David Mark is the founder and editor of Israel Rising. Besides Israel Rising, he heads up outreach for Ateret Cohanim in Jerusalem's Old City and acts as the Managing Director for Pulse of Israel. On the side he teaches classes that blend minimalism, mindfulness, and ecology with the teachings of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov.
The new alliance between Israel and the UAE as well as Bahrain has upended the Middle East in many ways. From technology and innovation partnerships to military drills and intelligence sharing, the Abraham Accords has made the countries involved the most powerful the region has seen.
None of this has been lost on the Iranians, who understand that despite Biden’s desire to jump back into the nuclear deal, there will be little he can do about the growing strength of the Sunni-Israel alliance.
This is why the Iranians are using Yemen as a forward battle against Saudi clout on the Arabian peninsula. This was clearly demonstrated when the new Saudi backed Yemen government arrived at the Aden airport only to be attacked by Iranian backed Houthis. 26 people were killed the triple bombing and more than 60 wounded.
The blasts were so loud they were heard in Israel.
The message from Iran is clear: Don’t think about joining the Abraham Accords.
Although most observers have focused their attention on the Persian Gulf, Yemen has strategic value to Iran as rests across the Bab al-Mandab Strait from Djibouti. This is one of the most important choke points for shipping in the world. Freighters travel through Bab al-Mandab Strait and bring oil and other commodities to the West.
This is why China has gone out of its way to build up its base in Djibouti, effectively giving it an advantage in controlling the Red Sea. Furthermore, Beijing has gone out of its way to invest in Eritrea and Ethiopia, securing most of the Horn of Africa.
This is why Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states have long seen the war in Yemen as critical in keeping the Chinese-Iranian alliance to only one side of the Bab al-Mandab Strait.
Message to Israel
With Israeli arms sales and agri-tech development in Ethiopia and other countries on the Horn of Africa, Israel is hoping to keep pressure on Beijing to play fair by keeping the struggle economic.
Iran’s message to Israel is clear. Yemen may have a new government, but it still the Houthis that call the shots and with them the Red Sea and its shipping routes are up for grabs.
Iran is effectively using much of China’s investment in its Belt and Road Initiative to help build a net against Israel and her Sunni allies.
Yemen is critical in controlling both sides of the Bab al-Mandab Strait and with it, a crushing blow to peace in the region.
Ahuvya Sandak, a 16 year old boy from Bat Ayin was killed last week when the vehicle he was riding in flipped over as a result of a police chase. When news first broke, the police closed off the area for six hours, letting his body lay in the open. His friends who survived were sent to the hospital for treatment and then released to house arrest. The initial report was that the boys were throwing rocks and a chased ensued, but something seemed fishy.
Knesset member Betzalel Smotrich arrived at the scene and the police prevented him from entering, which is against the law. Witnesses have come forward saying the police were driving out of control and put everyone’s lives in danger.
The family has requested an independent investigation, but the police have started their own – insisting the other boys should be tried for manslaughter.
All of this seems like a passing story anywhere else, far less important than elections and corona, but since the accident and the government’s stalling of an independent investigation, protests have erupted around the country, police stations have been vandalized, and extra security given to the police who were involved.
In normal times we would move on, but something has changed now in Israel. People are beginning to question the system that they are living in. The system, who for all of its triumphs in technology and defense has long ago used the police as an arm of complete control.
During Gush Katif, the media and the left convinced the country that it could lay waste to patriotic pioneers in Gaza – destroying 8,000 homes.
In Amona, shortly after, it tried to stampede the young resistance under the hooves of police horses.
Year after year, it has put down protests against Chareidim, settler youth, Ethiopians, and more.
During the Duma manhunt, which falsely placed blame on pioneering youth in Judea and Samria and in doing so saw torture being employed against kids as young as 14, normal people began to question and many people still question the legitimacy of case’s outcome as being politically driven.
Ahuvya’s death, unnecessary and seemingly a product of an over zealous and paranoid police department, appears to have broken whatever lock there has been on a focused protest movement, with the aim to take down Israel’s police state infrastructure.
People are tired. They are tired of being played against one another. They are tired of being fed media lies and being told they need to “fall in line” with an Israel focused more on handshakes with other countries and PR initiatives to keep the investment money in tech coming, rather than justice and fulfillment of a Divine purpose.
The economy is in shambles, Arab squatters are taking land, another election cycle is upon us, but Ahuvya’s death appears to have become the catalyst for something else.
The irony is, that if this was the old days people would believe the police’s story about the youth throwing the rocks, but their lies are known now. Initial reports say that the was car rammed by the police and pushed off the road and now the policemen say they thought it was a “Palestinian” vehicle.
It is unravelling, but not just their story – their control.
Israel can be a beacon of light it was meant to be, but it must first rip apart the Deep State that has held sway here since the original socialists stole the Zionist movement from within.
The youth of the hills have had enough. They want an Israel based on G-D given rights, not one where the State believes it is the arbiter of our rights. There is an uprising now. It is small and growing and everyday the government waits to gut the police department, the uprising will grow.
Yes, these elections may claim to deal with the coronavirus, but at the end they may be forced to deal with something far more important and that is determining our true national ethos. However, it may be that if the politicians continue to squabble for power, the youth of the hills just might determine that ethos for them.
The world as we know it, is churning. The simple assumptions on how things are supposed to work are gone now. The governments of the world are either inept or incompetent or perhaps nearly malicious in their attempt to use COVID-19 to take control of their countries in a way we have only read in dystopian science-fiction novels.
Despite our normalization bias, which creeps up on us when we want to forget what is happening, the things we are seeing are happening. Lock downs, mask mandates, and wealth transfers are happening. This is what they call the “Great Reset.”
All of this is happening under the guise of stopping a virus that has an extremely low mortality rate – no different than the flu if the affected is below 55 and has no pre-existing disorders.
The global elite has used mass media, a low information populace, and spineless politicians to exert control and take away our freedoms.
We assumed the End of Days – the Final War would be nuclear – something cataclysmic. We were wrong. The Final War is between two sides. The side of darkness wants to to turn us into slaves – to render our humanity obsolete by flooding our minds with fear and insecurity. The side of light knows the truth and knows that at the end the darkness will be pushed aside. The side of light knows that this is all about the elite’s attempt for total control and the creation a global dystopian authoritarianism where none of us will truly be free. In their world we are but a cog in the wheel of their wealth engine.
We can be free. We can cut loose from their grasp, but we must decide to say no to their edicts and we must understand that it is time cling to the truth that all of us despite what their side says are made in the image of the Almighty. It is this image they want to destroy and it is this image which is the engine of our salvation, because within each us is the gateway to the Divine blueprint of Creation. It is our pipeline to infinite faith.
The hour is near. The Great Reset is upon upon us. Only our faith in the Creator will see us through.
I want to start by repeating the opening paragraph of my post on IsraelUnwired from earlier today:
“From chaos to chaos, the US is experiencing perhaps the most trying moment in its history. All of the fears about the 2020 election have come to pass and now with the revelation that the SolarWinds platform has been hacked with an active infiltration for more than six months has essentially, all assumptions about security and the efficacy of the elections themselves should be thrown out.”
What is happening is something far deeper than a mere cyber attack on the US. The SolarWinds hack and the subsequent confusion over just how bad it still, especially when it comes to trusting the election results cannot be overstated.
With trust in the US government and its various institutions at an all time low and with factionalism and tribalism growing by the day, the US is on verge of a true systemic collapse.
The Chinese Communist Party, along with other state actors like Russia, North Korea, and their allies have been waiting for the final execution of their plan to take down the US. After all, communist leaders have always believed the US could be taken “without firing a shot.”
There are serious military leaders in the US, both retired and active urging President Trump to take action. Those retired leaders are openly asking him to “cross the Rubicon” the way Caesar did and “restore the Republic.”
This is not about the Rubicon. This is about an inflection point in world history; what we call a Ketz or end in Hebrew. An end is obviously not a final moment in time, but an end of one period and a beginning of another. A Ketz is the transitional moment when that happens.
That is what this Torah portion is about. Joseph spent two years in the dungeon in Egypt and in the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, the end of that period, the Ketz occured and he was taken out into the light.
Enemies of freedom surround us all. Chassidut teaches us that these physical enemies are just manifestations of the spiritual enemies we are fighting within. We are at a Ketz, much the same as Joseph and the Maccabees – both of who went from darkness to light.
Over the next few weeks and months our enemies will attempt to sow fear and division across the world. They will attempt to keep us in darkness and yet if we understand that the Rubicon people are urging President Trump to cross is not just his, but in truth it exists within each of us, then we have nothing to fear at all.
Most of humanity lives in a universe of distraction, which is the darkness we are fighting against. They want to forget about the pressures of the world and inject the noise and darkness further in. They want to remain in the “dungeon of Egypt.”
This is the Ketz we are in. The darkness may feel unnavigable, but at the end we will be lifted out into the light.
China under the PRC officially took over Tibet in October 1951. Tibet’s leadership including the then young Dalai Lama fled south into India, after a mass uprising in 1959, where the Tibetan government in exile still remains. Since the Chinese Han takeover of Tibet almost 70 years ago, the CCP run China has decimated the indigenous culture, transferring millions of ethnic Han into the occupied territory. More than that though, the CCP has continued to completely erase Tibetan history.
The following numbers are provided by Tibet Office: “1.2 million Tibetans, one-fifth of the country’s population, died as a result of China’s policies; many more languished in prisons and labor camps; and more than 6000 monasteries, temples and other cultural and historic buildings were destroyed and their contents pillaged.”
In 1987 the Western world, through grassroots efforts, launched the Free Tibet movement. The movement gained steam globally and by the 1990s there were international campaigns. Yet, as the CCP has continued to establish China as the indispensable economic anchor for the whole world, the same liberal media who championed the Tibetan cause has grown increasingly silent.
The Uyghurs Are Targeted For Annihilation
There are an estimated 12 million Uyghurs in North West China. They are a Turkic related Muslim people who migrated to Xinijang centuries earlier. Despite CCP claims, there are said to be more than 1 million Uyghurs in “reeducation camps” whose real aim appears focused on wiping out Uyghur culture – total cultural genocide.
Beyond the more than one million Uyghurs in what can only be considered concentration camps, Uyghur women are forcibly having their hair cut to sell on the global market and Uyghurs are forced to have their organs harvested where they are sold back to rich Muslims seeking an organ transplant.
Besides the open brutality, Uyghurs are on a basic level seeing their religious lifecycle events watered down in a very forceful way as a means of slowly destroying their culture.
Timothy Gross writes the following in China File about his experiences amongst the Uyghur:
“Important lifecycle rituals—baby-namings, circumcision, funerals, and weddings—provide opportunities for devout and casually religious families alike to strengthen connections. These ceremonies recommit the community to a religious path while forging and reinforcing kinship bonds between relatives (oruq-tughan), neighbors (qoshna), and friends.”
“Currently, however, these rites—known generically in official Chinese sources as the “four activities” (si xiang huodong, 四项活动)—demand the overbearing presence of the state in a formalized process referred to as the four applications, four delegations, and four receipts. According to this policy, families intending to hold naming ceremonies, circumcisions, funerals, and weddings must first file an official application. Then an official from the village Party branch will accompany religious clerics to the event, which the Party branch documents in a receipt.”
“Officials reward such mandatory invitations with monetary gifts. Work teams in one village dole out 200 renminbi for each naming ceremony, 100 renminbi per circumcision, 200 renminbi per wedding (second marriages are not eligible), and 500 renminbi per funeral. If the deceased was a Party member, officials increase the condolence payment to 1,000 renminbi. Families become ineligible for monetary gifts if they are deemed to have engaged in “extremism” or have a family member labeled as “targeted population.” If family members exhibit a bad attitude or perform poorly at work, or a Party member does not play a role in the ceremony, they are given reduced gifts. Although the modest financial support may be welcomed by some families, these payments act as what political communications expert Jennifer Pan has termed “repressive assistance,” that is, benefits that increase contact between the state and targeted groups and serve as a starting point for ideological transformation.”
Han-Centrism At The Heart of China’s Cultural Decimation Program
The Han, who make up 92% of China have been undergoing a form of hyper nationalism, which has transformed their nationalism into a virulent xenophobia. Han nationalism has been used as a tool to wipe out and colonize Tibet, Xinijang (home of the Uryghurs), and Inner Mongolia.
Dr. Bradley Thayer, Professor of International Security Studies a Tallinn University said the following in an interview:
“The origins of Han-centrism are deep within China’s history, it is not a modern phenomenon. It has been manipulated of course, as you have observed, by Xi Jinping and historically by the Communist Party of China. So, we see many examples of this in the present crisis with the Wuhan virus. We see the Chinese have been blaming many other countries, including the US- they claim the US army brought the virus to China or that it originated in Italy first. This is in keeping with the Han-centric belief that China does no wrong and cannot make mistakes and that any problems it face are of the responsibility of other people and nations.”
The Han are encouraged to move to regions that were conquered in the 20th Century and either spread sinification as is the case of inner Mongolia or like Tibet and Xinijang aid in a total erasure of the indigenous culture that is there.
Han-Centrism or nationalism has increased in recent years under Xi Jiping and has been the foundation for the current government’s attack on organized Western religions like Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.
Han Nationalism has now been fused with the CCP’s global agenda and is the primary driving force behind the CCP’s hegemonic aspirations around the world. The assumption by globalists and corporate leadership is that an open China would pacify nationalist ambitions, but in the last decade or two they have only fueled them.
The current push to reengage Beijing, if and when President Trump leaves office, feeds the unrestrained urge by the CCP to continue their expansion. The Han Nationalism that has now propelled the Xi Jinping leadership is being near worshiped by those on the globalist left. This is not surprising. For years the left has run an all out assault on traditional religion – a near atheistic driven attack. The CCP, built with atheism at its core sees eradication of traditional religion as a core value.
Ultimately, as the Western world increasingly becomes more and more dependent on Chinese products for its own feeling of self fulfillment, it is essentially supporting wholesale genocide of ethnic populations that historically speaking were never under Chinese rule.
The globalist left likes to pride itself on liberalism and tolerance and yet when it comes to China it looks the other way. Gone are the days of mass protests for Free Tibet that swept the 1990s and drew in famous entertainers.
Ironically, President Trump, the very man who the left claims is “Hitler incarnate” signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act this past June. Trump said that act “holds accountable perpetrators of human rights violations and abuses such as the systematic use of indoctrination camps, forced labor, and intrusive surveillance to eradicate the ethnic identity and religious beliefs of Uyghurs and other minorities in China.”
The Uyghurs and Tibetans are a message for the world, that placating genocidal regimes no matter how economically “indispensable” they are for the world, never ends well. The Jewish people were also at the mercy of a supposed “indispensable” nation, Nazi Germany, whose leader graced the cover of Time Magazine. Unfortunately, more than 75 years later the world has decided to put profits ahead of stopping the rising dragon. Will global leadership wake up before it’s too late? If the US elections are any indication, it does not seem likely.
