By Guela #42 (Mosiach.ru)
August 28, 2021 Anno Domini
Translated from the Russian
Excerpt

A banquet in honor of the new future Chabad location in Manila was held on a special pleasure yacht off the coast of Manhattan. They also started raising funds for writing a Torah Scroll for the new Beit-Chabad. Big ship – big voyage!

At that time, there was no permanent Chabad mission in the Philippines. We decided to test the waters first, because everyone is doing it – first the husband goes, then only the wife … But fate decreed otherwise. He arrived with his pregnant wife, left her there at the hotel, he began to wander everywhere in search of livelihood, and Tiphareth gave birth alone, without support, in a foreign country. Everything worked out! Since then, everything has worked out! Glory to Gd – my daughter is already 12 years old, and she herself is a teacher of the younger group of a kindergarten in their 9-storey Chabad skyscraper complex.

But wait, are we telling the tale of Aladdin? Or a thousand and one nights? Where did the 9-storey building in one of the brilliant capitals of the world come from for a poor couple who did not know where to lay their heads? Was it a jinn who built this building for them in the shape of a “770” – modeled on the building in New York?

Calm, only calm! Stories need to be able to tell! And if the reader-master will allow, the narrator will continue her humble narration!

… The genie, if he did exist, he worked on a Chinese contract, within the framework of the reality of the 21st century.

A couple from China did not emerge by chance, not by themselves. This was preceded by months of lessons and Saturday activities in the capital of the Philippines. Gradually, each new rented space became cramped. Particularly successful was the lesson on the 7 commandments of the sons of Noah: up to a hundred people came there. And among these students there was a couple from China, whom they met through mutual friends, big business owners. Meanwhile, the Rebbe’s answers constantly pointed to the need to look for a loan, a large loan for the construction of Beit Chabad.

• Who will give me such a loan !? Sometimes I am not even able to pay for rent, where will they entrust me with money for construction? – such thoughts rushed through the head of the young envoy.

… But a couple from China continued to study the 7 commandments and regularly attend lessons. He made up his mind and asked them for a very large loan for the construction of Beit Chabad in the form of an exact copy of “770”. They agreed! The payments were supposed to be made within 10 years.

The loan took place, now they began to look for a land plot. They found him too. They began to buy land, draw up documents. Last negotiations before signing, p. Levy again stresses how and when exactly he will make payments on loan repayment. But a couple from China exchanged glances and said, “You know, let this be our donation. You don’t have to return anything. We can afford it. ”

… More than half a million dollars were simply donated for the construction of the facility. Jin scratched himself inside the bottle and materialized – finally, they say! He was bored for a long time! Began to cheerfully build the long-awaited palace!

And now – wipe your eyes, Ostap Bender! This is not Rio de Janeiro! This is Manila, Philippines! Everyone here is wearing white pants! And here there are now not one, but as many as 4 Beit-Chabad, according to the needs of the archipelago and its population.

On 9 floors of the central capital of Beit Chabad, there are: a kindergarten, a canteen, a restaurant, rooms for guests, guests, a conference room, a mikvah and everything else that such an institution needs.

We wish further success to the family of messengers (by the way, the number of children in it is 6, and it will increase in the future) …

In the form of a personal interview:

• Yosef-Yitzchak, what does your working day look like?

• I get up at 5.30. I am conducting a telephone lesson with a friend – p. Luzon from neighboring Beit Chabad in the Philippines.

Prayer, lessons with children – their own and all those who come. Office activities. Observation of kosher technological lines at food industry enterprises. Meetings, business dates. Lesson on the Rebbe’s talks on Saturday. Lots of farbrengens on Saturdays and holidays. Preparation for all important calendar dates.

Personal Talmudic study is a fresh decision recently made. Hasidism has long been a priority. The wife has her own tasks and plans, her own female kingdom, where she directs activities for girls and women.

What to add? Ready for Moshiach! And without excesses, without six-point earthquakes and other fireworks … Filipinos are nice and kind people, they honor the 7 laws of Noah and wait for the Rebbe with all their hearts!

Some 30 U.N. agencies and institutions have signed memorandums in support of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure project, including the U.N. Industrial Development Organization, which has been under Chinese leadership since 2013.

By The Wall Street Journal
Sept. 20, 2020 Anno Domini

When China curtailed political freedoms in Hong Kong this summer, two rival declarations circulated at the United Nations Human Rights Council. One, drafted by Cuba and commending Beijing’s move, won the backing of 53 nations. Another, issued by the U.K. and expressing concern, secured 27 supporters.

China’s show of strength was just the latest diplomatic triumph in Beijing’s drive to sway the system of international organizations in its direction. As the Trump administration stepped back from many parts of the multilateral order established after World War II, China has emerged a chief beneficiary, intensifying a methodical, decadelong campaign.

Beijing is pushing its civil servants, or those of clients and partners, to the helm of U.N. institutions that set global standards for air travel, telecommunications and agriculture. Gaining influence at the U.N. permits China to stifle international scrutiny of its behavior at home and abroad. In March, Beijing won a seat on a five-member panel that selects U.N. rapporteurs on human-rights abuses—officials who used to target Beijing for imprisoning more than a million Uighurs at so-called re-education camps in Xinjiang.

Washington has recently attempted to counter this effort at the U.N., cajoling and wooing countries around the world. Those efforts, hamstrung by damaged relationships with partners and allies, have had a limited impact so far.

China’s success raises a conundrum for the U.S. and its allies. After the Soviet Union fell, these nations expected the U.N. to become a mechanism to promote democracy and human rights. Now, in a dynamic increasingly reminiscent of the Cold War, Beijing’s clout at the U.N. instead helps the Chinese Communist Party legitimize its claim to be a superior alternative to Western democracies.

“It’s China’s sense that this is ‘our’ moment, and we need to take control of these bodies,” said Ashok Malik, senior policy adviser at India’s foreign ministry. “If you control important levers of these institutions, you influence norms, you influence ways of thinking, you influence international policy, you inject your way of thinking.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping, addressing the U.N. General Assembly this month, called for the organization to play a “central role in international affairs,” particularly amid the coronavirus pandemic. “The global governance system should adapt itself to evolving global political and economic dynamics,” he added, an allusion to China’s rising clout and its perceptions of a U.S. decline.

The Trump administration views the U.N. system as divided into parts Washington should fight to fix and those that are beyond repair, U.S. officials said. In July, the administration began withdrawing from the World Health Organization, saying the U.N. agency’s deference to China at the outset of the pandemic allowed the virus to spread.

Many U.S. allies say that abandoning the field by leaving organizations like the WHO offers China a strategic gift. Their concerns have been heightened in recent months as Beijing chastised democratic countries for speaking out on Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and engaged in deadly border clashes with India.

“The U.S. is withdrawing from multilateralism to our great regret, and the Chinese are moving in,” said Hans Blix, a former Swedish diplomat who chaired the U.N.’s weapon-inspection program in Iraq.

Washington didn’t have a say in the selection of human-rights rapporteurs in March or in the dueling statements about Hong Kong: The Trump administration had quit the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2018, citing one-sided criticism of Israel. It left the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization over similar concerns in 2019.

Those decisions overlapped with tensions on trade, military spending and other long-standing issues that have pushed a wedge between the U.S. and its traditional allies in Europe and Asia.

To Beijing, such divisions and the U.S. pullback from the multilateral order was an opportunity, said Lanxin Xiang, director of the Center of One Belt and One Road Studies in Shanghai: “If this is your voluntary withdrawal, not us driving you away, filling in the vacuum should not be considered a provocative action.”

Out of the U.N.’s 15 specialized agencies and groups, Chinese representatives lead four, beating Western-backed candidates last year for the top slot of the Food and Agriculture Organization. Only a concerted campaign in March by the U.S. and partners defeated a Chinese effort to take over the leadership of a fifth body, the World Intellectual Property Organization, known as WIPO. No other nation has its citizens running more than one U.N. agency.

Earlier victories put Beijing in position to shape international norms and standards, notably with air travel under the Chinese-led International Civil Aviation Organization. The Chinese secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, who took his post in 2015, has backed Huawei Technologies Co. in its fight with the U.S., and pushed for a new internet protocol that Western governments say would allow more surveillance and censorship.

Some 30 U.N. agencies and institutions have signed memorandums in support of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure project, including the U.N. Industrial Development Organization, which has been under Chinese leadership since 2013. As a result, China can present its state-run Belt and Road projects, which mainly employ Chinese firms and often leave poor nations in debt, as benign U.N.-approved assistance.

“China has been able to make the U.N. more Chinese,” said Moritz Rudolf, founder of Eurasia Bridges, a German consulting firm that studies Belt and Road.

China has had its own stumbles: After placing one of its top law-enforcement officials as president of Interpol, it detained him in 2018 and later convicted him on corruption charges—underscoring how Chinese officials serving in international organizations remain under Beijing’s control.

China’s leaders say its aims at the U.N. are altruistic and that it has set a global example for dealing with Covid-19.

The U.N. advance has cost relatively little. Even though China is the world’s second- largest economy, it often pays discounted rates as a so-called developing nation. In 2018, it contributed $1.3 billion to the U.N. system, a fraction of the $10 billion annual commitment from the U.S.

Instead, China has leveraged loans and other assistance to dozens of developing nations in Africa, the Pacific and elsewhere to create voting blocs and defeat Western-backed candidates and proposals at the U.N.

“Unfortunately there’s a real threat that China is going to use multilateral institutions to advance their own initiatives and their own values as compared to the values of the United States,” said Sen. Todd Young (R., Ind.), who last year introduced a bill to investigate Beijing’s influence.

Split Decision

Member-states of the Food and Agriculture Organization gathered in Rome last year to select a replacement for the outgoing director-general. China nominated Qu Dongyu, its vice minister of agriculture.

Beijing looked for support from the developing world. In Uganda, Chinese diplomats met at President Yoweri Mu- seveni’s ranch and pledged to build a $25 million beef abattoir and a textile plant if his government backed Mr. Qu.

Cameroon put forward economist Médi Moungui, a candidate with the potential to rally support in West Africa. When China canceled $78 million in overdue debt owed by Cameroon, Mr. Moungui abruptly withdrew. Neither Cameroon officials nor Mr. Moungui responded to requests for comment.

The U.S. and Europe, meanwhile, were at odds. Europe backed French agricultural engineer Catherine Geslain- Lanéelle. The U.S. pushed for Davit Kirvalidze, a former agriculture minister of the republic of Georgia.

China sent a delegation of 80 to 100 people to the Rome gathering, compared with a typical delegation of a dozen or so, U.S. officials said. The Chinese delegates brought high-powered telephoto lenses to the vote and videotaped what was supposed to be a secret ballot. In some cases, they asked representatives from other countries to take photos of their ballots as proof they had backed Mr. Qu, U.S. and European officials said. The Chinese missions in Rome and Geneva didn’t reply to comment requests.

With the democracies divided, Mr. Qu clinched a lopsided victory. “I’m very grateful to my motherland,” he said after his win.

Gérard Araud, who previously served as France’s ambassador to Washington and U.N. envoy, said China is doing what the U.S. used to do decades ago—offer countries gifts or twist their arms.

“China does it now. It does it brutally, but there is nothing abnormal about this,” Mr. Araud said. “The fault is not of those who win. The fault is of those who lose.”

Wang Huiyao, a counselor to China’s State Council and head of the Center for China and Globalization think tank in Beijing, said lobbying for Mr. Qu succeeded because “China agriculturally has done very well, and the world has recognized that.”

Mr. Qu’s win proved a wake- up call for the U.S. and its allies. In November last year, President Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien traveled to New York to meet permanent U.N. representatives from Europe, Japan and other democracies, proposing a common front against China.

The European response, summarized by a person familiar with the meeting: Where have you been?

European officials said they shared U.S. worries about China but saw the contest differently. To the U.S., China is a rival that seeks to dethrone America as the world’s pre-eminent power. To the Europeans, China is a danger because Beijing seeks to upend the rules-based international order, which, they say, Mr. Trump also threatens to do.

United states

At the start of the year, the U.S., European nations and partners such as India put aside rivalries and together opposed China’s bid to lead WIPO, the Geneva-based agency that protects copyrights, patents and trademarks across borders.

China leapfrogged the U.S. last year as the top source of international patents filed with WIPO, largely because international investors like to file from China, where rates are cheaper and where locally issued patents offer more protection.

The U.S. message opposing Beijing was pointed. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has more than 1,000 open in- vestigations into actual and attempted technology theft by individuals and entities connected to China. “We couldn’t afford to have a serial IP violator running the world’s intellectual property organization,” said U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.

U.S. officials focused on setting rules for the election, hoping to avoid the kind of aggressive measures China used in Rome. The U.S. won support to limit the number of delegates in the voting room and ensure voting privacy.

The race began with 10 contestants. Washington, convinced that only a developing country could win, persuaded Japan and some others to withdraw early in the campaign and to support a Singaporean candidate. Though the city-state is one of the world’s most prosperous nations, it is grouped with mostly developing countries under U.N. rules. Other withdrawals left Singapore’s Daren Tang and China’s Wang Binying as the two front-runners.

Ahead of the March 4 vote, China complained that the U.S. was bullying smaller nations. Washington engaged in “immoral behavior,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said, trying to defeat Ms. Wang through threats and blackmail.

On the day of the vote, the U.S. sent two delegations. One was a six-person voting-room team with connections to Geneva-based diplomats. Another was made up of high-level ambassadors and senior officials who campaigned outside. The goal was to keep the election short and not allow Beijing time to apply diplomatic pressure on countries overnight. The tactic worked.

As the votes were cast, Singapore’s Mr. Tang overtook Ms. Wang in the first round and gained an absolute majority in the second round.

Some delegates were taken aback by the tensions. “It was like two elephants fighting,” one candidate said.

—Nicholas Bariyo contributed to this article.

By Andrew Michta
Wall Street Journal
Sept. 14, 2020 Anno Domini

One ploy for countries competing with other great powers is to peel away the allies of your adversary and convert them to your interests. In 1972, Richard Nixon took a trip to Beijing, one of the most daring and effective gambits in the history of U.S. foreign policy. At the time Beijing was a re- gional player and a nuclear power, but nowhere near a peer competitor to the U.S. or the Soviet Union. Nixon turned China into a lever of American influence.

We are about to find out how well Beijing can play the strategic game. On Monday the European Union and China are scheduled to hold a virtual summit—originally planned as a meeting in Leipzig, Germany—aimed at hammering out the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. This pact would lay out parameters of trade, address questions of Chinese subsidies and protection of European intellectual property rights, and, if German Chancellor Angela Merkel gets her way, define China’s role in fighting climate change.

So far during negotiations, Beijing has resisted meeting the E.U. halfway, especially on subsidies. But there are indications that the Chinese may be- come more accommodating. The summit comes only weeks before the U.S. presidential election, and the meeting will be Xi Jinping’s best opportunity to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Europe on trade. For Europe’s business community, access to the Asian market is seen as essential to the EU’s economic recovery. Having the treaty with Beijing would—at least in theory—help protect European intellectual property and keep vulnerable European firms from being bought outright by the Chinese.

Europe has been central to Beijing’s global strategy for years. Some 75 per cent of European imports come by sea, with access through the North Atlantic being crucial, and China has aggressively pursued acquisitions of stakes in major European ports. Most important, through its Belt and Road Initiative and its investments, China has aimed at establishing an alternative supply chain over land across Europe and Asia.

Beijing’s endgame is what I call the “global inversion” of established trade flows, which currently favor maritime routes, a setup that relies on U.S. naval power as enforcement. If China can develop a cross-Eurasian supply chain and protect it, it won’t need to match America in the maritime domain. That would be a fundamental shift in global trade and power distribution. China can do this because so far Washington—which now sees China as both an economic and military challenge of the first order—has not been able to convince the Europeans to see Beijing as anything more dangerous than an economic problem set. European leaders are increasingly concerned about Chinese bullying, but they don’t want to be pulled into an alliance with the U.S. against Beijing.

If these conditions hold and China can drive a wedge between the U.S. and Europe, normal trans-Atlantic relations will be a thing of the past. Such a change would transform Europe from the trans-Atlantic gateway to Eurasia into the tail-end of a Chinese-controlled Eurasian supply chain, allowing Beijing eventually to dominate Europe and bid for global hegemony.

China’s Europe strategy has a military component. The People’s Liberation Army Navy has been actively pursuing access to ports in Europe, especially in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It has conducted joint drills with the Russian Navy and the EU, starting in 2018 when it completed its first naval exercise with the EU Naval Force in the Gulf of Aden.

China has stakes in port facilities in the Mediterranean, including Greece, Spain, Egypt, Italy and Morocco, while the Chinese navy operates a support base in Djibouti, positioning itself to project power deeper into Africa. China’s navy has also entered the Baltic and is investing in capabilities in the Arctic, with a tender for a 33,000-ton nuclear- powered icebreaker and plans to operate four nuclear-powered aircraft carriers by 2035.

China sees Europe as a region whose wealth and technology can be exploited for advantage over the U.S. Europe is an attractive target: The Continent is desperate for market access and cash as the economy tries to recover from a pandemic. With Russia as a threat to Central and Eastern European countries on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s flank, Beijing also has an opportunity to exploit fissures within Europe. The rise of anti-Americanism in some countries will make it difficult to achieve a consensus on threats, while the alignment between Beijing and Moscow may deepen cleavages in Europe when it comes to relations with the U.S.

The frayed state of U.S.-European relations, especially the increasingly contentious relations between Washington and Berlin, offers Mr. Xi an opportunity to “play Nixon” in his own way. Washington needs to pay attention to the EU-China summit this week—and its aftermath.

Mr. Michta is dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

If we take Trump Tower to mean a place where Sino-Soviet oligarchs can launder their blood-soaked cash, consider Vancouver to be the biggest.

It is one of the most Soviet-penetrated ports in the Western world: Vancouver, the gem city on Canada’s West coast—a once beautiful city now plagued with rampant drug addiction, homelessness, and massive displacement of the European-derived indigenous population, largely due to one of the most inflated housing bubbles in human history. Things are so bad in Vancouver, Vancouver’s heroin-fentanyl-riddled downtown Eastside has become infamous around the world.

Seemingly bewildered civic and national officials continue to fail to find a solution to “the Vancouver model“. But that’s because they fail to identify the root of the problem, which is now out in the open for any non-ostrich to see.

The root of the problem is the Soviet narcotics offensive, with much of Vancouver’s drugs coming from Communist China’s Golden Triangle region, and Sino-Soviet money laundering, which involves the KGB (now FSB), Chinese intelligence, and the Sino-Soviet-Semitic international organized crime syndicate, including Chabad Lubavitch.
The Chabad mafia just happens to have a large presence in Vancouver, with at least half a dozen operations in the city.

The provincial government, the socialist BCNDP, has been forced to admit that money laundering is largely responsible for the city’s problem, but they won’t develop this explanation to its necessary conclusion, which is that Vancouver’s problems are by design and part of a long-range Leninist Soviet strategy to destabilize the West.
Get the indigenous population, especially its youth, hooked on and killed by drugs, thereby reducing the white, Western population; flood the real-estate market with laundered Soviet cash, much of which is the proceeds from Red narco-terrorism; use the effective housing inflation to drive out the local population; and, finally, increase Chinese-Korean migration to insure against any relapse of said displacement.

This same plot is taking place in several places in the Western world. In California’s Silicon Valley, for example, the exact same thing is happening.

Instead of admitting the root of the problem, Canadian officials ignore any discussion of the matter and, instead, attempt to curb these Soviet active measures by imposing ineffective across-the-board housing taxes on foreign buyers and absentee landlords. They don’t seem to understand that this Soviet plot is not about money.
The Soviets don’t care about taxes. They are willing to take loses in order to ensure the advancement of their strategies. It was the Chinese communists, after all, who greatly subsidized the cost of heroin to American soldiers during the Vietnam intervention, as an effective means of destabilizing America’s armed forced. Therefore, Canadian officials need to focus on, at the very least, banning foreign buyers all together, including identifying and stopping the many shell games that Soviet agents like to use in anonymously laundering cash through real estate.

Many Sino-Soviet elites, like Communist-controlled Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, own estates in Vancouver’s posh mansion district Shaughnessy, where you will find some completely empty mansions.
Wanzhou’s estate mysteriously seems to be in a perpetual state of renovation, like others. These are, effectively, Soviet laundro-mansions.
Shaughnessy, which is located very close to the Chabad district of Vancouver, is a microcosm of the macrocosmic Soviet active measure throughout all of Vancouver, Silicon Valley, and in other places in the West. So, too, is Vancouver’s Trump Tower (Toronto, where the same housing bubble exists, also has a mobbed-up Trump Tower). Real estate seems to be the primary instrument through which gangsters and gangster-run governments, like in Marxist Russia, China, and Israel, launder their money.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a devoted Marxist  and son to suspected KGB asset and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, has done absolutely nothing thus far. Until Canada’s elected officials grow a collective set of functioning gonads and identify the problem, this Soviet penetration is only going to deepen and wreak havoc on Canada.