Headline News 16/05/2021

Headlines:

• Erdogan Offers Strategy Based Diplomacy to Rein in ‘Israel’

• We Stand with Gaza: PM Imran Khan Reiterates Support for Palestine

• China and the US Dash Toward Another MAD Arms Race

Details:

Erdogan Offers Strategy Based Diplomacy to Rein in ‘Israel’

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the time has come when an international protection force should be sent to Palestine to protect the civilian population from Israeli attacks. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has launched a highly charged diplomatic effort to encourage the international community to come up with a strong response to Israel and hold the Zionist state accountable for committing large-scale violence and human rights abuse against Palestinians. Under Erdogan's leadership, Turkey continues to mobilise all relevant international institutions, especially the United Nations and the Organization for Islamic Cooperation, to support Palestine and teach Israel a "deterrent lesson". In the past few days, President Erdogan held phone calls with the heads of states and governments of nearly 20 countries, which include Palestine, Russia, Qatar, Pakistan, Kuwait and Algeria. President Erdogan invited the leaders he talked with to take effective action together against Israel's attacks on Masjid Al-Aqsa, Jerusalem, Gaza and all the Palestinians. In this direction, according to the Turkish government's latest press release, the president made his first contact with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas Political Bureau. During his talks, the Turkish president described the attacks of Israel as “[acts of] terror” and expressed the harshest condemnation of the persecution of Palestinian Muslims. President Erdogan said that they are taking initiatives at all levels to mobilize the entire world, especially the Islamic world, to stop the terror and occupation carried out by Israel. He reaffirmed that Turkey will remain as a supporter of the Palestinian cause and keep standing with its Palestinian brothers. The Turkish president also said that Turks will continue to protect the glory of Jerusalem. Pointing out that the main target of Israel's lawlessness and inhumane attacks is essentially all Muslims, the president also noted that the importance of working together for the immediate cessation of Israel's attacks. Erdogan said that the international community's strong and deterrent response as well as concrete steps against illegal practices and support for Palestine are necessary. Erdogan said it was important for the United Nations Security Council to intervene in the issue before the crisis grows further, and the idea of sending an international protection force to the region to protect Palestinian civilians should also be worked on. In addition, in accordance with the instructions of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Presidency of Religious Affairs organized an “emergency Jerusalem meeting” with the agenda of “Masjid Al Aqsa and Jerusalem” with the participation of Religious Affairs Ministers, Presidents and Chief Inspectors of Islamic countries. During the meeting, a common position was laid out on the protection of the sanctity of Jerusalem and the cessation of the persecution of Palestinian Muslims. [Source: TRTWORLD]

The immediate solution to the Jewish state’s violence is to deploy Muslim armies in Jerusalem and other Palestinian territories. However, the long-term solution requires the complete liberation of Palestine and an end to the Western project of establishing and supporting the Zionist state. This necessitates the re-establishment of Khilafah Rashidah (rightly-guided Caliphate) upon the method of the Prophethood to take on and cut the support of Western powers to the Jewish state.

We Stand with Gaza: PM Imran Khan Reiterates Support for Palestine

Prime Minister Imran Khan on Wednesday took to Twitter to reiterate his support for the people of Palestine, denouncing atrocities being committed by Israel. The death toll from the Israeli air strikes in Gaza strip has risen to 35. The tense atmosphere in Jerusalem over the past couple of days reached a crescendo on Tuesday when Israeli planes bombed Gaza following reports of rockets being fired into Israeli territory. Israeli forces have been attacking Palestinian worshippers with stun grenades and rubber bullets over the past several days following protests against Jewish settlements in the Sheikh Jarrah area. The massacre invited rebuke from most Muslim countries, with PM Imran Khan tweeting his support for Palestine today as well. "I am PM of Pakistan and #WeStandWithGaza #WeStandWithPalestine," he tweeted. The prime minister tweeted an excerpt from what seems to be an old article of Noam Chomsky on the Palestine-Israel situation. "You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back," reads the statement. This is, by far, the heaviest exchange between Israel and Hamas since a 2014 war in Gaza, and prompted international concern that the situation could spiral out of control. UN Middle East peace envoy Tor Wennesland tweeted: "Stop the fire immediately. We're escalating towards a full-scale war. Leaders on all sides have to take the responsibility of de-escalation. "The cost of war in Gaza is devastating & is being paid by ordinary people. UN is working w/ all sides to restore calm. Stop the violence now," he wrote. Into the early hours of Wednesday morning, Gazans reported their homes shaking and the sky lighting up with Israeli attacks, outgoing rockets and Israeli air defence missiles intercepting them. Diplomatic sources told AFP that Egypt and Qatar, who have mediated past Israeli-Hamas conflicts, were attempting to calm tensions. Last week, PM Khan strongly condemned the attacks led by Israeli forces on Palestinians at the Al-Aqsa mosque, in violation of "all norms of humanity and international law". PM Imran Khan had said that Pakistan reiterates its support for Palestinians. [Source: Geo TVs]

Khan has a habit of using rhetoric and internationalizing issues without resolving them. He let down the Rohingyan Muslims, and Kashmiris in the past. He will do the same with the Palestinians. He is the chief in command of the armed forces of Pakistan who should lead them to liberate the blessed land of Palestine instead of sending out tweets.

China and the US Dash Toward Another MAD Arms Race

The foundations of strategic stability in East Asia are crumbling. As the U.S. and China intensify their competition in trade, technology and security, the factors that have previously underpinned regional strategic stability -- and made possible the region's economic success -- have either been eroded significantly or become key drivers of instability. Strategic stability, marked principally by cooperative relations among major powers, benign threat assessment and muted competition for military superiority, has prevailed in East Asia during most of the post-Cold War era. The most important cause of the extraordinary luck East Asia has had since the fall of the Berlin Wall is engagement, not confrontation, between the U.S. and China. Despite occasional tensions, Washington and Beijing succeeded in promoting cooperation and managing their differences. Economically, regional economic integration encouraged by the U.S. created incentives for foreign policy restraint, keeping a lid on long-standing maritime and territorial disputes. On the security front, the U.S. alliance system and the forward deployment of forces helped maintain the region's military balance of power. Although China viewed this American security posture as a relic of the Cold War and inimical to its security interests, it acquiesced to America's security presence because it both benefited from the stability it produced and lacked the capabilities to challenge it. Today, few of these pillars of stability remain standing. The U.S. and China are now in an open-ended geopolitical conflict. Both see each other as an existential geopolitical threat. U.S.-led economic integration stalled after Donald Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The raging trade and tech wars between the U.S. and China threaten to fragment East Asia's trade, investment and technology flows because Washington has embraced decoupling as an instrument to weaken Chinese power. China's own version of decoupling -- reducing its reliance on the U.S. market and its technology -- will further accelerate fragmentation. To be sure, Beijing is trying to stitch together a separate trading bloc through the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement that excludes the U.S. But that strategy appears less likely to succeed following the rapidly deteriorating ties between RCEP's two largest members, China and Japan, with Tokyo appearing to side with the U.S. in its duel with China. In retrospect, China is mostly to blame for the demolition of the foundations of East Asia's strategic stability. China's rise, accompanied by its rapid military buildup, its turn toward hard authoritarianism at home and its aggressive foreign policy, have fundamentally altered the threat assessments of the region's key players. Change in threat perception unavoidably forces the two dominant actors in East Asia -- the U.S. and China -- to reevaluate the adequacy of their military capabilities. Of all the factors driving strategic instability in the region, it is this reevaluation that has unleashed the most dangerous dynamic. From Beijing's perspective, the American alliance system and forward deployment now poses an intolerable and acute threat to its security. Although China has been modernizing its military since the mid-1990s to deter the U.S. from intervening in a future conflict in the Taiwan Straits, the rapid descent of U.S.-China relations from engagement to open-ended conflict over the last two years has greatly increased Beijing's urgency and determination to further narrow the gap in military capabilities with the U.S. For the U.S., already alarmed that Chinese advances are eroding America's military edge, the only logical response is to take actions to maintain its advantage. The Pentagon's Pacific Deterrence Initiative, a six-year plan costing $27 billion, explicitly focuses on meeting China's military threat. It is almost certainly the first of many similar measures to come. Because of China's secretive political system, we do not know if President Xi Jinping and his colleagues have formulated their response to the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, but the odds are high that Beijing will see this as an escalation of the threat level and will counter it accordingly. Here we have a classic vicious cycle. Tragically, all signs suggest that this arms race will escalate and make East Asia less secure and worse-off. [Source: Nikkie Asia].

The onus is on China to demonstrate that it can stand up to America’s tactics to contain the dragon. Engaging in an arms race is not the way to do this. On the contrary, China has to accomplish political gains like seizing Taiwan to put an end to US primacy in the Asian Pacific