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In this mailing:
* Gordon G. Chang: Taiwan Voters Just Cut China's Xi Jinping Down to Size
* Amir Taheri: One War and Two Visions


** Taiwan Voters Just Cut China's Xi Jinping Down to Size ([link removed])
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by Gordon G. Chang • January 14, 2024 at 5:00 am
* The Taiwanese, especially after seeing how Beijing suffocated Hong Kong in the past four years, do not want to be ruled by the Chinese regime.
* Xi Jinping at the moment must be fuming. In his 2024 New Year's message, he signaled he is soon going to annex Taiwan. "China will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," the Chinese leader declared in a paragraph that appears to list what will happen this year.
* The people of the small island of Taiwan are not afraid of large China. They are an inspiration to free people everywhere.

Taiwan's voters stood up to China and all its war talk of recent weeks. The Taiwanese heard Communist Chinese ruler Xi Jinping's threats, became even more defiant, and have now cut him down to size by electing Lai Ching-te as their next president. Pictured: Taiwan's Vice President and president-elect, Lai Ching-te, speaks to supporters at a rally on January 13, 2024 in Taipei, Taiwan. (Photo by Annabelle Chih/Getty Images)

The results are in. Taiwan's voters stood up to China and all its war talk of recent weeks.

Vice President Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party won the presidency on Saturday in a three-way race with 40.1% of the vote. Hsiao Bi-khim, recently Taipei's representative in Washington, was elected vice president.

New Taipei City Mayor Hou Yu-ih, of the opposition Kuomintang received 33.5%, and Ko Wen-je of the new Taiwan People's Party came in third with 26.5%.

The election was historic. For the first time since 1996, when the island republic held its first democratic presidential election, a party has won a third straight presidential term.

Previously, the DPP, as the governing party is known, and the Kuomintang or KMT, traded the presidency every eight years.

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** One War and Two Visions ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • January 14, 2024 at 4:00 am
* The BBC gives massive coverage to so-called diplomatic initiatives to bring about a ceasefire. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's "shuttle diplomacy" between Washington and the Middle East is presented as a serious enterprise rather than a banal version of shadow-boxing.
* [T]he Beeb wants only Israel to rein in its furies, never mentioning that Hamas, too, could help by stopping rocket attacks on Israeli civilian targets.
* The IRGC cannot tell its audience that those heroes of the "Resistance" have been unable to protect the people they have under their rule for almost two decades. Thus, the IRGC offers no footage of "charred bodies of children" or heaps of rubble where once stood a Gazan village or town.
* Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi assures everyone that "martyrs" in Gaza have the good fortune of going straight to paradise.
* IRGC Quds Force chief Major-General Ismail Qa'ani has put it succinctly: "We give our Arab brothers who join the Resistance Front everything they want, including arms and training. But we shall not fight on their behalf."
* In other words, the glory of martyrdom is not for us, but for those we hire to die on our behalf.

Pictured: Anti-Israel protesters outside the offices of BBC Scotland, on October 14, 2023 in Glasgow, United Kingdom. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

If you thought you knew all you need to know about the war in Gaza, think again. Much depends on where and how you get your news from. Last week I decided to do a little, obviously non-scientific, experiment by following the Gaza news through two channels: the old BBC, one of Great Britain's most adulated institutions, and in parallel with it, the various news outlets controlled by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Tehran.

A number of themes emerged.

The BBC has already sent the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel to its dead archives, while the IRGC outlets keep mentioning it as "the battle that ended the myth of Zionist invincibility." The fact that 7 October was an ambush unleashed against unarmed people, including youths attending a concert, and not a battle, is beside the point; it must be constantly mentioned to justify Iran's thinly disguised hope that the Gaza war continues "longer than any think."

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