Given the emergency, Washington should immediately close down all of China's bases of operation in the U.S., including its four remaining consulates — Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco — and substantially reducing the staff of the embassy. The embassy, in reality, needs only the ambassador, immediate family, and personal staff, not the hundreds currently assigned there.

China's New York consulate is also an espionage hub. James Olson, a former CIA counterintelligence chief, "conservatively" estimated that China, in the words of the New York Post, "has more than 100 intelligence officers operating in the city at any given time." New York City, he said, is "under assault like never before."

Will Beijing merely transfer spies to Chinese banks and businesses operating in the U.S.? Probably, but that will take time and, in any event, Washington can order the closure of non-diplomatic outposts as well.

Others will say American businesses in China need consular support. Of course they do. My reply is that it is in America's interest to get its companies out of that country, for moral as well as other reasons. The loss of consular support will be one more reason for them to pack their bags in a hurry.

The UK's new MI5 director, Ken McCallum, said that countries such as China and Russia were no longer focused just on traditional espionage activities, such as stealing government secrets, but also on targeting Britain's economy, infrastructure, and academic research, while seeking to undermine its democracy.

China's ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, later denied threatening the UK by making still another threat: "We make no threats, we threaten nobody. We just let you know the consequences. If you do not want to be our partners and our friends, you want to treat China as a hostile country, you will pay the price. That means you will lose the benefits of treating China as a friend."

Meanwhile, Huawei's plans to build a research center in Cambridgeshire are going ahead.

"[China's] implementation strategy is to target elites in the West so that they either welcome China's dominance or accede to its inevitability, rendering resistance futile". — Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World.

In the UK, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg, the CCP has managed to "groom" British power elites to support Chinese interests, especially through the networking group the "48 Group Club".... The group features members such as former ministers, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, five former British ambassadors to China, leading business people, directors of large cultural institutions and professors, as well as a number of highly ranked CCP officials, including several former Chinese ambassadors to the UK.

Much of Chinese influence on British campuses is done through the CCP's Confucius Institutes, of which there are at least 29 in the UK, according to a February 2019 report on the topic by the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission.

"While American local governments value such "exchanges" for financial and cultural reasons, 'exchange' (交流) has always been viewed as a practical political tool by Beijing, and all of China's 'exchange' organizations have been assigned political missions". — China's Influence & American Interests, Report of the Working Group on Chinese Influence Activities in the United States, by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, 2019.

"We will keep connecting schools in the U.S. and China one at a time". — USA-China Sister Schools Association.

China has used its sister cities to boost its "mask diplomacy", in which it plays both the arsonist and the firefighter, and has written about this new initiative in state media with quotes from "grateful" US sister cities thanking China for sending them masks.

Local politicians and others, such as school principals, are simply easy targets for the sophisticated tactics of CCP officials, who prey on the goodwill and naiveté of unsuspecting Americans, although willful blindness doubtless plays a role. "Local politicians typically know little about China and have no responsibility for national security, and because their Chinese interlocutors present themselves as offering people-to-people exchanges and 'opportunities for local business', these politicians have a strong incentive to remain uninformed". — Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World.

Salmi Gailani, who was born in 1991, the year of the ceasefire, "blames the U.N. for the fact that for 30 years, Western Sahara has been a frozen conflict.... '30 years is long enough to place ballot boxes,' he said." — Euronews, November 17, 2020.

The international community has been trying to broker a peace for the Western Sahara for 30 years. Some observers, however, suggest that "if the Polisario Front were to have sovereignty over the Western Sahara, it would mean that Algeria was effectively surrounding Morocco."

Along with last week's the triumph for President Trump and King Mohammed VI, there have also been charges that Morocco could have joined the Abraham Accords without the US recognizing Morocco's sovereignty over the Western Sahara. So far, however, no one has quite said how.

Reacting to the killing of Major-General Qassem Soleimani and Brigadier-General Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, regime "thinkers" promise "revenge" and suggest this could be done with a single deadly blow to the "enemy".... Needless to say, when Khomeinists speak of "the enemy," they mean the American "Great Satan" and its sidekick Israel.

Even Ghulam Esmaili, spokesman for Islamic Judiciary, has joined the armchair strategists by suggesting "the clearing out of America and Israel" with a "single blow."

Launching the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Japanese high command also forgot to ask "what next?".

[T]he Kayhan editorialist who urged the attack on Haifa... says because the Islamic Republic has "all US bases within range", cowardly Americans won't react to a destructive attack on Israel. And if they did, he says, Tehran could pour missiles against US bases in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, the US 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, the CENTCOM in Qatar, bases in Omani part of Musandam Peninsula. The editorialist believes the US would simply grin and bear each attack.

In addition, a trove of 470,000 documents, released by the CIA in late 2017, point to close ties between the Iranian regime and Al-Qaeda.... According to the documents, Iran also provided Al Qaeda with "money and arms and everything they need, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia."

Eight of the 9/11 attack hijackers passed through Iran before coming to the US. Tehran provided funding, logistical support and ammunition to Al-Qaeda leaders, and sheltered several of them in exchange for attacks on US interests.

As sanctions against Iran were lifted during the Obama administration, it quickly became clear that those actions, instead, gave Iran's brutality to its own people and its adventurism abroad a global legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. This newfound legitimacy and the lifting of sanctions generated billions of dollars for Iran's military institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as for Iran's militia and terror groups. Tehran used those revenues to expand its influence throughout the region, including in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. The expansion campaign proved to be immensely successful.

If Biden becomes the next US president and if he pursues the same policies towards Iran as former President Barack Obama, he will not only embolden this predatory regime, but also empower its allies, as well as terror groups such as Al Qaeda.

Many Lebanese are demanding answers to role of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization in the port "massacre." They are also demanding an end to Iran's occupation of Lebanon.

Although the Lebanese government has set up a commission of inquiry into the port explosion, many Lebanese are wondering why the results have not been published yet. They are convinced that the Lebanese government is afraid to point the finger of blame at Hezbollah.

"Hezbollah trusts the judiciary it controls with its weapons." — Nizar Salloum, Lebanon, Twitter, December 7, 2020.

The UN is not going to provide relief or answers to the families of the victims of the Lebanon explosion because its members are busy passing resolutions day and night against Israel.

The only step left for the Lebanese is to revolt against the terrorist organization that has turned their country into a military and political base for the mullahs in Tehran.

China also seems to have a military agenda in the Caribbean region... Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe already is on record expressing China's willingness to deepen military cooperation with Caribbean countries.

Of more concern to US security interests is the ongoing seaport expansion project in the already commercially important port at Kingston, Jamaica, as well as the port at Freeport, Bahamas, China's possible new base of operations 90 miles off the US coast.

China is clearly not a government that honors its agreements.... The US can ill afford any Chinese drive to place under threat any Western Hemisphere country, much less the United States.

The Palestinian journalists' group is angry not only because two Israeli reporters visited Ramallah. It is upset because the reporters dared to reveal an inconvenient truth: that Palestinians are enjoying themselves and that, despite the outbreak of the coronavirus, the economy in Ramallah is doing well.

This truth goes against the Palestinian leadership's official and long-standing propaganda line: that the Palestinians are "suffering" as a result of the bad economy and therefore the world needs to continue providing them with hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

The only journalists the Palestinian leadership tolerates are those who do not question its policies and decisions and who do not ask embarrassing questions.

Will the International Federation of Journalists [the largest in the world; it represents more than 600,000 media workers from 187 organizations in 146 countries] condemn the Palestinians for threatening Israeli journalists on a regular basis? ... International organizations rarely see any evil on the Palestinian side. The only culprit, for them, is Israel. The silence of the IFJ and other international media organizations and human rights groups is nothing short of a green light to Palestinians to physically attack the next Israeli reporter they see on the streets of Bethlehem or Ramallah.

It has been 7½ years after Elvan was killed in what appears to be a direct shot in the face. The Turkish state is still trying to make sure that not a single officer will be punished for the tragic death of a 15-year-old boy.

Worse, there is no sign of accountability within the Turkish public administration system.

The dramatic, undeniable scene was captured by a photographer, Abdurrahman Gök who later posted the photos. Gök is now facing trial for potential links with terror groups and could get up to 20 years in prison.

What about the officer who shot Kurkut?... a serious crimes court in Diyarbakır acquitted the defendant, a police officer, known only by his initials, Y.S.

Justice, apparently, is too scarce a commodity for Turkish extremists who are often busy protecting Palestinian terrorists and accusing civilized nations of modern barbarism. The Australian story could be an example of modern barbarism.... but it has a fair ending. The Turkish stories of medieval barbarism in the 21^st century do not.

Now they [the Europeans] find themselves locked into what they know is a phoney and highly dangerous nuclear agreement that simply consigns confrontation with a nuclear-armed Iran to future generations.

They [the Iranian leadership] look at Europeans, as well as Americans, with contempt, as weak and decadent, lacking the courage or resolve to stick up for their own interests.... President Trump gave them pause for thought, especially when he ordered the death of Qasem Soleimani.... They have higher hopes of Biden, whom they expect to be more supine.

We can be sure the Supreme Leader has rejoiced at the results of his message: cowering in Europe, with only weak and token response, accompanied by a desperate, pleading assurance that the targets of his aggression are still his friends. If ever there was a lesson that appeasement fails and strength succeeds, surely this is it.

European governments must now show their own strength or face continued Iranian coercion -- coercion that will be witnessed by malign actors around the world from Moscow to Beijing to Pyongyang, with obvious implications.

Can the Europeans really afford to allow such an egregiously hostile and manipulative regime as Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons?

Then there is the Turkish Hezbollah, a Sunni violent organization that aims to found a Kurdish-Islamic state based on sharia. Although the Turkish Hezbollah is not to be confused with the Lebanese Hezbollah, it too has links with the Shia regime in Iran.

Journalist Ismail Saymaz detailed in his column how the former Turkish Hezbollah, now the Free Cause Party (Hüda-Par), has infiltrated into scores of schools in Diyarbakır for wider future influence in the Kurdish provinces.... Saymaz says the Free Cause network has spread around Turkey so successfully that the movement now runs a television station and publishes a daily newspaper.

With democratic voting since 2002, Turkey has evolved from a secular state that had strong institutional bonds with the West to a religious, fundamentalist state hostile to the Western civilization and Israel. The next two decades may see even Turkey's non-violent religious institutions evolving into violent ones.

Should Biden finally, officially, be declared the next president, you can rest assured that he will dismiss Durham during the opening flurry of activity from his administration.

Of course, this is all wildly frustrating for those of us hoping for some semblance of accountability and justice. Something. Anything.

When the Russia! Hoax fell apart it was reinvestigated by Mueller – and when that collapsed, they manufactured "Ukraine!" This bit of theater got the president impeached in two months flat. That was just last year. Do you remember? For many eager to bring down the current administration, prosecutions and justice move with lightning speed. Barr and Durham appear to still be looking for the keys to their offices.

This should all be deeply disturbing to the American public. Apparently, it is not. That, dear reader, is even more disturbing. The American public do not want to be deceived – yet again.

That a NATO member and European Union candidate, Turkey, is openly threatening the security of Westerners, is unprecedented.

One of the most abusive Ottoman practices was the institution of "devshirme," also known as the "child levy" or "blood tax," with which Christian boys were forcibly abducted from the conquered population, enslaved, converted to Islam and later trained as soldiers. Erdogan evidently sees the Ottoman occupation and abuse of European nations as Turkish "contributions" to Europe.

This current belligerence once again demonstrates major differences between Europe and Erdogan's regime. It is a crisis between a mentality that respects a free press versus a mentality that jails critical journalists. It reveals a mentality that wants to preserve the safety of its citizens versus a mentality that aims to force others to submit to its demands through threats and use of terror. It is a mentality that stubbornly believes in violating and even trying to invade the territories of its neighbors versus one that tries to resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation.

It is Erdogan's regime who targets the safety and freedoms of Europeans -- as well as Armenians, Syrians, Iraqis, and many of his own Turks.

"If nothing changes, in a few decades, France will have submitted to Islam, and Islamic violence will probably be even greater than today. It is already almost impossible for the country's leaders to react. They are hostages of a Muslim population that is less and less integrated and whose anger they do not want to arouse. They are under the gaze of groups that immediately denounce any criticism of Islam and under pressure from many countries in the Muslim world that France does not want to offend". — Alan Wagner, "L'Europe face à l'islam", interview on Tepa, August 2, 2020.

"For Muslims, Islamic law has God as its author. Any other legislator is illegitimate." — Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, historian, Le Point, March 21, 2016.

"Macron... is still not able to pinpoint the real problem because it would be politically incorrect for him to do so... This is the problem with someone like Macron and what he's saying... they can never acknowledge that what's happening is integral or a part of authentic Islam...." — Raymond Ibrahim, "Islamic Terror in France", SkyWatch TV, October 30, 2020.

"France still does not understand the reality it is facing. It believes that it has been struck by terrorists... but it is suffering a guerrilla war that is gradually gaining momentum..." — Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, lexpress.fr, October 18, 2020.