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Pompeo: China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pompeo-chinas-reckless-labs-put-the-world-at-risk/

In today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, along with Miles Yu, his top China policy adviser write that “China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk,” and come right up to the line of outright declaring that the coronavirus pandemic is the result of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Pompeo and Yu don’t point to any new or smoking-gun evidence, but they do point to a few pieces of circumstantial evidence that haven’t gotten much attention. Perhaps most notably, the op-ed column declares, “in January 2021, the State Department confirmed that people had fallen mysteriously ill at WIV in fall 2019, and that WIV conducts secret bioweapons research with the PLA.”

This echoes the fact sheet issued by the department that began with the cautionary note that the U.S government did not know how the virus first jumped into humans, but then continued, “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

This past Sunday, President Trump’s former deputy national-security adviser, Matt Pottinger, said on CBS News’ Face the Nation:

We have very strong reason to believe that the Chinese military was doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory, going all the way back to at least 2017. We have good reason to believe that there was an outbreak of flu-like illness among researchers working in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the fall of 2019, but right — immediately before the first documented cases came to light.

China signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1984, which outlaws the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological weapons.

China claims that it is in complete compliance with the BWC; the U.S. government disagrees. In 2019, the U.S. State Department’s updated report on compliance with arms-control agreements concluded,

the People’s Republic of China engaged during the reporting period in biological activities with potential dual-use applications, which raises concerns regarding its compliance with the BWC. In addition, the United States does not have sufficient information to determine whether China eliminated its assessed biological warfare program, as required under Article II of the Convention.

The Denial of Evil Why it’s a moral obligation to know what communism did – and does. Dennis Prager

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/denial-evil-dennis-prager/

One of the most highly regarded books of the 20th century was Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death.” Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, the book is regarded as a classic for its analysis of how human beings deny their mortality.

But there is something people deny more than mortality: evil. Someone should write a book on the denial of evil; that would be much more important because while we cannot prevent death, we can prevent evil.

The most glaring example of the denial of evil is communism, an ideology that, within a period of only 60 years, created modern totalitarianism and deprived of human rights, tortured, starved and killed more people than any other ideology in history.

Why people ignore, or even deny, communist evil is the subject of a previous column as well as a Prager University video, “Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?” I will, therefore, not address that question here.

I will simply lay out the facts.

But before I do, I need to address another question: Why is it important that everyone know what communism did?

Here are three reasons:

First, we have a moral obligation to the victims not to forget them. Just as Americans have a moral obligation to remember the victims of American slavery, we have the same obligation to the billion victims of communism, especially the 100 million who were murdered.

As Iran plays chicken with Biden, it also moves closer to the bomb By Lazar Berman

https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-iran-plays-chicken-with-biden-it-also-moves-closer-to-the-bomb/

Tehran appears to be jockeying for position ahead of nuke deal talks by blackballing inspectors and threatening to increase enrichment, but the posturing carries dangerous risks.

With each step Iran takes to advance its nuclear program, a path out of the dangerous quagmire becomes even more murky.

On Tuesday, Tehran officially suspended its implementation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty Additional Protocol, which gave nuclear inspectors increased access to Iran’s nuclear program, including the ability to carry out snap inspections at undeclared sites.

“As of midnight tonight, we will not have… commitments beyond safeguards. Necessary orders have been issued to the nuclear facilities,” said Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s envoy to international organizations in Vienna.

A day earlier Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said that Tehran could enrich uranium to 60% purity if it so desired. US State Department spokesman Ned Price said the comment “sounds like a threat” and referred to it as “posturing.”

Analysts believe both the move to limit inspections and the enrichment threat are aimed at bolstering Iran’s negotiating position as it and US President Joe Biden’s administration maneuver ahead of expected talks aimed at bringing Washington back into the 2015 nuclear deal. But even if intended as bargaining chips, they carry the risk of moving Iran significantly closer to nuclear weapons capabilities.

Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi Speaks A sobering caution to Biden on his path with Iran. Thu Feb 25, 2021 Joseph Puder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/iranian-crown-prince-reza-pahlavi-speaks-joseph-puder/

Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi isn’t likely to return to his homeland anytime soon. Nor, for that matter, is he likely to succeed his deposed father Mohammad Reza as Shah of Iran in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, if Iran is to be liberated from its oppressive, radical, and messianic Ayatollahs regime, Reza Pahlavi would be considered a natural contender to serve as a future Iranian head of state. With a large supportive Iranian expatriate constituency in Los Angeles and in Europe, he is the obvious leader of the Iranian exile opposition to the Islamic Republic of the Ayatollahs.  

Reza Pahlavi was born on October 31, 1960, and married Yasmine Etemad-Amini in 1986. They have three daughters and reside in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1980, shortly after his father’s death and on his 20th birthday, Reza Pahlavi, declared himself to be the new Shah of Iran – Reza Shah II. The Jimmy Carter administration declined to recognize him, and instead recognized the Islamic Republic led by Ayatollah Khomeini.

In his address to the International Society of Human Rights, on March 27, 2010, Reza Pahlavi declared: “Since the establishment of the clerical regime in Iran, both democracy and human rights have been grossly compromised. Not only did the people not gain political freedom, which some may have thought would be attained as a result of the ‘Islamic Revolution,’ but sadly they ended up losing practically all of the social freedoms which have been attained and enjoyed for a long time, particularly since the advent of the Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the 20th Century.”

Honored with the Champion of Jewish Values International Awards Gala in New York on May 5th, 2016, Reza Pahlavi stated: “But while Iran has this proud history, my own compatriots have been held hostage for 37 years by a clerical regime that abuses the very notion of freedom. Since I left my beloved Iran, I have dedicated my life to fighting for my compatriots’ freedom and their human rights. I do appreciate the fact that, by recognizing my efforts, you have demonstrated your care and concern about the plight of the millions of Iranians who have suffered under the repression of the clerical regime ruling my homeland.”

Germany: Covid-19 Triggers New Wave of Anti-Semitism by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17095/germany-covid-antisemitism

German police reported a total of 2,275 anti-Semitic hate crimes — an average of six per day — in 2020, according to preliminary data provided by the federal government. The tally represents a more than 10% increase over the number of anti-Semitic crimes reported in 2019… Police were able to identify 1,367 suspects — but only five individuals were ultimately arrested.

It remains unclear why so few perpetrators have faced legal consequences for their crimes, especially when government officials repeatedly claim that fighting anti-Semitism is a top priority. A reason may be that it is politically incorrect to identify the true suspects.

German police, possibly under orders from political authorities, systematically assign unsolved anti-Semitic hate crimes to the far right.

“Why are the majority of anti-Semitic acts attributed to ‘right-wing’ German perpetrators? One can see a political motive behind this — growing anti-Semitism can be used politically as a weapon ‘against the right.'” — Tichys Einblick.

“There has been criticism from experts for a long time that the allocation of the vast majority of anti-Semitism cases to right-wing extremist perpetrators is incorrect and that other groups of perpetrators, for example from Islamist and other Muslim circles, are given too little attention.” — Die Welt.

“Even today, anti-Semitism is not just a phenomenon of the right-wing extremist fringes. It reaches into the middle of our society.” — German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass.

The number of anti-Semitic hate crimes in Germany surged to a two-decade high in 2020, according to new statistics released by the German government. Anti-Semitism in Germany has been steadily growing in recent years, fueled in part by far-left anti-Israel activists and by mass migration from the Muslim world. The problem is now being exacerbated by the Coronavirus pandemic, which far-right conspiracy theorists are blaming on both Jews and Israel.

German police reported a total of 2,275 anti-Semitic hate crimes — an average of six per day — in 2020, according to preliminary data provided by the federal government. The tally represents a more than 10% increase over the number of anti-Semitic crimes reported in 2019, itself a record-breaking year for such offenses. The official numbers represent only the crimes reported to the police; the actual number of incidents is presumably much bigger.

China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk Beijing is obsessed with viruses, but not biosafety. We are paying a high price for its lapses. By Mike Pompeo and Miles Yu

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-reckless-labs-put-the-world-at-risk-11614102828?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with viruses. Its army of scientists claim to have discovered almost 2,000 new viruses in a little over a decade. It took the past 200 years for the rest of the world to discover that many. More troubling is the party’s negligence on biosafety. The costs and the risk to world health are enormous, as evidenced by a novel coronavirus that escaped Wuhan. This situation can’t continue. The world must hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable and punish Beijing if it fails to uphold global biosafety standards, including basic transparency requirements.

The most recent example of this malfeasance is playing out around us. The evidence that the virus came from Wuhan is enormous, though largely circumstantial, and most signs point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, as the source of Covid-19. In America, concern about the site is now broad and bipartisan. The Biden administration stated that it has “deep concerns” about the World Health Organization’s investigation into the early days of the pandemic, particularly Beijing’s interference with the investigators’ work.

The world has known for a long time that WIV poses a huge risk to global health. Two 2018 State Department cables warned of its biosafety problems. They even predicted that SARS-CoV-2’s ACE2 receptor, identified by WIV scientists, would enable human-to-human transmission. Yuan Zhiming, then director of WIV’s biosafety level 4 lab, warned, “The biosafety laboratory is a double-edge sword: It can be used for the benefit of humanity, but can also lead to a disaster.” He listed the shortfalls prevalent among China’s biology labs, including a lack of “operational technical support, professional instructions” and “feasible standards for the safety requirements of different protection zones and for the inoculation of microbiological animals and equipment.”

The Chinese public took note, with several bloggers alleging that WIV’s virus-carrying animals are sold as pets. They may even show up at local wet markets. After the Wuhan outbreak, one since-disappeared blogger asked a WIV researcher to debate the lab’s biosafety practices in public. The offer was ignored.

‘I needed security just to give my lectures’ Academic Selina Todd on her experience of campus censorship, and what we should do about it.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/19/i-needed-security-just-to-give-my-lectures/

The government has announced new measures to tackle the crisis of free speech on campus. Selina Todd is professor of modern history at Oxford University and author of Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth. Todd is a gender-critical feminist, who believes womanhood is a matter of sex, not gender identity. Her campaigning for women’s sex-based rights caught the attention of trans-rights activists and, as a result, she was deplatformed last year from a Women’s Liberation Festival event. spiked caught up with her to find out more.

spiked: The government says it is concerned about free speech on campus. How bad is the problem?

Selina Todd: It’s endemic and really serious. Over the past week, I’ve heard Jo Grady, the leader of the University and College Union (UCU), and representatives of the National Union of Students (NUS) saying this should not be a priority during the pandemic. But universities should be completely democratic institutions. And you never need democracy any more than in times when you are at your lowest ebb – which, as a nation, we are.

About 10 days ago, somebody set up a website collecting testimonies from feminists who feel that their freedom to debate on campus has been compromised. It has garnered over 70 testimonies. People feel that this is a really pressing issue. Something seriously needs to be done.

spiked: What are your personal experiences of campus censorship?

Erdoğan’s War Against Freedom on Campus by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17057/turkey-academic-freedom

On February 2, Turkish police detained more than 150 people peacefully protesting Erdoğan’s appointment of a party loyalist as BOUN’s new rector. It was the first time a non-BOUN graduate was appointed as head of the university since 1971. Students, professors and alumni have been protesting the appointment of rector Melih Bulu, a former member of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party, since early January.

On February 3, Erdoğan denounced student protesters as “terrorists” and vowed to crackdown on demonstrations. By then the police had detained more than 250 students. Erdoğan admitted he feared the BOUN protests could grow into anti-government protests and said he would not let them swell.

In [Erdogan’s] Islamist worldview, youth dissent is good only if it protests ideas Islamism opposes, not if it protests Islamists.

Bosporus University (Boğaziçi Üniversitesi in Turkish, or BOUN in its acronym) is one of Turkey’s top three “Ivy League” higher education institutions. Established as Robert College in 1863, BOUN was the first American university founded outside the US. Its founders were wealthy philanthropist Christopher Robert and missionary Cyrus Hamlin. Robert College was handed over to the Turkish government in 1971 and reflagged itself as BOUN.

BOUN’s notable graduates include former prime ministers Tansu Çiller and Ahmet Davutoğlu. Times Higher Education put BOUN in 601-800 in its 2021 world university ranking. Every year about 2.5 million Turkish pupils take a national examination to enter a university. In last year’s examination 708 of the top 1,000 in 2.5 million contenders enrolled at BOUN. In other words, 70% of Turkey’s best students prefer this university.

Turkish Islamists have always been at odds with the liberal, pro-Western traditions of BOUN. In an interview, Binali Yıldırım, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s choice for prime minister in 2016, commented that he did not attend BOUN in his youth because he “saw boys and girls sitting and talking together in the university’s yard” and found the genders intermixing unacceptable. It was precisely this ideological incompatibility that opened a new front in the battle between tyrannical Islamism and an elite university.

The Polar Bear Paradox As climate moves to the center of the world stage, activists will lose influence over policy. By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-polar-bear-paradox-11614035542?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

President Biden laid down a climate marker in his inaugural address: “A cry for survival comes from the planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear.” He returned to the theme in his speech last week to the Munich Security Conference, calling the climate crisis “existential.”

For environmentalists, those are welcome words. The Trump years saw the U.S. leave the Paris Agreement while pursuing aggressive deregulation at home. Climate change is now back on the national agenda.

There are two mistakes observers can make about this new era of climate diplomacy. The first is to think it won’t last or will be limited to rhetoric. Climate skeptics and fossil-fuel interests should brace themselves. The fight to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions and to shift the world’s energy systems toward much lower emissions isn’t going away. Key positions up and down the government bureaucracy will be filled by committed greens who have thought long and hard about how to use the powers of the regulatory state to achieve green goals. A host of new policies—and new regulations—are sure to come.

Those who dismiss ideas like the “green new deal” as mere left-wing fantasies miss the enormous appeal of these programs for corporations looking for new business opportunities. It isn’t only renewable energy companies looking for government mandates and funding. It’s major auto manufacturers dreaming of replacing every gasoline-powered car and truck on the planet with an electric vehicle—and reaping the public-relations reward of looking virtuous. It’s construction companies looking to replace the existing energy infrastructure.

Migrants and the Threat to Women’s Rights in Europe The lack of frank debate feeds Islamists and the far right, who would impose illiberal solutions.By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

https://www.wsj.com/articles/migrants-and-the-threat-to-womens-rights-in-europe-11614017275?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The European debate on immigration, integration and Islam has intensified. In part this is a response to terrorist attacks, the preaching of radical Islam, and the re-emergence of extreme right-wing and populist parties. But the big, underlying change has been the influx of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.

More than 3.7 million people have arrived illegally in Europe since 2009, the majority of whom have applied for asylum. Roughly half arrived in 2015 alone. Two-thirds of the newcomers were male. Around 80% of asylum applicants were under 35. The great majority have come from Muslim-majority countries.

The flow of migrants has abated in the past few years, but large numbers of people still attempt to reach Europe, even during the pandemic. Last year Europe saw more than 336,000 first-time asylum applications and 114,300 illegal entries from January through November.

One consequence has been a change in the position of women in Europe. Many Muslim migrants don’t feel or express contempt for women. But some do—enough to drive a trend.

One shocking event that drew attention to this trend was the wave of sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve 2015-16 in Germany. According to German police, more than 1,200 women were assaulted, of whom 24 said they were raped. The perpetrators often acted in gangs, attacking lone women. Of 153 suspects in the city of Cologne, nearly all were foreign, including 103 from Morocco and Algeria. Sixty-eight were asylum seekers.