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A hero in Hong Kong

Posted: November 7, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

In a world seemingly bereft of heroes, it’s worth remembering that some heroes do exist and need our support.

Lai Chee-ying, better known in the West as Jimmy Lai, is a Hong Kong businessman and politician fighting for democracy for several decades.

Now, he sits in a Chinese prison accused of violating outrageous laws intended solely to suppress the democratic movement and freedom of speech in Hong Kong.

Born in Guangzhou in south China in 1947, Lai escaped at the age of 12 from the mainland to Hong Kong as a stowaway aboard a small ship. There, he spent his early years in a garment factory and rose to the position of factory manager. In 1975, Lai used his year-end bonus on Hong Kong stocks to raise cash and bought a bankrupt garment factory, where he began producing sweaters. He built Giordano into a company with more than 8,000 employees in 2,400 shops in 30 countries. 

After the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, Lai turned his attention to politics, building a publishing empire to combat and criticize the Communist Party and its rulers. Lai created Next Digital, a Hong Kong media company, and the popular newspaper Apple Daily.

In 2006, Next Magazine ranked second in circulation in Hong Kong’s magazine market. Apple Daily became the No. 2 newspaper in Hong Kong. He expanded to Taiwan, and 

in 2020, Lai launched an English version of Apple Daily. All of the publications were banned in mainland China. 

Lai was arrested in 2020 on charges of violating the territory’s new national security law, an action which prompted widespread criticism. However, no trial has been set for these actions, which could end up in a life sentence. In three separate cases, he was sentenced to more than five years for various political offenses, including participation in political protests. 

Lai is a devout Christian and a British citizen who met with top U.S. officials during the Trump administration. Yet the Vatican and the British and American governments have done little to get Lai out of jail. 

A recent documentary, The Hong Konger, is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRkuv-fOV7k

In an interview, Lai says: “The younger generation and the older generation have never been so united…. If we just surrender, we will lose everything.” The documentary is also critical of the relationship between corporate investment and the lure to Western companies of Chinese markets.

Like Martin Luther King Jr., Lai decries violence and has disavowed some of his followers who engage in attacks on police. 

It is both heartening and saddening that people like Jimmy Lai exist. It’s crucial that ordinary people and governments use whatever pressure possible to free him from his Chinese prison. 

The mess in Pennsylvania’s election system

Posted: October 31, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

As Pennsylvania voters head to the polls next week, the Democrats have created another gimmick to boost their chances for all future elections, including the 2024 presidential campaign.

Pennsylvania played an essential role in the nail-biting elections of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, so any change in the state election process may become critical.

Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has announced that Pennsylvania will implement automatic voter registration when someone gets a new driver’s license or renews an old one.

What’s wrong with the plan? It’s already incredibly easy to register to vote. If the estimated 1.7 million Pennsylvanians who haven’t registered to vote are that lazy, let them stay unregistered.

These “new” voters are more likely to use mail-in ballots, which Democrats to “harvest” ballots in 2020. Ballot harvesting occurs when individuals take advantage of the options to “harvest” or collect voters’ completed ballots and return them on behalf of the voter. While it may seem like a kind gesture to assist voters in submitting their mail ballots, ballot harvesting can severely undermine the fairness and honesty of elections.

A 2021 study by researchers from the University of Southern California and the University of California-Berkeley found that automatic voter registration increased registration in states where it was in effect and boosted the number of people voting by more than 1%.
Instead of the voter registration gimmick, state and local officials should investigate some serious organizational problems in the election process.

Just a stone’s throw away from Biden’s birthplace of Scranton, Luzerne County is a mess!

The Associated Press recounted that “the polls had just opened for last year’s midterms in Pennsylvania when the phones began ringing at the election office in Luzerne County.

“Polling places were running low on paper to print ballots. Volunteers were frustrated, and voters were worried they might not be able to vote.”

Emily Cook, the office’s interim deputy director who had been in her position for just two months, rushed to the department’s warehouse. She found stacks of paper, but it was the wrong kind — ordered long ago and too thick to meet the requirements for the county’s voting equipment.

Guess how Luzerne County votes. Democrat. Guess where the ballot shortages were most prominent. Republican precincts.

The 2022 ballot debacle, referred to locally as “papergate,” was just the latest problem in a county on its fifth election director in the past three years.

Election offices have been understaffed for years. But 2020 was a tipping point, with all the pandemic-related challenges before the presidential vote and the hostility afterward.

A wave of retirements and resignations has followed, creating a vacuum of institutional knowledge. In Pennsylvania, officials estimate that 40 of the state’s 67 county election offices have new directors or deputy directors since 2020.

Unfortunately, Al Schmidt, who oversaw the presidential election in Philadelphia in 2020, serves as the secretary of the Commonwealth, which runs Pennsylvania voting. Although Schmidt claims he is a Republican, he’s clearly one in name only from his background in Philadelphia.

The Pennsylvania election scheme is an absolute mess, and such messes make it a lot easier to steal votes or suppress them, and the Democrats have almost complete control of the operation in 2024.

Fixing the college mess

Posted: October 24, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

It’s heartening for me to see higher education in trouble.

The anti-Israel bias of some prominent institutions, such as the University of Pennsylvania, has made headlines recently. But the problems are much more profound.

I spent nearly 30 years watching the demise of the essence of teaching and learning at three colleges and universities that slid into a bureaucratic morass and a political mess.

I’ll start with the less sexy side of the equation. When I started at Temple University in 2005, I could pop in to see the dean whenever I wanted to do so. The entire staff of the dean’s office stood at eight people.

I met privately three times with the current dean, whom I helped get the job a decade ago, after battling through some of the 20-odd bureaucrats who stood in the way.

The expanding bureaucracy in the Klein College of Media and Communication was typical for much of higher education. The outrageous cost of higher education has more to do with the nonteaching staff at colleges and universities than the expansion and pay of teachers.

For example, I paid $559 a year in tuition to a state school in 1973. That comes to $3,896.77 in today’s dollars. Higher education might be competitive if tuition stood at only two or three times that amount.

Is college worth it? The public is increasingly skeptical. This year, a Wall Street Journal poll found that 56% of adults said a four-year college was “not worth the cost,” up from 40% in 2013.

What first looked like a pandemic blip has turned into a crisis. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after returning to in-person classes, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As a result, many colleges and universities will have to tighten their budgets by reducing staff, including hiring fewer tenured professors.
In my opinion, that’s good.

Second, politics became increasingly leftist as I moved along in academia. Here are a few examples. I lost one job because I was a conservative and couldn’t advance at another institution because of my views. At one point, a fellow professor slammed the door in my face because she disagreed with my politics.

Tenure is what protects many leftist professors from criticism. It’s almost impossible to get fired once a teacher has tenure, which keeps many leftists from getting called on the carpet for their opinions.

Take, for example, Marc Lamont Hill, who recently left Temple for the City University of New York.

Five years ago, Hill, a media professor and network pundit, called for countries to boycott and divest from Israel in a speech for the U.N.’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. “We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grass-roots action, local action and international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” Hill said in prepared remarks.

CNN fired Hill. Temple couldn’t touch him because he had tenure.

With fewer tenured professors and economic pressure from students maybe there’s a chance higher education will get less political and more useful.

A moment of crisis

Posted: October 17, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Marine Sgt. Steve Russell was on guard duty. It was Sunday, a day of rest.

As he gazed out of the compound’s gates in Beirut, he saw a truck turn and head for the Marine outpost.

Then a wave of flames swept across the truck’s bumper, sending tons of explosives in a suicide attack.

Amazingly, Russell survived. But the explosion killed 241 military personnel—almost all of them Marines, who had come as part of a peacekeeping mission after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It was the largest loss of life among the Marines since Iwo Jima in World War II.

A seminal event in the chaos of the Middle East, the bombing 40 years ago still provides some insight into what led to today’s events.

As an investigative journalist for ABC’s 20/20, I spent several months back then in an attempt to piece together who was behind the attack and why.

Here are the reports:

Here’s what we found:

–Iran financed the attack on the Marines to humiliate the U.S. government and its presence in Lebanon, particularly when the Reagan administration pushed for Arab countries to make peace with Israel.

–Syria, a longtime ally of the Islamic Republic and enemy of the United States and Israel, provided the logistical support for the operation.

–Islamic Jihad, a front organization with ties to Hezbollah, provided the manpower in Lebanon. Heading the operation was Imad Mughniyeh, one of the Middle East’s prolific terrorists and bomb makers. As a chief strategist of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group, he deployed truck bombs and improvised explosive devices throughout the region, including the war in Iraq.

–The Reagan administration failed to recognize the danger the Marines faced in Beirut. For example, the guards protecting the compound were under strict orders to keep their guns without any rounds in the chamber to protect against civilian casualties. Moreover, the American military command failed to inform the Marines about the possibility of an imminent attack—information received a few days before the explosion.

–The Reagan administration largely ignored the attack’s impact on the Marines for two reasons. First, only days after the attack, the United States invaded Grenada to rescue American medical students. Second, a significant divide existed within the administration between those who wanted retaliation against the terrorists and those who argued that the government had no definitive proof of whether Iran and Syria were involved.

What can we learn about today’s issues from the past?

First, a clear connection has existed for decades among Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians. You don’t need a smoking gun to know that a link exists between the trio. Syria cannot play as prominent a role today because of its ongoing civil war.

Second, Hezbollah has become a powerful influence in the region, particularly as the leading party in the Lebanese government and an ally of Iran. Moreover, Hezbollah provides aid and assistance to Hamas, the main instigator of the attacks on Israel.

Third, Shia Muslims, the smaller of the two main branches of Islam, control a vast swath of the Middle East, including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. That’s a significant shift from the balance of power in the past 40 years when Sunni Muslims controlled much of the territory. That’s why Saudi Arabia leaders, who are from the dominant Sunni tribe, have started to talk with their longtime enemies from Iran.

Fourth, it’s important to note that the Sunni-Shia détente also includes the Palestinian leadership, which is primarily Sunni. Moreover, it’s important to note that the Palestinian political groups, which historically made no differentiation among Sunnis, Shia, and Christians, have created ties with distinctly religious regimes.  

Lastly, the United States has a history of putting itself in harm’s way in the Middle East, wagering that a show of military strength will somehow frighten its adversaries. So, too, has shuttle diplomacy played a role in the U.S. strategy.

Let’s take a good, hard look at how many failures the United States has had in the Middle East over the past four decades. Only the first Gulf War stands as a victory.

It may be time to sit this one out.                                                                  

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