Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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Sept. 6
The Washington Post on Chinese subterfuge in the U.S.
Evidence — including a bombshell indictment this week of a senior New York political figure — is mounting that China is not content to run a police state just at home but is extending a long arm of repression and subversion into the United States, seeking to intimidate protesters, harass critics and silence dissent. China is using subterfuge and coercion to bully people on U.S. soil, openly defying American rights guarantees and rule of law. This behavior is a threat to open societies everywhere and cannot be allowed to continue without a strong response.
Another recent example: Revelations that Chinese diplomats and pro-China diaspora groups based in the United States organized demonstrations in San Francisco that harassed and silenced protesters opposed to Beijing’s policies when Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited the city last November. A six-month Post investigation found that, although there was aggression from both sides during the visit, the most extreme was instigated by pro-Chinese activists and carried out by coordinated groups of young men. Protesters against Mr. Xi were attacked with extended flagpoles and chemical spray, punched, kicked and had fistfuls of sand thrown in their faces. Demonstrators supporting the Chinese Communist Party and Mr. Xi tore down protesters’ banners and replaced them with Chinese flags. The pro-Xi forces also stalked protesters and used gloves with metal knuckles, metal rods and flagpoles in various scuffles, videos show.
The pro-Xi demonstrators had a right to express themselves, but not to use violence to deny others the same rights. The Hoover Institution’s Glenn Tiffert, a historian of modern China, told The Post that the Chinese Communist Party “mobilizes surrogates to ostracize, intimidate, surround and silence the activists” with a goal of trying to “isolate, bury and extinguish” others “so that it alone monopolizes the field.”
We called attention to this practice last year with the story of a Chinese American dissident artist in California whose work was destroyed by thugs hired by China. We also noted that China’s methods were growing more brazen. Beijing has been setting up outposts in other countries to hunt for dissidents. China is using cutouts, or third parties, to mask the secret role of its security services, a trend evident in criminal complaints involving Chinese transnational repression that the Justice Department has filed since March 2022.
The latest complaint, filed Aug. 26 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, charges that Linda Sun, formerly an aide to two New York governors, was secretly being rewarded by China’s government in exchange for her influence and taking actions on China’s behalf in New York state government. According to a 64-page indictment, she attempted repeatedly to block officials from Taiwan, the self-governing island that China considers a renegade province, from accessing the governor’s office. The indictment says Ms. Sun bragged that she had successfully prevented Taiwan’s representatives from meeting either Andrew M. Cuomo or Kathy Hochul — she had worked for both Democratic governors.
In 2019, the indictment alleges, Ms. Sun wrote invitation letters to a Chinese delegation that they could submit to the State Department in visa applications. When the Chinese changed the composition of their delegation, she issued the invitation again. However, she had no authorization to invite the delegation to New York, and the handwritten signature on the letter “was falsified,” the indictment says.
Ms. Sun was charged Tuesday with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), visa fraud, alien smuggling and money laundering conspiracy. Her husband, Chris Hu, was also charged with money laundering conspiracy, along with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and misuse of identification. Each pleaded not guilty. The government says the pair made millions of dollars from the influence scheme, which they spent on luxury houses and cars. Sun’s family also received gifts of salted ducks prepared by the personal chef of a Chinese consulate official, the indictment says.
The Justice Department is right to pursue the perpetrators of transnational repression. Calling attention to such outrageous behavior will help deter it. But the United States also needs to bolster the legal framework against it. FARA is essentially a registration and disclosure statute, an imperfect tool for fighting transnational repression. It could be strengthened to give law enforcement better tools to proactively identify and block repression by overseas despots. Freedom House suggested including transnational repression in the annual State Department human rights report. Several bills introduced in Congress, such as the Transnational Repression Policy Act, would help codify transnational repression as a crime.
China and other despotic nations must get the message: Not on our shores.
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Sept. 9
The Wall Street Journal on Russia's acquisition of ballistic missiles from Iran
If you want another example of vanishing U.S. deterrence (see nearby), consider the Biden Administration’s failure to stop Iran from providing Russia with ballistic missiles.
Citing unidentified U.S. and European officials, the Journal reports that a recent arms shipment from Tehran to Moscow included hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles. Iranian lawmaker Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani this week described how “one part of the barter” with Russia “includes sending missiles” in exchange for food exports and help with sanctions evasion.
The authoritarian axis now flaunts how it ignores U.S. warnings. Last month State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said such a missile shipment would “represent a dramatic escalation in Iran’s support for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.” The U.S. and its G-7 and NATO partners “are prepared to deliver a swift and severe response if Iran were to move forward with the transfer of ballistic missiles,” he added.
Swift and severe, you say? We’re waiting. In 2022 Iran began providing Russia with Shahed drones, artillery shells and ammunition. In 2023 Iran began building a drone factory in Russia. Yet that fall the Biden Administration allowed United Nations restrictions on Iran’s missile program to lapse.
Ukraine relies on U.S. Patriot defense batteries to counter ballistic missiles. Iran’s shipment to Russia will further strain its scarce air defenses as Russia continues to attack civilians and energy infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Tehran is learning from Moscow’s military experience, and its complex April 13 drone and missile attack against Israel was “remarkably similar to Russian-perpetrated attacks on Ukraine,” Dana Stroul of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told U.S. lawmakers this year.
In exchange for ballistic missiles, Russia “agreed to supply Iran with its advanced Su-35 fighter jets, attack helicopters, and training aircraft,” Gen. Erik Kurilla of U.S. Central Command said in March.
The strategic perversity here is that the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce sanctions on Iranian oil sales has enriched the regime so it can afford to build more missiles. It then supplies those missiles to Russia, which uses them to bombard Ukraine, which the U.S. is supplying with defenses against those missiles. Wouldn’t it make sense to stop enriching Iran in the first place?
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Sept. 6
The Boston Globe says Hamas leaders must pay
Hersh Goldberg-Polin was a California-born American Israeli, “a happy-go-lucky, laid-back, good-humored” man who loved soccer, music, geography, and travel, his mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, said in her speech at the Democratic National Convention. While celebrating his 23d birthday at the Nova Music Festival, which was attacked by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, Goldberg-Polin lost part of his arm to a grenade. He was kidnapped and taken to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and held for 11 months before his captors executed him and five other Israeli hostages last week, according to Israeli officials. The Israeli army recovered their bodies.
On Tuesday, the day after Goldberg-Polin’s funeral, the US Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint against senior leaders of Hamas. The indictment, sealed since Feb. 1, details a litany of Hamas terrorist attacks that murdered American citizens over the past three decades, culminating in the Oct. 7 massacre of nearly 1,200 people in Israel, including at least 40 Americans. It alleges that Hamas’s top leaders “planned, supported, and praised” the Oct. 7 attack and have for years supported and incited terror attacks against those who support Israel, including Americans. The indictment also lays out the support that the Iranian government and the Lebanon-based Islamic organization Hezbollah have given Hamas.
For the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians who have suffered under Hamas’s despotic rule in Gaza, removing the organization from power is imperative. But alongside that political goal, the United States and its allies must also provide justice for Hamas’s victims.
The six indicted leaders are Hamas head Yahya Sinwar, chairman of Hamas’s political branch Ismail Haniyeh, military branch commander Mohammad Al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif), military branch deputy commander Marwan Issa, head of diaspora office Khaled Meshaal, and head of Hamas’s national relations abroad Ali Baraka.
Each faces multiple criminal charges, some of which carry the death penalty, including providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization resulting in death, conspiring to bomb a public place and to use weapons of mass destruction resulting in death, and conspiring to murder Americans outside the United States.
The indictment is a strong symbolic statement that the United States will pursue justice for those who murder US citizens. As US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing its unsealing, “We are investigating Hersh’s murder and each and every one of the brutal murders of Americans as acts of terrorism.”
But for the indictment to be more than virtue signaling, the Biden administration will have to act on it by pressuring US allies to arrest and extradite these terrorists.
Three of the indicted leaders — Haniyeh, Al-Masri, and Issa — are dead, either assassinated or killed in Israeli strikes. Sinwar is thought to be hiding in the tunnels of Gaza. If he is located, Israel may try to assassinate him before he can be captured.
Meshaal, however, who is responsible for Hamas’s activities outside the West Bank and Gaza, is principally based in Qatar. President Biden has designated Qatar a major non-NATO ally, and Qatar hosts the Al Udeid Air Base, a large US Air Force installation. The United States sells Qatar military aircraft, and the two countries cooperate on security and educational programs. The United States has leverage it can use to urge Qatar to arrest and extradite Meshaal.
Baraka is based in Lebanon, where the United States has less leverage. But both Baraka and Meshaal travel, and convincing US allies like Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and European countries to agree to arrest Hamas leaders if they enter those countries would curb the Hamas leaders’ ability to travel and operate. This would involve a diplomatic, whole-of-government approach that extends beyond the Department of Justice.
Matthew Levitt, director of the Reinhard program on counterterrorism and intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said pressuring allies like Qatar to not give Hamas leaders safe haven would begin to put pressure on Hamas and also send a diplomatic message to other countries regarding how the United States believes Hamas should be treated given its actions on and after Oct. 7.
Indicting the Hamas leaders also only gets at the tip of the iceberg of malign actors. Garland himself said the indictments are only one part of broader US actions targeting Hamas.
US law enforcement and counterterrorism officials should continue to investigate and prosecute those who were actively involved in murdering, abducting, or terrorizing US citizens in Israel on or after Oct. 7. Levitt said this could include the person who actually pulled the trigger on Goldberg-Polin or those who terrorized Americans in the Israeli communities that were attacked, but it could also include bringing cases against those in the United States or elsewhere who contributed money to Hamas, violating laws against providing material support to terrorists.
Holding Hamas terrorists accountable will not bring Goldberg-Polin back to life. It will not help 4-year-old Israeli American Avigail Idan recover from her weeks in Hamas captivity. It will not bring home the remaining American hostages: Edan Alexander, Sagui Dekel-Chen, Omer Neutra, Keith Siegel, and the bodies of Itay Chen, Gadi Haggai, and Judith Weinstein Haggai. It will not comfort the family of Deborah and Shlomi Mathias, the daughter and son-in-law of a Brandeis professor, who were murdered in their home on Oct. 7 while shielding their teenage son from bullets, or the families of the other murdered Americans.
But it will send a powerful message that anyone who threatens the lives of American citizens must pay for their crimes.
ONLINE: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/09/06/opinion/hamas-israel-indictment-gaza-hostage-murdered/
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Sept. 5
The Guardian on the Ukraine's incursion into Russian territory
Ukraine’s audacious August incursion into Russian territory was a welcome fillip for national morale, and a message to foreign backers that Kyiv could still take the initiative after the disappointing counteroffensive of 2023. A more sober mood has now asserted itself with Moscow’s retaliation for the humiliation.
A strike on Lviv on Wednesday left at least seven dead and 53 injured, while another killed more than 50 people at a military training institution and hospital in Poltava the previous day. At the weekend, a 14-year-old girl was among at least seven people killed in Kharkiv when a bomb hit a playground. The Russian advance in eastern Ukraine also appears to be picking up steam, with tens of thousands preparing to flee. Losing Pokrovsk, a big logistics hub, would be a serious blow. There are also reports that Iran is expected to ship missiles to Russia “imminently”.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s long-awaited reshuffle this week, the biggest since the war began, recognises the public mood. The president said that the country needed “new energy”. No one is calling for elections. Ukrainians, though exhausted, continue to rally round the flag. Yet Vladimir Putin’s comment that the Kursk incursion had failed to slow Russia’s advance in the Donbas, and has weakened Ukrainian forces elsewhere, was meant not only to shrug off Moscow’s embarrassment but to underscore Ukrainian questions about the cost and wisdom of the operation. Russia’s advance started picking up pace earlier this year, but some analysts – and Donbas residents – believe it is picking up pace because of the Kursk foray, which seems to offer more symbolic than directly strategic gains.
The risky operation had the president’s approval. Mr Zelenskiy has pulled off many gambles – most obviously using his charisma and celebrity to catapult himself to the presidency, as explored in a new BBC documentary, The Zelensky Story. Ukrainian presidents have also had to contend with the power of oligarchs. The Russian invasion – and Mr Zelenskiy’s response – have transformed the position. National crises put leaders to the fore, but perhaps no other individual could have galvanised the domestic and international response as he did. Some concentration of powers is inevitable in wartime, but he also seems most comfortable running everything from a small team, as he did in his television days.
There were eyebrows raised when he sacked the immensely popular army chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, in February. This reshuffle is less dramatic but seems to strengthen the power of the inner circle, especially Mr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.
Dmytro Kuleba, the respected foreign minister, is the highest-profile figure to step down, though he is expected to take another significant role. Separately, there are concerns about the dismissal of Volodymyr Kudrytsky, Ukraine’s energy grid chief, with two foreign board members blaming “political pressure”. Leaders under intense pressure are understandably prone to relying on trusted aides and allies. But people want to be confident that internal talent is being fully used when their country is faced with an immense, existential threat.
Mr Zelenskiy’s charismatic authority will be deployed to full effect when he travels to Washington this month to meet Joe Biden, a trip that is all the more essential given the uncertainty surrounding November’s US election. Ukraine’s allies must stand firm in support. Increasingly, however, Zelenskiy will have to manage politics at home as well as partners abroad.
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Sept.
The Dallas Morning News on foreign actors spreading propaganda and misinformation in the U.S.
Spreading disinformation and sowing discord have been Russia’s specialty for years. But recent federal indictments reveal how Russian propaganda infiltrates and influences American political discourse. The Justice Department’s actions show, we hope, that the U.S. is getting serious about these ongoing threats ahead of the election. But all of us need to recognize that our democracy is under attack.
Russia is hardly alone in trying to undermine our nation. Whether it is Iranian agents hacking the Democratic and Republican campaigns or the Chinese government allegedly turning a top New York state official into an agent, these foreign adversaries are exploiting institutional weaknesses and American division. Too many of us are now ready to accept propaganda as truth, and our enemies know it.
Russia’s sophisticated divide-and-destroy strategy is a lesson in why Americans cannot let political differences make enemies of our fellow citizens.
In Wednesday’s indictments, the DOJ seized 32 Kremlin-run websites and charged two Russian state media employees with running a $10 million scheme to distribute content to U.S. audiences while hiding their connection to Russia.
How did they do it? The Russia Today employees, now on the run, are accused of covertly funding a Tennessee-based content creation company to publish English-language videos on social media platforms with pro-Russia messages. According to the Associated Press, the description of the company matches Tenet Media, which hosts well-known conservative influencers, some of whom now say they were duped. Where did they think the money filling their pockets was coming from?
The Russians know how to get clicks. They know Americans will not go to RT directly, but they look for trusted voices in social media to direct consumers to their fake-news websites. The Tennessee company posted more than 2,000 videos with more than 16 million views on YouTube, according to the indictment.
A recent Pew Research poll found that half of American adults at least sometimes get their news through social media. We wouldn’t be surprised if the number is higher.
Americans need to be more careful with their clicks. That influencer with all of the hot takes might just be on the take. That new website claiming to be news might be a front.
The consequences are real. We know that the Iranian propaganda machine was all too eager to support American students protesting Israel’s war against Hamas. And false reporting also recently led to anti-immigrant riots in Great Britain.
Some of the worst actors on the world stage want to be your favorite news and information source. The problem is too many Americans are gullible to this garbage.
We agree with Attorney General Merrick Garland: There should be no tolerance for these authoritarian regimes trying to exploit our free exchange of ideas. These crackdowns on foreign influence need to continue. Our democracy demands it.