
The UN is failing, Milei concluded. ‘They’re losing credibility.’
‘It is powerless to provide solutions to the real global conflicts, such as the aberrant Russian invasion of Ukraine. Instead of facing these conflicts, the UN invests time and effort in imposing on poor countries the WEF’s agenda.’
The organisation, Milei argued, is too busy dictating to nations what they should produce and how they do it, whom they might associate with, what their citizens should eat, and the ideologies the should believe.
To this Milei warned, ‘We are at the end of a cycle.’
‘Collectivism and moral posturing, of the Woke agenda, have collided with reality and no longer have credible solutions to offer to the real problems of the world.’
In sum, the UN went woke, now it’s going broke.
‘We cannot persist in the error by doubling down on an agenda that has failed. We in Argentina have already seen with our own eyes what lies at the end of this path of envy and sad passions: poverty, brutalisation, anarchy and a fatal absence of freedom. Argentina will not support any policy that involves the restriction of individual freedoms, or of trade. Nor any policy, that violates the natural rights of individuals, no matter who promotes it or how much consensus that institution has.
‘We invite all the nations of the free world to join us, not only in dissenting from this pact, but in creating a new agenda for this noble institution: the agenda of freedom.
‘May God bless the Argentines and all the citizens of the world, and may the forces of heaven be with us.’
Amen!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/javier-milei-slams-the-un-for-ditching-freedom-for-socialism/
****************************************************While Xi reigns, China’s economy is unreformable
It was presented as a bold stimulus to boost China’s ailing economy – but while it excited stock markets in Asia, Western economists were underwhelmed. At a rare press conference in Beijing on Tuesday, the usually gnomic governor of the People’s Bank of China, Pan Gongsheng, unveiled a range of measures designed to ‘support the stable growth of China’s economy’ and see that it hits this year’s target of five per cent growth.
There was a time when such measures, which included an interest rate cut and more funds to support the stock and property markets, would have quickened the pulse of investors. But this is unlikely to reverse their exodus. It merely confirms fears about China’s deep-seated problems and casts doubt over whether the Chinese communist party (CCP) is capable of meaningfully reforming an economic model that is no longer sustainable.
With the CCP increasingly in every lab and boardroom, the country’s start-up scene is on its knees
The measures ‘indicated policymakers’ growing concerns over growth headwinds,’ said Goldman Sachs, an investment bank. Liu Chang, macro economist at BNP Paribas Asset Management, meanwhile, said that though positive, ‘we think there is still a worrying lack of urgency behind their words around stimulus’.
The problem for Pan is that not only do few economists believe that five per cent growth can be achieved, but China is widely believed to be cooking the books. Analysts have long used alternative gauges for measuring China’s economic activity, such as electricity consumption or energy imports, but their scepticism has increased as the country’s economic problems have mounted. Growth in 2013 may have been as low as 1.5 per cent, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group, a research organisation, as supposed to the 5.2 per claimed. This year has probably been tougher.
While president Xi Jinping has portrayed himself as China’s ‘supreme reformer’, the heir to Deng Xiaoping, his principal achievement since coming to power in 2012 is to put Deng’s reforms sharply into reverse. A property bubble continues to burst with slumping sales and prices, youth unemployment is soaring, and inward investment is plunging amid growing signs of social stress, including a spike in protests.
Beijing has reacted by restricting data about the economy and criminalising pessimism. The Ministry of State Security, China’s main spy agency, has declared that gloom about the economy is a foreign smear and that ‘false theories about “China’s deterioration” are being circulated to attack China’s unique socialist system’.
The announcement of these stimulus measures coincided with reports that Zhu Hengpeng, a prominent economist at one of China’s top think tanks has disappeared after criticizing Xi’s management of the economy in a private chat group. Zhu, who for the past decade has been deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has been placed under investigation, detained and removed after making comments about the flagging economy and referring to Xi’s mortality, according to the Wall Street Journal.
An economic model that for four decades relied on cheap exports and massive, wasteful state-led investment in property and infrastructure is no longer sustainable. It produced dizzying rates of growth but has also led to soaring debt and diminishing returns, with China littered with ghost cities, containing 60 to 100 million empty or incomplete homes, while companies accounting for 40 per cent of China’s home sales have defaulted.
It is widely agreed that China needs to rebalance its economy and that consumers need to spend more, since private consumption accounts for just 39 per cent of the economy – extremely low by world standards (the figure in the US is 68 per cent). But there is no consumer confidence, with 80 per cent of family wealth tied up in property and no meaningful social safety net.
Xi hopes renewable energy technology can replace property as a new motor of growth, and mouth-watering subsidies have been thrown at industries ranging from solar panels to electric vehicles (EVs) and batteries. This has lead to massive over-capacity and vicious price wars. Yet the benign global environment that accompanied China’s earlier export splurges has gone: the world is much more wary.
Xi’s longer term goal is to build a world-beating ‘innovation’ economy driven by domestic tech, but the most effective way of achieving this – giving more sway to the market and to private companies – runs counter to everything he stands for. Xi has prioritised security and CCP control, even over the economy. He has hobbled China’s most innovative technology companies, which have faced tightening restrictions. With the CCP increasingly in every lab and boardroom, the country’s start-up scene is on its knees, with one executive recently telling the Financial Times, ‘The whole industry has just died before our eyes … The entrepreneurial spirit is dead’. Last year, China led the world in the number of millionaires leaving the country, according to the Henley Wealth Management Report.
This is the background against which Pan wheeled out his stimulus, hinting that further measures might be in the pipeline. It had more than a hint of desperation about it and came days after Beijing announced it was raising the retirement age – a measure that was also widely criticised as inadequate to fend off a fast-approaching demographic crisis.
The CCP has long cultivated the myth of the technocrat, claiming that its officials have risen through a meritocratic system and are superior to those in the West because they can plan rationally for the long term. That was always a highly tenuous claim and ignores the reality that even the most gifted technocrat can make little real difference in an autocratic system where ultimately the only thing that matters is the opinion of the leader. Indeed, such a system encourages fraud as underlings clammer to tell the emperor what he wants to hear or face the consequences of voicing unwelcome opinions – as the economist Zhu did.
Pan is perhaps the embodiment of that hapless technocrat. He is no doubt aware that China’s troubled economy has peaked and may go sharply into reverse, but unable to mutter the unspeakable – that it is unreformable as long as Xi Jinping remains in charge.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/while-xi-reigns-chinas-economy-is-unreformable/
*****************************************************Not all masculinity is toxic: Hold the front page: men are different to women
Gender wars are a subset of culture wars. We risk raising a generation of boys who are emotionally damaged and mentally fragile amidst a sea of snowflake children who, terrified by multifront extremist alarmism, demand governments keep them safe from any unpleasantness and all life challenges. Indoctrinated into bearing the burden of collective guilt for past sins that isn’t really inheritable, how many white Christian boys will struggle with mental health issues?
The excesses of trans extremists have finally begun to attract serious pushback from some brave souls like popular writers, athletes, civil servants, police officers, school teachers, professors and a few politicians like Moira Deeming and Claire Chandler. When are men, with the support of women who believe in gender equality and need to consider the welfare of their sons, fathers, brothers and husbands, going to organise the fightback to restore equal rights for all regardless of racial, religious and gender identity? To fight that war and hope to win, an army must first be raised. An army of advocates, activists and even some metaphorical martyrs to the cause.
Instead, additional demands continue to come from women’s rights advocates. On 17 September, Chief Executive Women released its annual report showing that 91 per cent of CEOs are men. It called on companies to set real gender targets because ‘diverse voices are important and diverse leadership teams are good for business’. There are big problems with its tall claims. It pushes the interests of a narrow cultural elite, not of most women in their quotidian activities.
We never, but never, hear talk of equal gender outcomes in the dangerous, menial, physically demanding, family life-disrupting and geographically remote jobs. If the nation’s senior women executives are truly motivated by concern for group-based social justice and the belief that diversity in the senior executive leadership will ‘unlock substantial economic growth and productivity’, they should prioritise getting racial minorities ahead of women who are even more badly under-represented.
However, promoting people into senior positions based on chromosomes and race is not talent-scouting but virtue-signalling. And what if top women leaders were disproportionately represented in high profile leadership disasters? Would a male police chief have prioritised a visit to the hair stylist and going out to dinner during the Black Saturday bushfire that killed 173 people in 2009?
Of course there are many examples of female leaders acting with acumen, courage and integrity: Christina Holgate’s commercial success with Australia Post and Renée Leon (sacked by Scott Morrison as departmental secretary for terminating the unlawful Robodebt). But only recklessly courageous researchers would explore gender-based failures of leadership and so we are stuck with platitudes instead of empirical data.
The ubiquitous gender pay gap myth mostly reflects different occupational choices on work-lifestyle balance. How many women would choose to work 12-hour shifts in mines in remote locations for extended periods, for double what they might be earning? In full-time work in the US, men work on average two hours more per week. Among those working less than 35-hour weeks, women earn five per cent more. In countries that offer more job flexibility without imposing financial hardships on families, for example in Scandinavia, more women choose the lower paying but less stressful and more flexible professions that provide more job satisfaction.
Nataliya Ilyushina made a similar argument by noting that the report on the gender pay gap from Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency had accidentally measured women’s freedom of choice.
The increasingly radicalised and unhinged attacks on toxic masculinity culminated in the #MeToo moment when women had to be believed and men vilified, defenestrated and perhaps even incarcerated, no matter how thin the evidence and absurd the alleged victimisation and grievance narrative. In the process, longstanding pillars of Western jurisprudence and criminal justice systems have come under sustained assault with a weakened commitment to the key principles of equal protection under the law, due process and innocence until proven guilty. There’s a double standard at play, where the woman is effectively infantilised and denied responsible agency.
Being too intoxicated is an acceptable excuse to transfer the burden of proof and responsibility entirely to the male defendant. But being drunk is no excuse for him.
Judgmental remarks about a woman’s sexual behaviour and the choices she makes will unleash a social media pile-on demanding public censure and dismissal. Yet it is permissible to characterise men’s conduct in judgmental language.
The justice system downplays the reality that some women can act unwisely, succumb to temptation in the heat of the moment and change their stories subsequently either because they regret their ethical lapse, or because they fear the consequences for their marriage or relationship; and some are outright malicious or manipulative and use sex consciously as a weapon. Following public criticism of ‘lazy and perhaps politically expedient’ but unserious and unmeritorious prosecutions for alleged sexual assaults, New South Wales chief prosecutor Sally Dowling told a Senate hearing on 4 September, an audit was launched and 15 rape cases were discontinued.
The biggest victims of the culture wars have been whites, Christians and males. By a clever sleight of mind, ‘toxic masculinity’ has morphed into the charge that masculinity itself is toxic. Competition, bravery, honour, chivalry, gallantry are also hardwired traits of masculinity. The warrior-protector trait led a dad to jump to the tracks in a fatal effort to save his twin babies whose pram had rolled down from the platform while the mother screamed. Few would be surprised by that gender difference or judge the mother harshly.
Treating the accused perpetrators and victims of serious crime differently is anathema to the fair administration of justice. As in every aspect of public policy, sexual assault laws should balance the rights of complainants for justice and closure with the rights of the accused to a fair trial, due process and protection against malicious, extortionate and vengeful allegations. A particular category of crime should not have a lower threshold of evidence for prosecution than other serious crimes. The process itself as punishment and the cost of being found not guilty further undermine justice.
Lower life expectancy and higher suicide and incarceration rates for Aborigines in Australia and blacks in the US supposedly prove the reality of systemic and institutional racism. But do lower life expectancy and higher suicide (three-quarters of suicides in Australia and the UK are among males) and incarceration rates for men prove toxic and criminal masculinity? The death rate for American men on the job is twelve times higher and injuries are 50 per cent more than for women. In Australia, ABS data show that men comprise 70 per cent of those working over 60 hours per week and 96 per cent of those dying in the workplace. Which women’s lobby group highlights these job statistics?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/not-all-masculinity-is-toxic/
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