China Rising in the Caribbean

by Gordon G. Chang • April 10, 2019 at 5:00 am

About 55 miles east of Palm Beach, Florida on Grand Bahama Island, a Hong Kong-based business is spending about $3 billion on a deep-water container facility, the Freeport Container Port.
The concern is that the port will become another debt-trap, like the port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka. There are concerns that Hambantota will eventually become a Chinese naval base. Will the Pentagon have to contend with Chinese warships at Freeport?
The Chinese military is already in the Caribbean, in Cuba, apparently to collect signals intelligence from the U.S. Washington splashes plenty of cash around the Middle East, for instance, but American policymakers need also to be concerned, urgently, about critical needy locations closer to home.

US President Donald Trump recently met with the Caribbean leaders, signaling Washington's intensified engagement with the region. But American programs need cash to back them up, as they are inadequate to meet Chinese challenges in the Caribbean, where trade and investment have made Beijing a power. Pictured: President Trump and Melania Trump welcome Caribbean leaders to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida on March 22, 2019. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)

There's a "Red Storm Rising" just miles from America's shores. "In point of fact, the entire hemisphere is on fire," said Lou Dobbs on his widely watched Fox Business Network show on April 4. "China and Russia are engaging us in almost every quarter in this hemisphere. Russia and China in Venezuela, but China throughout the hemisphere and throughout the Caribbean."

Throughout the Caribbean, China's influence is growing fast. Trade and investment have made Beijing a power. Chinese motives are not solely commercial, however, and do not appear benign.

We begin on the island of New Providence, in the Bahamas. The Export-Import Bank of China in 2011 extended a $2.45 billion construction loan for the Baha Mar resort, near the capital of Nassau. The project, troubled from the start, is the largest and most expensive in the Caribbean.

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The Nation of Islam and Women's "Social Justice"

by Denis MacEoin • April 10, 2019 at 4:00 am

Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, stands for almost everything the Women's March principles claim to deplore. He is a misogynist who wants to keep women in their traditional roles, he hates all LGBT people in an exceptionally vicious way, he is a black separatist, unlike the marchers, who call for unity between races, and has shown close support for a number of dictators, notably the late Libyan president Mu'ammar Ghadhafi, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, and Cuba's Commadante Fidel Castro -- even though the Women's March progressives seek reform through democratic means achieved through working hand-in-hand as free people.
Given that most of the values are those on which most liberals and conservatives agree, one might ask how three of the four board members of the Women's March came to embrace Louis Farrakhan, praise him, and even attend his 2018 Saviors' Day rally. These three were Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Carmen Perez.
"Rank, vile, open, gutter-level anti-Semitism is apparently a pleasure that the progressive left is unwilling or unable to abstain from. Why?" — James Kirchick, Tablet, March 19, 2019.

Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, stands for almost everything the Women's March principles claim to deplore. How then did three of the four board members of the Women's March come to embrace Farrakhan and praise him? (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

It is well-known by some and wholly ignored by others that Islam has a long, sad history of antisemitism, a bigotry that originated in the seventh century CE (the first Islamic century) and has grown more vicious in the 21^st. Combined with an almost universal anti-Zionism and bolstered by many on the political "left", it is today the most ubiquitous and deadliest form of Jew-hatred. It takes the form, not just of insults, boycotts, and lawfare, but of wars, terrorist attacks, and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of the Jews.

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