RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-crisis-sweden-refused-lockdown-other-countries-following/

No lockdown, no shuttered businesses or elementary schools, no stay-at-home. And no disaster, either.

Spring is in the air, and it is increasingly found in the confident step of the people of Sweden.

With a death rate significantly lower than that of France, Spain, the U.K., Belgium, Italy, and other European Union countries, Swedes can enjoy the spring without panic or fears of reigniting a new epidemic as they go about their day in a largely normal fashion.

Dr. Mike Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s Emergencies Program, says: “I think if we are to reach a new normal, I think in many ways Sweden represents a future model — if we wish to get back to a society in which we don’t have lockdowns.”

The Swedish ambassador to the U.S., Karin Ulrika Olofsdotter, says: “We could reach herd immunity in the capital” of Stockholm as early as sometime in May. That would dramatically limit spread of the virus.

A month ago, we first wrote about Sweden’s approach, which we said “relies more on calibrated precautions and isolating only the most vulnerable than on imposing a full lockdown.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/boris-and-bibi-ride-coronavirus-pandemic-popularity-11588629245?mod=hp_opin_pos_3

The Covid-19 pandemic is, among other things, a test of leadership around the world. For some—Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, for instance—the pandemic has been a major political setback. Others, such as Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, have seen their popularity soar. Then there are those like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who have exploited the pandemic to expand their sweeping powers.

Prime Ministers Boris Johnson of Britain and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are the two world leaders who have been most successful at strengthening their positions amid the pandemic. This isn’t because they have both succeeded in stopping the spread of the disease. While Israel has, so far, contained the disease with fewer than 300 fatalities at press time, Britain trails only Italy among European countries in number of lives lost to Covid-19. Many more deaths are likely to come. Messrs. Johnson and Netanyahu are succeeding because the pandemic drives home their core messages.

National leaders acquire and hold power in part by offering a “theory of the case”—a vision of what their country needs and why a particular leader and particular program are the solution. In 2016 Donald Trump’s theory of the case was that a broken and corrupt establishment was driving the country into the ground. In 2020 former Vice President Joe Biden’s theory of the case is that America needs a president who will bring “normal” back.

President Trump was preparing to run on “the strongest economy in world history.” The pandemic crushed that argument, and although his base continues to support him, Mr. Trump is struggling to reinvent his re-election campaign. President Vladimir Putin’s core message for 2020 was that a stable and respected Russia was becoming more secure economically. A referendum scheduled for this month would have sealed his grip on power. But thanks to the pandemic and the resulting oil price implosion, the referendum has been postponed, and Mr. Putin must find a new message.

For Bibi and Boris, the pandemic reinforced the arguments they have been making to the public. In Mr. Netanyahu’s case, his response to the pandemic enabled him to split the opposition, postpone his trial on corruption charges, and continue his reign as Israel’s longest-serving and most effective prime minister since David Ben-Gurion. His core message is that in a dangerous world Israel needs a decisive prime minister and government with a real majority, and that the opposition, whose fissures are becoming deeper, is incapable of providing it. Mr. Netanyahu must survive a ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court about whether a person under indictment can serve as prime minister, but the strength of his new Knesset majority shifts the odds in his favor.

Let me fuse two tales of resurrection — the PM’s medical ordeal and his party’s return from death’s door — into a single narrative in which the hero, an outcast Tory rebel, ends up as a Prime Minister who dominates British politics more completely than anyone since Margaret Thatcher. Better still, the voting public come to realise just how much they like him.

The story begins a month before the 2019 European elections when Tory constituency associations began passing motions of no confidence in Prime Minister Theresa May. That rebellion, which spread rapidly, signified that the Tories were a party with a clear Leave majority—something like 70 per cent of activists and 55 to 60 per cent of Tory MPs (if the latter had taken a truth serum).

Those no-confidence votes were important, but national political correspondents treated them as marginal. That was partly because they’re overwhelmingly Europhiliac. Also, they shared a deeply rooted collective sentiment that Tory activists shouldn’t be important, which slid imperceptibly into thinking they couldn’t possibly be important. As a result they were consistently mistaken in predicting that May would eventually get her non-Brexit bills through the Commons and, more generally, that Brexit would be lost in the quicksands of a Remainer House of Commons.

Those calculations, like much else, were shattered by the European elections, in which the triumph of the Brexit Party under Nigel Farage could only have been achieved with the support of both Tory voters and Tory activists. (When a Tory canvasser asked my sister to vote Tory in local elections, she agreed to do so but added she would vote for the Brexit Party in the Euro-elections. He replied: “So will I.”) But the 8 per cent national vote, amplified by more association votes of no confidence and the looming prospect of one by the National Conservative Convention of 800 senior Tories, led in quick succession to May’s resignation, a Tory leadership election, and Johnson’s clear victory on a promise to achieve a real Brexit.

https://quillette.com/2020/05/03/an-icu-doctor-reports-from-the-frontline/

I had been out of clinical medicine for a couple of years but felt a calling to return to the intensive care unit (ICU) to help my local area in London cope with the additional burden presented by this pandemic. Like everyone, I had read that the National Health Service (NHS) needed a dramatic increase in capacity to save lives—beds, ventilators, and staff. I was a little scared. Would there be enough Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)? Would my new colleagues accept me? Would I survive, or become another face on the news of a frontline staff member who had succumbed to the virus? I felt a little deflated when I contacted four local London hospitals to offer my help, my time, possibly my good health, only to have my emails either not replied to or batted around various HR departments. Hospital administrators struggled to process a volunteer who was an ex-intensive care doctor with 11 years’ experience. Classic NHS, I thought. The national institution that all we Brits know: at times loved, at times hated, full of wonderful people, but not always well-run. This was part of the reason I had left my UK clinical work to become a doctor in the global pharmaceutical industry.

I cycled up to the hospital on an unseasonally warm day before the Easter weekend. My first day back. What immediately struck me was that the corridors of the old Victorian hospital were empty. Where was everybody? Where was the pandemic? There seemed to be no patients, no staff, no one about at all. Had this all been media hype? I expected the hospital to be a hive of bustle. The front line. This was where the rubber met the road of tackling COVID-19, I thought.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-sweeps-across-brazil-a-land-ill-equipped-to-fight-it-11588603847?mod=hp_lead_pos5

In the tiny, stifling home she shared with seven relatives in the Amazon, Maria Portelo de Lima began coughing, started feeling weaker and, over a week, got sicker and sicker.

Her family tried to get the 61-year-old to a hospital in Manaus, a city of 2.2 million in the heart of the rainforest. They were told no ambulances were available or hospital beds free because of a flood of coronavirus patients.

Ms. de Lima died April 26. With so many other Covid-19 victims in the city, it took 30 hours for an ambulance to pick up her body. She was buried in a mass grave, her identity marked by a wooden cross that cost $22.

Covid-19, which has focused its fury most heavily on wealthier countries, now is hammering Brazil. Brazil has just passed China, the origin of the pandemic, both in confirmed cases, 101,147, and in deaths, 7,025, becoming the hardest-hit country in the developing world.

Unlike in China, which corralled the virus through stern restrictions, things in Latin America’s largest country are expected to get much worse. Infections are rising by more than 5,000 a day and deaths by nearly 500.

There is so little testing in Brazil that its real number of Covid-19 infections might be far higher than the official figure. One university study has estimated the total to date at higher than the U.S.’s world-leading 1.19 million.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15973/denmark-bible-translation-outrage

This misleads the reader twice. Once, the Danish Bible Society statement dodges the truthful assessment that the word “Israel” was omitted or replaced in the Hebrew Bible in 9% of its occurrences and in the New Testament nearly completely. By omitting any distinction between the two parts of the Bible the statement claims that it mentions “Israel” scores and scores of times in the translation. Second, the statement inflates the word “Israel” with “Israelites.” Again here, the analysis of the critique has been side-stepped. The accusation has not been against the replacement of “Israel and the Israelites,” but against the replacement of “Israel.”

The word “Israel” has an extended history of three thousand years, the word “Israelites” of less than one thousand years. These two words are of unequal measure and had not been joined together in the critique.

After a spectacular denial of the crime of which the Danish Bible Society has been accused internationally, it finally admits to it. But it does not sound like repentance…. While any translation has to wrestle with the transportation of meaning and culture of a text from one language to another, the extraordinary decision of the Danish Bible Society staff to deprive their readers of some of the key points of the Christian faith is mind-boggling.

Above all, the Danish Bible Society separates Israel from its Land. Apart from other key issues of the faith, it denies the reader the knowledge of the intrinsic connection between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and between Israel and its Land. It falls in the trap of which the Apostle Paul warned, “It is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you” (Romans 11: 18). Its version of the Bible robs the Christian faith of its Jewish roots. It presents a new story of the Christian faith. Its maker is the Danish Bible Society.

No one seems to be in the know about this translation of the Bible. Is it possible that the superfluous mistranslation of the Bible was an initiative of the General Secretary of the Danish Bible Society, Birgitte Stoklund Larsen? Did her office raise the money? Where from? Who is profits from this initiative? If not her, who then?

For Christians and Jews, the Bible is serious. Any tampering with its words, above all with the word Israel, is unacceptable and rejected unequivocally. The attempted murder of Israel, from time eternal until our day, is too real to let people play, whimsically, with its land, its people or its name.

The misrepresentation of Holy Scripture by the Danish Bible Society (DBS) has been met with a crescendo of international protest demanding the withdrawal of the falsified Bible.

The March 2020 Danish Bible, for the secular Danish reader’s easy reading, has omitted or replaced the word “Israel” in all but two places of the more than 60 Greek occurrences in the New Testament and in 9% of the Hebrew Bible.

Protests started on April 21 with the Danish author Jan Frost, who, in a video, first revealed the changes and took the Danish Society to task for them.

On April 26, the Bible Society of Israel (BSI) issued a gracious but unambiguous statement asking to “take measures to correct” the translation:

“The local body of believers as well as others in Israel and beyond were very surprised by and disappointed with the approach that the translators took regarding the term Israel and in its implementation in this translation…..We believe that the Danish Bible Society, as our fellow brothers and sisters in the Lord, will seriously consider our feedback, which echoes the voices of many, and will take measures to correct their translation as necessary.” (Emphasis added.)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15971/germany-iran-terror-banks

“Germany was again Europe’s largest trading partner with Iran by far, exporting $1.64 billion worth of goods in 2019. While German banks have been largely reluctant to finance Iran trade, there are at least five banks – all owned/operated by Iran and all operating inside Germany – that are more than happy to step in.” – Daniel Roth, “Germany’s Iran Banks,” United Against Nuclear Iran April 7, 2020

One of the sanctioned banks freely doing business in Hamburg, Germany, is Bank Melli. It is the largest bank owned by the Iranian regime, and when it comes to revenues, it ranks first, followed by bank Mellat.

Another major Iranian bank also still conducting business in Hamburg Germany is Bank Sepah. Bank Sepah, also owned by the Iranian regime, has been sanctioned by the US Treasury Department and has links to the regime’s ballistic missile program. According to United Against Nuclear Iran, “Bank Sepah has provided ‘direct and extensive financial services’ to Iran’s key ballistic missiles procurement and development agencies, including Aerospace Industries Organization (AIO) and its subsidiary, Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group (SHIG).”

By trading with the Iranian regime and allowing Iran’s sanctioned banks freely to operate in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is empowering the ruling mullahs and their regime. They are not only the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism; they are also racing to develop clandestine nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

While the attention of the international community has been directed towards the battle against the coronavirus pandemic, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government appears to be allowing Iran’s sanctioned banks to operate freely in Germany.

According to a recent report published by United Against Nuclear Iran:

“Siemens, Volkswagen and the big multinationals have pulled back due to U.S. sanctions, but many of Germany’s 3.5 million small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) are still prepared to do business with Iran. And they still can. From Hamburg in the north to Munich in the south, the ‘Mittelstand’ firms can obtain Letters of Credit, bank guarantees, insurance and all the other trade finance products they need from their Iranian facilitators. “

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/netherlands-man-who-murdered-politician-protect-robert-spencer/

“I shot Fortuyn for Dutch Muslims.”

This was the startling claim of Volkert van der Graaf, a thirty-four-year-old non-Muslim Dutchman, as he confessed to the May 2002 murder of “far right” politician Pim Fortuyn. Eighteen years later, Volkert van der Graaf is free to receive the gratitude of the Islamic community for which he did, in his mind, such a signal service. His freedom is yet another indication, as if we needed another, of Europe’s wholesale cultural collapse, and the inability or unwillingness of European authorities to face up to the consequences of what they have done by inundating their nations with Muslim migrants with a vastly different sociocultural perspective from that of the natives.

The Dutch-language Post Online reported Thursday that “van der Graaf (50) was convicted on appeal in 2003 by the Amsterdam court of appeal. The court had also imposed an eighteen-year sentence upon him, after a demand from the Public Prosecution Service for a life sentence. The Justice Service saw the murder not only as an attack on the politician, but also on democracy. The court did not follow that line of reasoning. The prosecution also demanded a life sentence on appeal, but the sentence remained unchanged.”

Even worse, “in recent years, Van der Graaf no longer had to be in prison because – since May 2014 – he was on parole. He had to comply with various conditions, such as a duty to report and a ban on talking to the media. Van der Graaf then successfully challenged a number of conditions in legal proceedings.”

Consequently, on Thursday, the murderer was officially free completely from all obligations to the state. A Dutch official explained that “the person concerned has fully undergone the imposed sentence and is no longer under the supervision of the Public Prosecution Service or the probation service; there are no more conditions for him.”

No one seems to mind, because after all, Fortuyn was “far-right.” Probably only in the post-modern, post-Christian Netherlands of hashish cafes and taxpaying licensed prostitutes could an openly homosexual politician such as Fortuyn (whose kitchen featured portraits of Marx and Lenin) be described as “far right,” but such is the way of the world today. Fortuyn held only one position that earned him that label: the incompatibility of traditional Islamic values with the liberal, secular societies of the West.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazil-doubles-down-on-reform-11588541718?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Under the strain of Covid-19, the Brazilian economy is expected to contract by 5% this year. But the outlook isn’t all grim for the world’s ninth-largest economy. Last week a political crisis swirling around President Jair Bolsonaro prompted him to reaffirm his commitment to free-market-minded Economy Minister Paulo Guedes.

Mr. Guedes is the architect of a revolutionary plan to end the decadeslong subsidization of the well-connected in Brasília, paid for by the forgotten man. Progress has been slow since Mr. Bolsonaro took office in January 2019 and now the virus has thrown the reformers a curveball. But the president’s fresh endorsement of Mr. Guedes signals an understanding that his government is built on the popular demand for faster growth and better living standards.

The wild card is whether the government can build a coalition in the National Congress willing to cooperate. That’s a thorny challenge in Brazil’s notoriously fragmented legislature. The socially conservative Mr. Bolsonaro is a former military officer who served 28 years in Congress. As a legislator, he was never prominent in shaping policy. Now swaying the coequal lawmaking body is vital to his efforts to move Brazil ahead.

Mr. Bolsonaro has been full of surprises for left-wing critics. During his presidential campaign in 2018, they labeled him a right-wing extremist and predicted that he would try to impose a military dictatorship. Yet while plenty of leaders around the region are using police-state tactics in national lockdowns to stop the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Bolsonaro is taking a federalist approach by putting the states in charge.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/05/03/british-jews-are-too-eager-to-embrace-starmers-still-dubious-labour-party/

JNS.org – In both Britain and America, the Jewish community is increasingly badly served by leaders who seem less and less able to distinguish between the friends and the enemies of the Jewish people.

In America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has been convulsed by controversy over appointing Dianne Lob as its new chairman. Lob is the former president of HIAS, an organization originally established to assist Jewish refugees, but which has morphed into a body closely associated with anti-Israel and Islamist groups.

In Britain this week, Conservative MP Robert Halfon mounted a startlingly outspoken attack on the Jewish community’s main representative body, the Board of Deputies, for having a “left of center political agenda.”

His criticism was triggered by its weekly bulletin that, he said, read like a “political broadcasting service” for the Labour Party.

The background to this fracas is the replacement of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by Sir Keir Starmer — a former human rights lawyer, Director of Public Prosecutions, and more centrist figure than his far-left predecessor.