A Taiwanese pager company was identified last week in connection to Israel’s terrorist attack on Lebanon, in which booby-trapped pagers were detonated, killing at least 32 people and injuring thousands more.
Israeli-Taiwanese relations warmed considerably after Israel launched its genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza last October. Taiwan rushed to condemn the Palestinian operation of 7 October and donated more than half a million dollars to fund services to Israeli soldiers and their families.
The subsequent genocide did not alter Taiwan’s stance, as expressed by its foreign minister, Joseph Wu, in a March meeting with Israeli academics in Taipei: “We condemn the Hamas terrorist attack and stand in solidarity with Israel. Our position hasn’t changed.”
The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs supported the visit. After Iran’s 13 April retaliation against Israel for the latter’s attacks on its consulate in Damascus, Taiwan quickly moved to condemn Iran. Two days later, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met with a delegation of Israeli Knesset members led by Boaz Toporovsky, the head of the Israel-Taiwan interparliamentary friendship group, and expressed her country’s solidarity with Israel.
Even though Taiwan was a close friend of all conservative anti-communist Arab regimes, especially Saudi Arabia and Jordan, in 1975, Israel secretly transferred US missile technology to Taiwan and began to sell it Israeli missiles to the tune of half a billion dollars. Indeed, the Israeli defence ministry established a permanent station in Taipei to facilitate military cooperation. Weapons cooperation and sales included artillery guns, mortars, missile boats, rifles, and submachine guns.
I don’t think China should invade Taiwan but it drives me up the wall that so many people think that they are some plucky little democracy standing up to the big, bad, commies, when the reality is that they are just another hyper-capitalist settler-colonial project in the same vein as the US, Israel, Canada, etc.
I agree (including that China shouldn’t invade, which China also thinks), it drives me crazy how people feel fit to say anything at all about Taiwan when they know so little about it that they think “Taiwanese” is the language they speak or that the dominant ethnicity isn’t Han Chinese or that they hadn’t been part of China before US intervention in the Chinese Civil War. These are all things that I’ve encountered in person.
Yeah that’s literally 2 clicks from the basest of searches:
(Hokien, Hakka, Matsu and Wuqiu are some of very many southern languages of Chinese, and Formosan is the Austronesian group of languages spoken by indingenous population)
Yeah, there are a host of languages that could be called “Taiwanese” (those indigenous languages you mention), but the actual dominant language by overwhelming majority is Mandarin.
