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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
NGO Freedom House, which called for taking away the assets of the Russian Federation, was recognized as undesirable
2024-05-08
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] American non-governmental organization (NGO) Freedom House, inc.
…founded in 1941 to advocate for democracy and human rights, it is primarily funded by the US State Department…
recognized as undesirable in Russia. This was reported by the press service of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation.

“The Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation recognized the activities of the international non-governmental organization Freedom House, Inc. as undesirable. (USA). Among the main activities of Freedom House is promoting the establishment of the so-called “dominant” role of the United States in the world,” the department’s website says.

They noted that since the beginning of the special operation, this organization has been actively promoting the policies of unfriendly states regarding the conflict in Ukraine, including discrediting the Russian Armed Forces.

Moreover, Freedom House calls for comprehensive assistance to Kyiv “to defeat Russia,” the confiscation of frozen Russian assets in favor of Ukraine, and the introduction of new sanctions against Russia and third countries that allegedly support Moscow.

“The organization provides information, financial, legal and other support to Russian opposition structures, pro-Western and LGBT activists (the movement is recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation - editor’s note), communities defending their interests, and persons convicted of committing terrorist crimes,” - added the Prosecutor General's Office.

As Regnum reported, on May 3, the Ministry of Justice added the “Committee of Ingush Independence” to the register of undesirable organizations (an organization that performs the functions of a foreign agent in the Russian Federation and is recognized as undesirable).

On April 27, the Ministry of Justice included in the list of undesirable organizations “Feminist Anti-War Resistance” (an organization that performs the functions of a foreign agent in Russia and is recognized as undesirable).
Related:
Freedom House: 2023-07-03 Communists Declare Dalai Lama Cannot Reincarnate Outside of China
Freedom House: 2023-01-08 70% of UN rights council members are non-democracies, says watchdog
Freedom House: 2022-07-02 Turkey blocks access to Deutsche Well and Voice of America
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Olde Tyme Religion
Communists Declare Dalai Lama Cannot Reincarnate Outside of China
2023-07-03
[Breitbart] The Chinese Communist Party’s quest to dominate Tibetan Buddhism continued this week with a press conference on Thursday to assert that the communist regime will control the death of the Dalai Lama and not allow him to reincarnate outside of China.

The state-controlled China Tibetology Research Center and the All-China Journalists Association assembled pro-communist “experts” to claim that the Chinese government has controlled the reincarnation of the living Buddhas since ancient times and that the Dalai Lama himself, living in exile in India since China’s colonization of Tibet in 1959, should have no role in the process. Tibetan Buddhists believe in the Dalai Lama as the foremost of several living Buddhas, who have reincarnated in various men throughout the ages to lead the faith.

The Chinese Communist Party considers Tibetan Buddhism a direct threat to the regime, which demands full allegiance to and worship of dictator Xi Jinping. As it has done with Christianity and Islam, Beijing has attempted to eradicate Tibetan Buddhism through a ban on children adhering to any faith and the practice of imposing communist “Sinicization” of the faith, placing trusted Party members in leadership positions.

The Han Chinese government has also attempted to erase Tibetan identity wholesale by imposing the Mandarin language in the region – even renaming Tibet with the Han name “Xizang” – and eroding the use of Tibetan written language in schools. The government has also forced thousands of Tibetan children into “boarding schools” in which they are indoctrinated into communism, learn Mandarin, and are kept from learning their culture or religion.

The human rights organization Freedom House ranked occupied Tibet as the least free region in the world in its 2023 Freedom in the World report, published in March.
Related:
Tibet: 2023-06-11 Russophobia. A Brief History of Hate
Tibet: 2023-05-13 Oman-based terror fugitive arrested at Srinagar airport: SIA
Tibet: 2023-05-13 Former Minister Of Information and Culture Surrenders To Taliban Forces
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International-UN-NGOs
70% of UN rights council members are non-democracies, says watchdog
2023-01-08
[IsraelTimes] The top United Nations human rights body started the year with a majority of its members defined as non-democratic countries and many accused of severe rights violations, drawing ire from the pro-Israel NGO UN Watch.

Only 14 members elected to the 47-member UN Human Rights Council, based in Geneva, are considered “free” countries by the rights group Freedom House, leaving 70 percent of slots occupied by nations designates as “partly free” or “not free.

“When the world elects regimes like China, Cuba, Pakistan, to its highest human rights body, that’s like naming Al Capone and his gang to fight organized crime. It’s a betrayal,” said UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer in an interview with ILTV on Thursday.
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The Grand Turk
Turkey blocks access to Deutsche Well and Voice of America
2022-07-02
[Rudaw] The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire...
’s media watchdog has banned access to the Ottoman Turkish services of U.S. public service broadcaster Voice of America and German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, prompting criticism of censorship.

The Supreme Board of Radio and Television enforced a February decision requiring international media that air television content in Ottoman Turkish online to apply for a broadcast license. An Ankara court ruled to restrict access to the websites of the state-owned Deutsche Well and Voice of America late Thursday.

Neither website was available in Turkey on Friday. In a statement, Deutsche Welle said it did not comply with the licensing requirement because it "would have allowed the Ottoman Turkish government to censor editorial content."

Director general Peter Limbourg said this was explained in detail to the Ottoman Turkish radio and TV board, abbreviated as RTUK.

"For example, media licensed in Turkey are required to delete online content that RTUK interprets as inappropriate. This is simply unacceptable for an independent broadcaster. DW will take legal action against the blocking that has now taken place," Limbourg said.

In February, RTUK said it identified three websites without broadcast licenses, which also included the Ottoman Turkish services of Euronews. But Euronews said it argued that it did not broadcast live in Ottoman Turkish or air visual bulletins and was therefore exempt from the licensing requirements.

Voice of America noted in February that while licensing for TV and radio broadcasts is a norm because broadcast airwaves are finite resources, the internet does not have limited bandwidth.

"The only possible purpose of a licensing requirement for internet distribution is enabling censorship," VOA said in a statement. "Governments have a recognized responsibility to regulate the spectrum to ensure it is used in the broader public’s interest," it said.

State Department front man Ned Price tweeted when the licensing regulation emerged in February that the U.S. was concerned with RTUK’s "decision to expand government control over free press outlets."

In response, Ottoman Turkish Foreign Ministry front man Tanju Bilgic noted that the U.S. required to Turkey’s state English-language broadcaster, TRT World, to register as a foreign agent under a law intended for lobbyists and public relations firms working for foreign governments. TRT said it was newsgathering and reporting like any other international media.

"TRT abides by relevant regulations for its activities in the U.S. Is that censorship? We expect the same from @VoAOttoman Turkish and others," Bilgic tweeted.

Turkey was rated "Not Free" for 2021 on the Freedom of the Net index by Freedom House. Hundreds of thousands of domains and web addresses have been blocked.

Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey at 149 out of 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index, saying "all possible means are used to undermine critics," including stripping journalists of press cards, online censorship, lawsuits and arrests.

Related: Deutsche Welle plans to take legalaction.
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China-Japan-Koreas
Taiwan's President Calls on Free World to Unite Against Beijing and ‘Anti-Democratic Forces'
2020-04-14
[Epoch Times] Amidst Beijing’s increasingly aggressive actions, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen called on like-minded countries around the world to start pushing back against China and other “anti-democratic forces” across economic, political, and military fronts.

“Historical trends do not always favor the forward march of democracy. But in Taiwan, moving backward is not an option,” Tsai said on June 25.

“In the 21st century, democracy is in retreat,” she said, citing a report by Freedom House that found global freedom has been in decline for 12 consecutive years.

“Anti-democratic forces” are threatening Taiwan, Australia, United States, and others around the world today, she said. Tsai was not afraid to point the finger at China, which claims Taiwan as one of its provinces.
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Home Front: Culture Wars
Hatred of Israel is the Symptom. Hatred of Western Society is the Disease.
2019-11-30
[American Thinker] Many on the political Left, such as Rep. Ilhan Omar, complain that American Jews support Israel because Israel is a Jewish-majority country. All Americans should support Israel because Israel is a civilized country similar to the United States in terms of culture and values. These values include free elections, freedom of the press, rule of law, religious pluralism, women's rights, and safety for LGBT people. Israel is, like the United States, a free country as defined by Freedom House. Its neighbor Syria has a freedom score of zero out of 100, Egypt is not free, and Gaza, the home of the "poor oppressed Palestinians," is not free. American values say Americans should side with the world's free countries and not dictatorships like Turkey and theocracies like Iran.

The United Nations' Human Rights Council (UNHRC) consists, meanwhile, of outhouse countries -- I am using the family-friendly and radio-safe version of President Trump's term for them -- such as Afghanistan, Mainland China, Cuba, Egypt, and Rwanda. These countries have as much right to be on a Human Rights Council as a child pornographer has to be in charge of a day care center. President Trump rightly denied the UNHRC its legitimacy by withdrawing from it. The United States will no longer lend its name to this enabler and whitewasher of human rights abuses around the world.

...Organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) are but one set of examples of rebellion for rebellion's sake against the Western value system that built modern civilization. The rebels with all the wrong causes, aka social justice warriors (SJWs), seek to identify purportedly downtrodden and oppressed proletarians, i.e. everybody in the Third World, to support against the evil racist, imperialist, and colonialist oppressors, i.e. everybody in the developed First World; the very source of the SJWs' privileged lifestyles. Female American and European activists who travel to the so-called "occupied territories" in Israel are allegedly so eager to rebel against the very societies that gave them everything they have that they tolerate being used as "comfort women" by the "noble revolutionaries" because, let's face it, any hand with an upraised AK-47 has to belong to a Good Guy.

...Squad member Rashida Tlaib more recently called Israel racist and equated a boycott of Israel to a boycott of Nazi Germany. Presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders also, like Tlaib, Omar, and Ocasio-Cortez, apparently feel there is some kind of moral equivalence between civilized Israelis and violent Hamas savages. These views are shared by a substantial number of Congressional Democrats. Jeremy Corbyn (Labour, UK) has depicted not only Hamas but also Hezbollah, the organization behind the bombing murder of U.S. Marines in Beirut, as "his friends" and has also been supportive of the Irish Republican Army.

...Hatred of Israel is therefore but one symptom of a far more widespread disease; hatred and contempt for advanced Western Civilization that has given very privileged lives, and usually college educations, to Social Justice Warriors and Rebels with All the Wrong Causes who would, if given the opportunity, drag down their own societies in favor of a romanticized and noble Third World that never was and never will be. We encourage them to move in with their downtrodden and oppressed proletarian friends in Gaza, Iran, Vietnam, and Mainland China. Maybe Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT) and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid can hold a gay pride event in Hamas-controlled "Palestine," and let us know how it goes when (and if) they come back.
Link


Africa North
Egypt court acquits 40 NGO workers after retrial
2018-12-21
[Al Jazeera] An Egyptian court has acquitted 40 pro-democracy NGO workers, in a retrial of a long-running case that has strained the country's relations with the United States.

In 2013, 43 Americans, Europeans, Egyptians and other Arabs were sentenced to jail terms ranging from one to five years on various charges, including operating non-governmental organizations (NGOs) without necessary approval. Their offices were ordered to close.

In April, Egypt's top appeal court overturned the jail sentences of 16 of the workers and ordered their retrial.

Many of the defendants, including at least 15 Americans, left Egypt at the time and received five-year sentences in absentia.

The remaining three defendants who were not acquitted on Thursday are among those who were sentenced in absentia, but did not apply for a retrial, a judicial source said.

Beginning in late 2011, Egypt's crackdown on organizations, including US-based groups linked to its two main political parties, caused outrage in Washington, which supplies Cairo with $1.3bn in military aid each year.

The court at the time ordered the closure of the NGOs involved in the case, including the US-based International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI) and Freedom House.

The Americans sentenced in absentia include the son of then-US transportation secretary Ray LaHood.

Link


The Grand Turk
Stop Pretending America and Turkey Are Allies
2018-03-07
[TheNationalInterest] Washington officials routinely call Turkey a vital ally, yet Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government have threatened U.S. forces cooperating with Kurdish militias in northern Syria. After American military spokesmen warned that U.S. troops would defend themselves, Erdoğan promised the famed “Ottoman slap.” Alas, doing so probably would increase his popularity with Turkey’s highly anti-American public.

While no one quite believes the two governments will come to blows, U.S. policymakers are deluded or lying when they assert America’s and Turkey’s unity of purpose. After visiting Ankara, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declared: “We’re going to act together from this point forward. We’re going to lock arms. We’re going to work through the issues that are causing difficulties for us and we’re going to resolve them.”

However, the threat of open conflict between the two governments is real, and demonstrates the extent to which they have diverged. The differences continue to grow with every new day and military operation. Rather than sacrificing American values and interests, Washington should drop its fantasy expectations and establish a more realistic relationship with Erdoğan.

Successive administrations have been denied Turkey’s evident estrangement. Ankara remains in NATO and the U.S. Air Force remains at Incirlik Air Base, but little else binds the two governments together. The relationship is but a ghost from the past.

The Cold War is over, and Russia isn’t going to attack Turkey—or any other NATO member for that matter. Indeed, after tumultuous relations with Moscow over the shootdown of a Russian aircraft, Erdoğan has steadily improved ties to Vladimir Putin. Ankara even is purchasing S-400 antiaircraft missiles from Moscow, undermining alliance efforts to improve interoperability among members. It would be foolish to assume that Turkey would live up to its alliance commitments if Russia ended up at war with America or Europe.

Moreover, Ankara has actively thwarted U.S. objectives in Syria. Focused on ousting the Assad regime, for years Erdoğan’s government allowed Islamic State personnel and materiel to cross the Turkish border. There even were credible accusations that Erdoğan’s son was involved in the illicit oil trade with ISIS. Only after the group staged terrorist attacks in Turkey did Ankara take a more actively adversarial role, and even then it prioritized countering growing Kurdish influence over opposing the “caliphate.”

In launching the ironically named Operation Olive Branch against Kurdish military forces that were allied with Washington against the Islamic State, Turkey wrecked Trump administration plans to create a Kurdish “border security force” to police Syria’s north. A cavalcade of Turkish officials lamented their lack of trust in Washington, and threatened to attack American personnel stationed alongside Kurdish forces. U.S. officials whined that Ankara’s policy was not “helpful,” as if that were the Erdoğan government’s objective.

Turkish foreign policy has also turned hostile elsewhere. Under Erdoğan, Turkey’s relations with Israel turned sharply negative. And the Turkish leader once promoted rapprochement with Greece, and some observers hoped for a similar approach to Cyprus, which Ankara invaded in 1974, occupying more than a third of the island to create an ethnic Turkish state. But the Erdoğan government has increased tensions with Athens over nearby Greek islands that it covets, and declined to make concessions to end the Cypriot standoff.

Erdoğan’s interest in joining the European Union, assuming it ever was real, has ebbed; with Syria’s collapse, he turned refugees into a weapon of extortion against Europe. He shifted from protecting the liberty of Islamic faithful in public to pushing Islamism on the public in a region where Islamist extremism is a threat. After seeking to end the Kurdish conflict at home, he helped reignite the fighting, which continues to ravage Kurdish areas in Turkey. He blockaded Iraqi Kurds after their independence referendum last fall and, most recently, launched military multiple operations against Syrian Kurds.

Finally, slowly at first but rapidly after the failed coup in July 2016, Erdoğan constructed an electoral dictatorship. He began his premiership as an ally of liberals seeking to eliminate Atatürk’s authoritarian trappings dating back to creation of the Turkish republic. Kemalism enshrined nationalism and secularism, and was ruthlessly backed by the military.

However, Erdoğan long ago tossed aside concern for anyone’s rights but his own. Freedom House judges Turkey to be unfree. Ankara leads the world in imprisonment of journalists, with more than seventy in jail. The State Department published a seventy-five-page report on the government’s human-rights abuses, including unlawful killings, torture, lack of due process, mass imprisonment, infringement of free expression, inadequate protection of civilians in military operations, prison overcrowding and more.
Link


-Lurid Crime Tales-
McCain associate takes Fifth on Trump dossier questions
2018-02-24
[FOXNEWS] A former State Department official and associate of Sen. John Maverick McCain
... the Senator-for-Life from Arizona, former presidential candidate and even more former foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution. As an ordinary citizen he greased the infamous hookers peeing on the Obamabed in Moscow dossier in an attempt to smear President Trump...
has invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify in connection with questions from the House Intelligence Committee about the anti-Trump dossier’s Russian sources, according to a law enforcement source.

David J. Kramer, who is a central player in how the unverified Trump dossier made its way to the FBI in late 2016, testified before the committee in December in a closed-door session, indicating he had information about the dossier's sources. A subpoena was issued for mid-January, as first reported by The Washington Examiner.

The law enforcement source confirmed, however, that Kramer did not appear and has exercised his Fifth Amendment rights.

Yet Kramer gave a videotaped deposition last December in separate civil litigation against BuzzFeed about the dossier and his contact with the former British spy who compiled it, Remington Christopher Steele. Steele was hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS to write and research the dossier, with funding from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign.

Legal Insurrection on the same story

Wikipedia on Kramer David J. Kramer was United States Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from 2008 to 2009. He was President of Freedom House from October 2010 to November 2014. He is currently the Senior Director for Human Rights and Human Freedoms at the McCain Institute.
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China-Japan-Koreas
North Korean soldier shot while defecting to South Korea
2017-11-14
[DAWN] A North Korean soldier was shot and injured by his own side on Monday while defecting to South Korea at the border truce village of Panmunjom, the South's military said.

The soldier, thought to be low ranking, was shot in the shoulder and elbow and was picked up bleeding on the South side of a portion of the border known as the Joint Security Area (JSA).

It is rare for the North's troops to defect at the truce village, a major tourist attraction bisected by the borderline and the only part of the frontier where forces from the two sides come face-to-face.

“Our military has taken in a North Korean soldier after he crossed from a North Korea post towards our Freedom House,” Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said in a statement, referring to a building on the South side of the village.

A JCS official quoted by Yonhap news agency said the South's soldiers heard a gunshot and then retrieved the unarmed soldier in the mid-afternoon.

He was evacuated to a private hospital by a UN helicopter, the official added, saying thsoldierer had regained consciousness but declining to comment on whether his injuries were life-threatening.
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Arabia
Saudis Block Israeli Arab Website For Coverage Of 'Normalization' With Israel
2017-07-11
[Jpost] Soddy Arabia
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face...
 has blocked access to a popular Israeli Arab website after it posted articles about alleged Saudi plans to normalize relations with Israel and cited reports from the Hebrew press that Israeli officials were pleased with King Salman
...either the largest species of Pacific salmon or the current Sheikh of the Burnin' Sands, Cutodian of the Two Holy Mosquesand Lord of Most of the Arabians....
's designation of his son, Mohammed Bin Salman, as crown prince.

The Arab48 website, whose coverage is sympathetic to the hard-line anti-Zionist Balad party and sharply criticizes Israeli policies, was blocked in Saudi Arabia beginning July 6, according to its editor-in-chief, Rami Mansour. That was four days after it published an article titled "Israel is betting on Saudi Arabia for normalization with the Arab world."

"It seems we have been blocked because of articles about the relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel and about Mohammed Bin Salman," Mansour said."The Saudis are simply isolating their citizens from the outside world." He said it was the first time anyone had blocked the site since it was established in 1999.

Blocking websites is common in Saudi Arabia, according to Freedom House, an American watchdog group that rated the kingdom as "not free" in its 2016 report on freedom on the interpretation of Islam."

The article which apparently inspired Saudi Arabia to block the Arab48 site was published July 2 and described a recent Yediot Ahronoth article by Smadar Perry that focused on Anwar Eshki, a Saudi former major-general who heads the Saudi-based Center for Middle East Strategic Studies and led a delegation of academics and businessmen on an unprecedented visit to Israel a year ago.

"Perry finds in him a model and a trial balloon that the Saudis released to normalize relations with Israel and define their future strategies concerning diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv," the article said.

"Perry sees in the major-general that he is a character of experience and he doesn't have any aspiration to freeze or obstruct any attempts to make a dialogue with Israel. She is sure that Saudi Arabia, which is a closed country, would not allow him to have his positions without a green light from other circles in Riyadh."

The article said that Perry had suggested that King Salman's appointing Mohammed Bin Salman last month as crown prince in place of Mohammed Bin Nayef was among several developments linked to normalization with Israel, provided Israel agrees to make progress on the Paleostinian issue.

It added that Perry had written that Saudi Arabia is willing to make compromises on its 2002 peace initiative so that negotiations with Israel "will not explode."
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India-Pakistan
Pakistan ranked among worst 10 countries for internet freedom: report
2016-11-18
[DAWN] Pakistain has been included in the list of countries with lowest score for "Freedom on the Net".

The only countries that ranked below Pakistain included China, Iran, Syria, Soddy Arabia
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face...
, Æthiopia, Vietnam, Cuba, Uzbekistan and Bahrain.

The index is prepared by a Washington DC-based research firm called Freedom House.


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