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March 2021

China’s Threat to Free Speech in Europe by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17219/china-free-speech-europe

The current standoff is, in essence, about the future of free speech in Europe. If notoriously feckless European officials fail to stand firm in the face of mounting Chinese pressure, Europeans who dare publicly to criticize the CCP in the future can expect to pay an increasingly high personal cost for doing so.

“As long as human rights are being violated, I cannot stay silent. These sanctions prove that China is sensitive to pressure. Let this be an encouragement to all my European colleagues: Speak out!” — Dutch lawmaker Sjoerd Sjoerdsma.

“It is our duty to call out the Chinese government’s human rights abuses in Hong Kong and their genocide of the Uighur people. Those of us who live free lives under the rule of law must speak for those who have no voice.” — Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith.

“Beijing’s strategy is to simply crush and silence any global opposition to its atrocity by inflicting crushingly punitive measures on anyone who speaks out. A very concerning development.” — Adrian Zenz, German scholar.

“It is telling that China now responds to even moderate criticism with sanctions, rather than attempting to defend its actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.” — China Research Group.

“For far too long the EU has believed in the illusion of a middle ground.” — Lea Dauber, Süddeutsche Zeitung.

“In plain language: Beijing wants to decide who in Europe can talk or write about China.” — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

“Beijing’s sanctions against the UK and EU — targeting MPs, academics, even legal groups — show the regime of Xi Jinping will not tolerate dissent from anyone, anywhere.” — Sophia Yan, China correspondent for the Telegraph.

“Beijing’s message is unmistakable: You must choose. If you want to do business in China, it must be at the expense of American values. You will meticulously ignore the genocide of ethnic and religious minorities inside China’s borders; you must disregard that Beijing has reneged on its major promises—including the international treaty guaranteeing a ‘high degree of autonomy’ for Hong Kong; and you must stop engaging with security-minded officials in your own capital unless it’s to lobby them on Beijing’s behalf.” — Matt Pottinger, former deputy White House national security adviser, Wall Street Journal.

China has imposed sanctions on more than two dozen European and British lawmakers, academics and think tanks. The move comes after the European Union and the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on Chinese officials for human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region.

China contends that its sanctions are tit for tat — morally equivalent retaliation — in response to those imposed by Western countries. This is false. The European sanctions are for crimes against humanity, whereas the Chinese sanctions seek to silence European critics of the Chinese Communist Party.

The current standoff is, in essence, about the future of free speech in Europe. If notoriously feckless European officials fail to stand firm in the face of mounting Chinese pressure, Europeans who dare publicly to criticize the CCP in the future can expect to pay an increasingly high personal cost for doing so.

On March 22, the European Union and the United Kingdom announced (here and here) that they had imposed sanctions on four Chinese officials accused of responsibility for abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, a remote autonomous region in northwestern China.

Yale Fires Psychiatrist for Diagnosing Unseen Patients by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17227/bandy-lee-alan-dershowitz

“[I]t is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” — Principles of Medical Ethics, American Psychiatric Association.

[Dr. Bandy] Lee herself has a long history of such unprofessional conduct. She previously diagnosed President Trump, whom I believe she also never met, as being psychotic.

Lee’s resort to diagnosis rather than dialogue is a symptom of a much larger problem that faces our divided nation: our unwillingness to debate issues and our willingness to resort to ad hominems and diagnoses instead of reasoned argumentation. Lee is part of that problem, not its solution. So is [Professor Richard] Painter. Shame on them.

Despite her violation of ethical and professional rules, I did not call for Lee to be fired. I simply advised Yale of her actions and asked them to investigate these violations. Yale decided to fire her not because of what I said, but because of what she did.

Lee is now suing Yale and blaming me for having caused her to be fired. She credits me with far more power than I have. I simply exercised my freedom of speech right to correct her falsehoods and to ask Yale to investigate her misuse of her credentials.

Should Yale have fired Dr. Bandy Lee, the psychiatrist who diagnosed someone she had never even seen — actually me — as suffering from “psychosis” because of my views on the constitutional rights of President Donald Trump? She claims I caught the psychosis from Trump. Her evidence: that I used a word — “perfect” — months before he used it!

Lee has never met me, never examined me, never seen my medical records, never even spoken to anyone close to me.

Yet she was prepared to offer a diagnosis of “psychosis’ which she attributed to my being one of President Trump’s “followers.” (I am a liberal Democrat who did not vote for Trump.)

Indeed, she went even further, diagnosing the severity and spread of “shared psychosis’ among “just about all of Donald Trump’s followers!”

Africa’s “Bigger Slave Problem” More pressing than Democrats’ quest for reparations. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/africas-bigger-slave-problem-lloyd-billingsley/

Last year Joe Biden said African Americans who don’t support him “ain’t black,” but this year the Delaware Democrat is open to reparations for slavery, America’s “original sin,” according to the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. A neglected historical account provides enlightenment on slavery’s true origins and its most enduring practitioners.

In 1856, British Army officer John Hanning Speke set out to find the source of the Nile. Speke’s massive Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile documents the African societies he found, and the widespread practice of slavery.  “To catch slaves is the first thought of every chief in the interior,” Speke wrote, “Hence fights and slavery impoverish the land.”

Many Africans were “caught in wars, as may be seen every day in Africa, made slaves of, and sold to the Arabs for a few yards of common cloth, brass wire, or beads. They would then be taken to Zanzibar, resold like horses to the highest bidder, and then kept in bondage by their new masters.”

As slaves, the Africans were “circumcised to make Mussulmans of them, that their hands might be ‘clean’ to slaughter their master’s cattle and extend his creed. For the Arabs believe the day must come when the tenets of Mohammed will be accepted by all men.” True to form, “the slave is willed to his successor.”

On Arab slave ships, “old women, stark naked, were dying in the most disgusting ‘ferret box’ atmosphere.” By contrast, “Slavery had received a severe blow by the sharp measures Colonel Rigby had taken in giving tickets of emancipation to all those slaves our Indian subjects the Banyans had been secretly keeping.”

Speke found an ally in chief  Mbumi who “knew that the English were the ruling power in that land, and that they were opposed to slavery.”  In some parts of Africa, Speke found, “cows, sheep, slaves have to be given to the father for the value of his daughter.” The Wahuma people kept slaves and “do not allow their daughters to taint their blood by marrying outside of the clan.”

The ‘Insurrection’ Probe Is Falling Apart The government has created, by their own overheated hyperbole, a nearly insurmountable obstacle to proving their initial accusations in court. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/30/the-insurrection-probe-is-falling-apart/

He is known as the “zip tie guy.”

In one of the most iconic photographs of the January 6 Capitol melee, Eric Munchel, wearing tactical gear, is seen holding up a fistful of zip ties in the Senate gallery. Munchel, the media quickly concluded, brought the flex cuffs to arrest lawmakers attempting to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. The woman photographed with him later was identified as his mother, Lisa Eisenhart.

The top federal prosecutor who handled the first two months of the Justice Department’s Capitol breach probe recently bragged that Munchel was one of the first protestors targeted in the agency’s unprecedented 50-state manhunt for alleged “insurrectionists.”

Former U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin told “60 Minutes” that he authorized the arrest of more than 100 people prior to January 20 in a display of “shock and awe” to intimidate Americans who planned to protest Joe Biden’s inauguration; he specifically referred to the detention of the “the zip tie guy” as a way to send a message. “We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did.”

Munchel and Eisenhart, once they realized they were under investigation, turned themselves in to law enforcement a few days after the Capitol protest. Government prosecutors successfully fought to keep both behind bars pending their trial although they committed no violent crime and had remained in the building for less than 15 minutes; on January 24, the D.C. federal judge presiding over the Capitol investigation ordered both defendants transported from Tennessee to a Washington jail to await their day in court.

Prosecutors darkly warned in late January the two Americans could be the first Capitol defendants to be charged with sedition, a crime almost never applied to U.S. citizens.

A Major Blow to the Prosecution

Ethical Patriarchy: Our Final Hope for Western Civilization? Turning the tide against the nihilism of woke ‘progressives’. Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/ethical-patriarchy-our-final-hope-western-jason-d-hill/

Moral patriarchy is fundamentally defined by three foundational principles: (1) the capacity to provide, (2) the need to protect others, and (3) the aspirational desire to leave a legacy.

These three foundations have been the bedrock out of which our stupendous western civilization has been forged. It is a civilization built mostly by men. Our civilization has been forged in the moral crucibles of the best within such men, and from their noblest and most inspirational drives and identities.

Today, those identities and drives are under attack. Masculinity and manliness, the twin attributes of patriarchy, are being criminalized along with vitality, exuberance and displays of moral authority in men and young boys by a phalanx of radical feminists, “woke” progressives, and systemic nihilists. The goal of these forces is to advance a systemic, nihilistic, gynocentric paradigm that has ushered in an era that will destroy not only men, but civilization itself.

Secular liberalism, which once entered the culture spheres in triumph, has now retreated in decrepitude. The results are in the maladies I shall outline below which are destroying our civilization.

I submit that nothing short of a return to a Judeo-Christian inflected, patriarchal system of governance will restore our unprecedented American Republic and western civilization — whose collapse seems almost imminent — back to its rightful supremacy. Postmodern-liberalism and secularism as systems of moral governance have expired.

I write against the backdrop of schoolteachers who are telling parents not to gender their children, and who are telling their students not to use words such as “Mom” or “Dad” but “adult” or grownup” in class.

I write in a world often referred to as “cancel culture,” that seeks to, among other things, decolonize college courses and strip them entirely of western canonical thinkers, to replace the genius of Shakespeare with the “poetry” of rapper Jay-Z.

I live in a country I love deeply, as a naturalized citizen, that is guilty of Americaphobia and of rampant Christophobia in schools that are currently forcing children in the state of California to worship Aztec gods.

Race in America Still Incoherent How does the Left’s non-stop racialist demagoguery help ordinary black people? Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/race-america-still-incoherent-bruce-thornton/

We recently witnessed yet more examples of how incoherently the “woke” establishment talks about “race.” This confusion and duplicity can be explained by the Left’s commitment to “any means necessary” as their most important tactic for increasing their power. But it also reflects the strange persistence of the old racialist categories that flourished during the age of Jim Crow and “scientific racism.”

First came the murder of eight people, six of them ethnic Asians, by a clearly insane, guilt-obsessed sex-addict. Despite confessing his motives and their corroboration by friends and family, the “woke” commissars instantly began blaming white “racism” against Asians fomented by Donald Trump and his “white supremacist” minions. This attack, the narrative continues, explains the “outbreak” of anti-Asian “hate crimes” first stirred up by Trump when he insisted on calling the current pandemic “Chinese.”

Of course, this is all blatantly preposterous. Identifying diseases by geographical origin goes back half a millennium to syphilis being called the “Italian disease.” In 1957-58 we had the “Asian Flu,” and in 1968 the “Hong Kong” pandemic. No record of a “breakout” of anti-Asian pogroms back then. As for “white supremacists,” a plurality of “hate crimes” against Asians are committed by blacks. Meanwhile, blatant institutional discrimination against Asian applicants to our most prestigious universities––a lawsuit was making its way to the Supreme Court until Biden’s DOJ tossed the case–– continues to punish Asians for being hard-working and disciplined.

Then quickly followed another mass shooting that killed ten. Once more the itchy twitter-fingers of the “woke” decried psychopathic “white males” as a dire threat to our health and safety. Turned out the perpetrator is from Syria, most likely Arabic. While critics of the hasty “woke” gloated over the blunder, most people seemingly didn’t notice that Arabs are Semites, and Semites are Caucasians just like Swedes. Or at least they used to be: identity politics has turned “Caucasian” into a synonym for people of European descent. As Muslims, alleged victims of “white” Western imperialism, Arabs are now “people of color.”

This is where the incoherence becomes obvious. Those old racial categories were always useless other than for legitimizing the reduction of people to vast, simplistic categories based on physical traits like the color of skin, the texture of hair, and the shape of the nose or eyes. In other words, they are truly racist concepts that in their heyday invidiously defined the world’s peoples and put them into hierarchical ranks.

A British School Caves to the Muslim Mob A society on its knees. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/british-school-caves-intolerant-muslim-mob-katie-hopkins/

A Religious Studies teacher from a school in Batley, England is now in hiding under police protection because he used an illustration of the Muslim prophet Muhammad as part of his learning materials in class. His family has also been forced into hiding with him for their safety.

The Muslim mob braying for his blood have blockaded the school gates, are actively inciting violence against the teacher in question, forcing the school to close and children to miss out on their education. A few of their number have posted a petition to have the teacher reinstated because they saw — first hand — that he was simply trying to teach them, not what to think, but how.

In response, the School Headmaster has prostrated himself on the ground in deference to the mob swarming at the gates, the police are reading and re-reading his endless apologies, and the teacher has been suspended pending investigation. Work will be the least of his concerns right now. His life and the lives of all those who are close face immediate threat.

Predictably, the British media are largely silent on the matter, preferring to prioritize other stories, or reporting with the kind of painful neutrality observed by Switzerland. And those who grift a living from “defending free speech” are mute, knowing their future income relies on their silence. They will try to protect what they have for just one more day — even though they will pay for their complicity in the end.

If pushed, you will hear supposedly Conservative politicians talking about “avoiding offence” or asking for “calm.” These are the most centrist positions you can take when trying to say nothing and avoid the wrath of everyone.

Naturally the left-wing politicians from the area are siding with the Muslim mob (because their power depends on these votes) and every Islamic organization from here to Mecca is piling on with their condemnation and demands for reparations. This is an Islamic show of strength in the heart of Britain.       

The Book Of Nameless Women At Yale William Kahrl and Henry I. Miller

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/31/the-book-of-nameless-women-at-yale/

March was supposed to be Women’s History Month, but at Yale University this month they were busy erasing it.

Last fall, the university sponsored a convocation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the admission of the first women undergraduates as well as 150 years of women attending the university’s graduate and professional schools. Many distinguished alumnae attended and members of the first three undergraduate classes contributed their reminiscences in video compilations as well as essays about their experience. So far, so good.

Two of the 141 women who wrote essays asked to keep their submissions anonymous for personal reasons. But when the books were published, the Yale Alumni Association had deleted the names of all the women – without asking the authors’ permission or even warning them of what had been done to their work.

After centuries of women being suppressed, diminished, pushed into the background, or having their work appropriated by others, this unexpected anonymization produced the reaction you might expect. The complaints raised in a first letter of protest were dismissed by the administration, and when the campus newspaper took up the story in February, the people responsible responded placidly, assuring readers that only a few people were upset – saying, in effect, let’s move on, there’s nothing to protest here.

The Wuhan Whitewash A WHO report on Covid’s origin echoes Chinese propaganda.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wuhan-whitewash-11617142921?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The World Health Organization on Tuesday finally released its report on the origins of the coronavirus, and the result wasn’t worth the wait. The document is best understood as a whitewash heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party and Westerners with conflicts of interest.

The report—based primarily on an international team’s visit this year to the city of Wuhan, where Covid-19 was first detected—has little new information. But the team analyzes four origin scenarios.

The report says the most likely origin was a transfer to humans through bats with an intermediary host. The second most probable, according to the report, is that bats directly transmitted Covid-19 to humans. The report also takes too seriously a third theory, pushed by Beijing, that the virus arrived in China in frozen food, which the WHO claims is “possible” and merits more study.

Most telling is that the team concludes it is “extremely unlikely” that the virus leaked from a lab such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The report simply asserts that WIV facilities “were well-managed, with a staff health monitoring programme.” The report suggests “regular administrative and internal review of high-level biosafety laboratories worldwide” and following up on new evidence.

Yet enough already is known about the WIV to suggest this lacks credibility. In 2018 U.S. officials warned in diplomatic cables about safety and management issues at the WIV that could lead to a pandemic. This is especially troubling because the WIV conducted “gain of function” research on coronaviruses that theoretically can enable them to infect a new species.

The U.S. State Department warned in a January fact sheet that WIV researchers had developed “symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses” in autumn 2019. The WHO report nonetheless takes the Chinese government at its word when it says there was “no reporting of COVID-19 compatible respiratory illness during the weeks/months prior to December 2019.”

Biden’s Pledge Of Transparency Vanishes Amid Border Crisis

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/31/bidens-pledge-of-transparency-vanishes-amid-border-crisis/

Biden believes that the media is a critical piece of our democracy; that transparency is incredibly important.” – Former White House deputy press secretary T.J. Ducklo 

Just two months into his presidency, Joe Biden has already decided that transparency isn’t so important after all, at least when it comes to the border crisis, and that keeping people in the dark is good policy.

Of course, Biden still refuses to admit that there even is a crisis at the border. At his press conference last week, he acted as though the flood of unaccompanied children into the U.S. was as routine as flowers in the spring.

“Nothing has changed,” he said. “It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.”

It’s not true, of course. Last year, the number of illegal crossings dropped in each of the months Biden claims it always spikes. And the total number of unaccompanied children in 2020 plunged to 33,000 from 80,000 the year before. So far this year, the number of unaccompanied children apprehended far exceeds every year under Donald Trump. So, clearly, something has changed.

Even if what Biden said were true, that a massive surge of unaccompanied children happens every year, it means he was caught entirely flat-footed for this supposedly predictable event. In other words, either Biden is lying or he’s incompetent.

Which is why President Transparency has been pretending there is no crisis while denying the press access to the detention facilities that are currently being overrun with children.

When asked at his press conference about this denial of access, Biden said that he’d continue to shut the media out.

“I will commit to transparency,” he said, “soon as I am in a position to be able to implement what we are doing right now.”

The reporter then asked: “Just to be clear: How soon will that be, Mr. President?

Biden: “I don’t know, to be clear.”