As US President Barack Obama welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to the White House on Friday, Sept. 25, and spoke of the friendship between the two countries, the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning-CV-16 docked at the Syrian port of Tartus, accompanied by a guided missile cruiser. This is revealed exclusively by DEBKAfile.
Beijing is not finding it hard to dance at two weddings, wooing the US for better relations, while at the same time backing Russia in its military intervention in Syria. Coupled with the warm smiles and handshakes exchanged at the lavish reception on the White House lawn, Beijing was clearly bent on showing muscle – not just in the South China Sea, but by allying itself with the Russian-Iranian political and military buildup in support of Syrian President Bashar Assad and his regime.
DEBKAfile’s military sources report that the Chinese aircraft carrier passed through the Suez Canal on Sept. 22, one day after the summit in Moscow between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
When they talked, Putin made no mention of the Chinese warship entering the eastern Mediterranean or its destination. Its arrival has upended the entire strategic situation surrounding the Syrian conflict, adding a new global dimension to Moscow and Tehran’s military support for Assad.
This was grasped at length by US Secretary of State John Kerry. On Sept. 25, he sent Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who also led the US negotiating team for the nuclear talks with Iran, to announce that the Obama administration is ready for dialogue with Iran about the situation in Syria, and this topic would be raised when Kerry’s met Iranian Foreign Minister Muhammad Jawad Zarif in New York on Sept. 26.
But if the top US diplomat hoped to bypass the Russian initiative in Syria by going straight to Tehran, he was too late. Iran is already moving forward fast to augment its military presence in the war-torn country, buttressed by the ground, air and sea support of two world powers, Russia and China.
This turn of evens has a highly detrimental effect on Israel’s strategic and military position. It also strengthens Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in his determination to turn the nuclear deal concluded in July into a tool for isolating the US politically, militarily and economically in the Middle East, rather than a milestone on the road to a breakthrough in ties with Iran, as the Obama administration had hoped.
Our military sources find evidence that the Chinese forces are digging in for a prolonged stay in Syria. The carrier put into Tartus minus its aircraft contingent. The warplanes and helicopters should be in place on its decks by mid-November – flying in directly from China via Iran or transported by giant Russian transports from China through Iranian and Iraqi airspace.
This explains the urgency of establishing a Russian-Syria-Iranian “military coordination cell” in Baghdad in the last couple of days. This mechanism, plus the Russian officers sighted in Baghdad, indicates that the Russian military presence is not limited to Syria but is beginning to spill over into Iraq as well.
The coordination cell – or war room – was presented as necessary to begin working with Iranian-backed Shiite militias fighting the Islamic State in both places. But more immediately, it is urgently needed to control the heavy traffic of Russian, Iranian and Chinese military flights transiting Iraqi air space.
Our sources report that the Chinese will be sending out to Syria a squadron of J-15 Flying Shark fighters, some for takeoff positions on the carrier’s decks, the rest to be stationed at the Russian airbase near Latakia. The Chinese will also deploy Z-18F anti-submarine helicopters and Z-18J airborne early warning helicopters. In addition, Beijing will consign at least 1,000 marines to fight alongside their counterparts from Russia and Iran against terrorist groups, including ISIS.
DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism sources point out that just as Russian marines will be instructed to single out rebel militias with recruits from Chechnya and the Caucasus, the Chinese marines will seek out and destroy Uighur fighters from the northern predominantly Muslim Chinese province of Xinjiang.
In the same way that Putin has no wish to see the Chechen fighters back in Russia, so too Chinese President Xi wants to prevent the Uighurs from returning home from the Syrian battlefields.

Yogi Berra, an American story

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George Will
By George Will
Published Sept. 24, 2015

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The 18-year-old U.S. Navy enlistee, thinking it sounded less boring than the dull training he was doing in 1944, volunteered for service on what he thought an officer had called “rocket ships.” Actually, they were small, slow, vulnerable boats used as launching pads for rockets to give close-in support for troops assaulting beaches.

The service on those boats certainly was not boring. At dawn on June 6, 1944, that sailor was a few hundred yards off Omaha Beach. Lawrence Peter Berra, who died Tuesday at 90, had a knack for being where the action was.

Because he stood — when he stood; as a catcher, he spent a lot of time crouching at baseball’s most physically and mentally demanding position — 5 feet 7 inches, he confirmed the axiom that the beauty of baseball is that a player does not need to be 7 feet tall or 7 feet wide. The shortstop during Yogi’s first Yankee years was an even smaller Italian American, 150-pound Phil Rizzuto, listed at a generous 5 feet 6.

Yogi had, sportswriter Allen Barra says (in “Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee”), “the winningest career in the history of American sports.” He played on Yankee teams that went to the World Series 14 times in 17 years. He won 10 World Series rings; no other player has more than nine. He won three MVP awards; only Barry Bonds has more, with seven, but four of them probably tainted by performance-enhancing drugs. In seven consecutive seasons (1950-1956), Yogi finished in the top four in MVP voting. Only Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics (11 NBA championships, five MVP awards) and Henri Richard (11 NHL championships) have records of winning that exceed Yogi’s.

He grew up in what he and others called the Dago Hill section of St. Louis, when the Italian Americans who lived there did not take offense at the name. They had bigger problems. Allen Barra notes that an 1895 advertisement seeking labor to build a New York reservoir said whites would be paid $1.30 to $1.50 a day, “colored” workers $1.25 to $1.40 and Italians $1.15 to $1.25. The term “wop” may have begun as an acronym for “without papers,” as many Italians were when they arrived at Ellis Island.

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American sports and ethnicity have been interestingly entangled. The nickname “Fighting Irish” was originally a disparagement by opponents of Notre Dame, which for many years had problems filling its football schedule because of anti-Catholic bigotry. But sports also have been solvents of a sense of apartness felt by ethnic groups.

In 1923, the Sporting News, which for many decades was described as “the Bible of baseball” (except by baseball fans, who described the Bible as “the Sporting News of religion”), called the national pastime the essence of the nation: “In a democratic, catholic, real American game like baseball, there has been no distinction raised except tacit understanding that a player of Ethiopian descent is ineligible. . . . The Mick, the Sheeny, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Cuban, the Indian, the Jap or the so-called Anglo-Saxon — his ‘nationality’ is never a matter of moment if he can pitch, hit or field.”

Ah, diversity. In 1908, the Sporting News said this about a Giants rookie, Charley “Buck” Herzog:

“The long-nosed rooters are crazy whenever young Herzog does anything noteworthy. Cries of ‘Herzog! Herzog! Goot poy, Herzog!’ go up regularly, and there would be no let-up even if a million ham sandwiches suddenly fell among these believers in percentages and bargains.”

David Maraniss, in his biography of the Pirates’ Roberto Clemente, the first Puerto Rican superstar, notes that as late as 1971, Clemente’s 17th season, one sportswriter still quoted him in phonetic English: “Eef I have my good arm thee ball gets there a leetle quicker.” In 1962, Alvin Dark, manager of the San Francisco Giants, banned the speaking of Spanish in the clubhouse. Today, with three of the most common surnames in baseball being Martinez, Rodriguez and Gonzalez, some managers speak Spanish.

Yogi’s great contemporary, Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella (another three-time MVP), was the son of an African American mother and Italian American father. Today, with two Italian Americans on the Supreme Court, it is difficult to imagine how delighted Italian Americans were with their first national celebrity — the elegant centerfielder on baseball’s most glamorous team, Joe DiMaggio, the son of a San Francisco fisherman.

DiMaggio was “Big Dago” to his teammates. Yogi was “Little Dago” and became the nation’s most beloved sports figure. As Yogi said when Catholic Dublin elected a Jewish mayor, “Only in America.”

I posted on the history of Muslim attacks on Europe yesterday Here. The Muslim view today is stated below (from a Muslim Preacher).

A Muslim preacher named Sheikh Muhammad Ayed gave a little talk on September 11th about how Europeans don’t care so much about Middle Easteners as much as they care about cheap labor. He also said that Europe is “old and decrepit and needs human reinforcement.”

He added, “No force is more powerful than the human force of us Muslims.”

And in the same vein, he said that “the coming caliphate” will collect its Muslim sons to fight as soldiers for Islam.

But it’s all about the breeding and whatnot:

“We shall soon collect them in the name of the coming caliphate. We will say to you: These are our sons. Send them, or we will send our armies to you…We will breed children with them, because we shall conquer their countries – whether you like it or not, oh Germans, oh Americans, oh French, oh Italians, and all those like you. Take the refugees!”