Chinese media slam Japan's move to expand military role

Graphic comparing the military strength of China and Japan, based on an analysis by the International Institute for Strategic StudiesAFP

China’s state-run media launched a broadside Wednesday against Japan’s move to loosen the bonds on its powerful military, casting it as a threat to Asian security.

The harsh criticism came one day after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said his cabinet had formally endorsed a reinterpretation of a constitutional clause banning the use of armed force except in very narrowly-defined circumstances.

“The Japanese government is eager to break through the postwar system,” wrote the ruling Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper in an editorial penned under the name “Zhong Sheng”, a homophone for “Voice of China”.

It called the Abe government’s move “a dangerous signal, as well as a wake-up call”.

In a commentary late Tuesday, China’s official Xinhua news agency challenged Tokyo with a question: “Is China on your military agenda?”

“Japan has a history of making sneaky attacks, as it did in launching wars with China, Russia and the United States in the recent 100 years,” Xinhua wrote. “Now, Japan, with greater freedom to use military force, is making the world more worried.”

China, home to the world’s largest military, far outnumbers rival Japan in manpower, ships, aircraft and defense spending.

China’s official defense budget last year came to $119.5 billion, while according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance 2014 report, released in February, Japan’s total was $51 billion.

Tokyo and Beijing have long been at odds over islands in the East China Sea, and Beijing has argued that a reinterpretation of Japan’s pacifist constitution could open the door to remilitarization of a country it considers insufficiently penitent for its actions in World War II.

The state-run China Daily newspaper wrote that “the recalcitrant attempts by Japanese politicians, including Abe, to rewrite history and their country’s unseemly record in World War II are reminders that Japan doesn’t deserve being treated as a normal country”.

China’s nationalistic Global Times, which is close to the ruling Communist Party, ran a cartoon on Wednesday depicting Abe as the American action hero Rambo, with a Japanese flag bandanna tied around his forehead and wielding a large machine gun.

“Both Tokyo and Washington wish to see more disturbances in Asia, as the US hopes it will hinder China’s rise and Japan wants to seek opportunities to realize its rise both politically and militarily,” the paper wrote. “China needs to expose the Japanese rightists’ evil intent.”
JapanToday.com

Obama Unleashes Bio Weapon Illegals Against America

BILL WOULD ALLOW POLICE TO CONFISCATE GUNS BASED ON ACCUSATION ALONE

A draconian gun control bill set to be voted on by the California legislature would allow police to confiscate a person’s firearms solely on the basis of an accusation made against the gun owner by a family member or a health professional.

Although the bill was amended after an onslaught of complaints, the legislation is still being labeled as the harshest gun control law in the country.

AB 1014, authored by Assemblymembers Das Williams and Nancy Skinner, would create ‘gun violence restraining orders’ that would allow police to proactively confiscate firearms and hold them for one year with no due process merely based on an accusation made by an immediate family member, a law enforcement officer or a health professional.

“This bill would allow a search warrant to be issued when the property or things to be seized are a firearm or firearms or ammunition that is in the custody or control of, or is owned or possessed by, a person who is the subject of a gun violence restraining order and who is presently known to have in his or her custody and control or possession, or to own a firearm or firearms or ammunition,” states the bill.

The accusation against the individual has to meet the standard of evidence, “to believe that the subject of the petition poses a significant risk of personal injury to himself, herself, or another by having under his or her custody and control, owning, purchasing, possessing, or receiving a firearm,” states the bill, although the nature of this evidence is not properly defined.

The bill has drawn fiery criticism from gun rights advocates who see the legislation as an onerous assault on the Second Amendment.

“If for example, person A goes to a judge and files a complaint about person B, person B can have his/her guns and gun rights taken away without any idea why or even have the chance to plead their case. Only after law enforcement searched person B, their family, friends, place of work, and anywhere else police might have thought person B hid guns would that person have the right to defend themselves. Guilty until proven innocent,” writes Yehuda Remer.

“This bill goes too far,” Sean Doherty of California Assn. of Federal Firearms Licensees told a Senate panel. “AB 1014 shreds the right of privacy and right of property that has been jurisprudence for decades.”

Even David Warren, of Taxpayers for Improving Public Safety (a group that normally supports gun control legislation), spoke out against the bill, stating that it had “significant constitutional deficiencies” and would not be enforceable.

Having been passed by the California Senate Public Safety Committee, the bill now heads to the legislature for a full vote.




Credit to Infowars

The Approaching Inevitable Market Reversal

ISIS in the Middle East

TRUTHS: No Economic Recovery, No New Jobs, No Fed. Taper.

What Does an "Islamic Caliphate" in Iraq Mean?

• The newly declared “Islamic State” is trying to reinforce its battlefield achievements in Syria and Iraq by creating a new Sunni Muslim religious entity to overturn the prevailing regional political order rooted in the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916).
• The military capability of the “Islamic State” in Iraq to expand the territories under its rule is limited. Therefore, its leaders are directly appealing to Muslims all over the world to support the caliphate and to rebel against existing governments.
• The declaration of the caliphate escalates the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites and is likely to impact the Muslim communities in the West as well.
• As a new regional reality emerges in the Middle East, Israel faces new and more complex security challenges than in the past.  These threats, once again, sharply focus the issue of defensible borders west of the Jordan River.

On the first day of the month of Ramadan (29 June 2014), the day on which World Pride Day was celebrated as a marker of social and cultural progress, the reestablishment of the Islamic caliphate (state) was declared in Iraq and a caliph was appointed to lead it.

The declaration of the establishment of the caliphate was transmitted via audiotape by Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, spokesman of ISIS – the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Greater Syria) – which changed its name to “the Islamic State.”

Initial Implications of the Declaration of the Islamic Caliphate

The Islamic State is trying to reinforce its battlefield achievements in Syria and Iraq by creating a new Sunni Muslim religious entity that threatens to overturn the prevailing regional political order rooted in the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) which set the borders and carved up the Middle East into European spheres of influence. The rule of the caliphate is applied to the territory under its control. This rule, however, does not accept the existing borders or the division of the Muslims into different states on a national basis. In the view of the Islamic State, the primal sin that led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which was a continuation of the rule of the caliphate, lies in nationalism and in the adoption of Western ideologies, such as democracy, that are foreign to Islam. Hence, the jihad is aimed at overturning the existing order and enabling the expansion of the boundaries of the caliphate to encompass all territory where Muslims live.

The main objective of the Islamic State is to entrench its rule (imposing its authority and defeating local militias such as that of the Kurds) and repel the counterattack by the armies of Iraq and Syria, which are fully backed by Iran and Russia.

The Islamic State’s military capability to expand the territories under its rule is limited. Therefore, its leaders are trying to attain force multipliers by directly appealing to Muslims all over the world to support the caliphate and calling on the Muslim population to rebel against existing governments and thereby accelerate the worldwide Islamic revolution.The timing of the declaration at the beginning of the month of Ramadan is of supreme importance in this context. The organization Hizb ut-Tahrir (which also has branches in the West) has already hastened to welcome the declaration of the caliphate.1 Fear of the Islamic State is evident in Saudi Arabia (the crown jewel in the Islamic State’s vision of conquest), in Jordan (the weak link), and in other countries (Lebanon has learned of the appointment of the leader of the Islamic State).2 The danger of regional instability is greater than ever.

The Caliphate Threatens the Muslim Brotherhood

The declaration of the caliphate poses a challenge to the rival Islamic organizations and particularly to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has tried to promote the concept of a “political Islam” that combines Islam and democracy (according to the Islamic interpretation) and is aimed at achieving the ultimate goal of global Islamic rule in stages. Over the past year the Islamic State has made clear that it sees no room for compromises with organizations that do not fully and unquestioningly accept its authority, as was well evident in the bloody war it waged against the Al-Qaeda-backed Jabhat al-Nusra organization in Syria until it extracted a declaration of loyalty from this group.

The declaration of the caliphate escalates the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites and is likely to impact the Muslim communities in the West as well. In the Sunni Muslim context, the sense of identification with the caliphate creates conditions for expanded activity by groups associated with radical Islam in the West, including both the recruitment of mujahideen for combat and the perpetration of terror attacks.

Israel, which was not directly mentioned in the speech declaring the establishment of the Islamic caliphate, is included among the enemies that the Muslims are commanded to destroy so as to implement Islamic rule in the world. As a new regional reality emerges in the Middle East, Israel faces new and more complex security challenges than in the past. These challenges include the rise of radical Islam, increasing Iranian military involvement in Israel’s vicinity, direct threats to the stability of the Hashemite Kingdom in Jordan, and the strengthening of elements that support the Islamic State in the Palestinian territories. These threats, once again, sharply focus the issue of defensible borders west of the Jordan River.

Below are the main points in the “declaration of the caliphate,” which is titled “This Is Allah’s Promise.”3

Establishment of an Islamic caliphate: The rule of the caliphate extends over the territories under the Islamic State’s control in Syria and Iraq (“from Aleppo to Diyala”). The Shura Council (Consultative Council) of the Islamic State has appointed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the caliph.

Implementation of Islamic law (sharia): The Islamic State has fulfilled conditions for the establishment of the caliphate. These include, among others, the practical implementation of sharia law in territories under its rule, with Islamic courts set up that mete out sentences in accordance with Islam (executions, crucifixions, amputations, whipping, etc.); mosques taking responsibility for instilling the ethos of the next generation; and enactment of the principles of “the cross is shattered” and “the graves are destroyed.”

Fortification of the rule of the Islamic caliphate: The Islamic State has denied the validity of independent Islamic organizations and frameworks, demanding that all the organizations accept the new government and fully subjugate themselves to it.

The supremacy of the Muslims over the peoples of the world and the goal of an Islamic takeover of the world: The Muslims are the best among the nations, and on them Allah has bestowed his promise of leading the world on condition that they worship him and do not incorporate any other god into the belief in Allah or adopt any ideology in addition to that of Islam. This is the time of jihad and of taking the path of the Prophet Muhammad, after whose death the Muslim nation was able to achieve battlefield victories over the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire with its leaders becoming kings and rulers of the world (implying that the Islamic nation of today is capable of overcoming the infidel empires).

Representation of the Muslims all over the world: The authority of the Islamic caliphate is not limited to the geographic territory under its direct control; instead the Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the legal ruler of all the Muslims in the world, and it is their duty to express loyalty to him and obey his instructions.

The rejection of democracy, secularism, and nationalism: The Islamic State commands the Muslims to renounce any worldview that is opposed to Islam, particularly democracy, secularism, and nationalism, and to return to the religion of Islam and thereby fulfill the conditions for Allah’s promise regarding the subjugation of the entire world to Islamic rule.

Ongoing jihad everywhere: In a message to the mujahideen, the Islamic State called for continuation of the holy war in light of the fact that Allah has blessed the Muslims with the jihad and victory that led to the establishment of the caliphate, developments that sow enormous fear in the West and the East.

Credit to Right Side News

Written by Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi