Biden: It's Okay to Finance China's Military

by Gordon G. Chang • February 25, 2021 at 5:00 am

Wall Street wants to finance the enemy, and the Biden administration is opening the door wide.... Beijing views the U.S. financial community as its channel to influence the highest levels of the American political system.
"It would be a tragic mistake for the new administration to postpone, dilute, or otherwise eviscerate implementation of the key provisions of Executive Order 13959. Doing so would only serve to enrich Wall Street and Beijing at the expense of American security, fundamental values, and investor protection." — Roger Robinson, chairman of the Prague Securities Studies Institute, interview with Gatestone.
The People's Republic of China is a unified state, so the investment ban should apply not only to companies the Trump administration designated but also to all state-owned enterprises. State enterprises are by no means separate businesses. The divisions among them are artificial, and all are tightly controlled by the Communist Party. Each one of these entities, therefore, is military-linked and Party-controlled.
China's Military-Civil Fusion means the People's Liberation Army "has the right to raid any non-military Chinese company for any technology it decides could advance its military strength." — Richard Fisher, of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, interview with Gatestone
The Biden administration is allowing Wall Street to use the cash of "scores of millions, up to 160 million Americans" to "fund ICBMs targeting their families, to fund concentration camps in Xinjiang." Most Americans will have no idea their retirement and other savings are being used to finance their own destruction.... financing China's war on America.

(Image source: iStock)

Wall Street wants to finance the enemy, and the Biden administration is opening the door wide.

How can this be?

On January 26, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control issued General License No. 1A, which permits Americans to continue acquiring shares in certain companies associated with "Communist Chinese Military Companies," known as CCMCs, until May 27. The previous deadline, set by the Trump administration, was January 28.

The General License delayed a portion of the application of President Trump's landmark Executive Order 13959, issued November 12, 2020.

EO13959 stopped investors, subject to wind-down provisions, from purchasing or possessing shares in any company designated a CCMC. In short, Trump ordered Americans to stop financing China's military, the People's Liberation Army.

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Muslim Life in 2021, as Predicted in 1921

by Daniel Pipes • February 25, 2021 at 4:00 am

The Muslim world "sunk to the lowest depth of its decrepitude" in the eighteenth century; "the life had apparently gone out of Islam, leaving naught but a dry husk of soulless ritual and degrading superstition behind." Meanwhile, Europe discovered ocean routes, established economic hegemony, and exploited its power as "mistress of the world" to indulge in "recklessly imperialistic policies." Its conquests of Muslim-majority lands prompted a massive "flood of mingled despair and rage" against the West.
The "great Mohammedan Revival" began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a "profound ferment" and a "stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind." This process was well underway by 1921: "The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march."
The "great Mohammedan Revival" began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a "profound ferment" and a "stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind." This process was well underway by 1921: "The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march."
Do not try to reduce causation to interests. Beliefs and passions count at least as much.

Lothrop Stoddard's prescient 1921 study, The New World of Islam, saw the shape of what was to come. He correctly understood Islam as the permanent force it is. This remains an excellent lesson for today's analysts. Do not try to reduce causation to interests. Beliefs and passions count at least as much. Pictured: A Moroccan coin from 1921. (Image source: iStock)

When Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) is still recalled, it is as a prominent racist who had a major but malign influence on the budding field of international relations, who acted as theoretician for the Ku Klux Klan, and who contributed the concept of Untermensch (sub-human) to the Nazis.

Stoddard, however enjoyed a high and favorable profile during the 1920s. He had earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and traveled widely. President Warren Harding praised him, and F. Scott Fitzgerald obliquely referenced him in The Great Gatsby.

Stoddard also wrote a prescient 1921 study, The New World of Islam, a survey of 250 million Muslims "from Morocco to China and from Turkestan to the Congo." Despite his consuming racism, Stoddard impressively recognized trends underway in Islam. As Ian Frazier observed in the New Yorker, "Whatever his philosophy and methods, his guesses sometimes proved out."

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