RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15776/coronavirus-china-propaganda

What remains unclear is if European publics, which are bearing the brunt of the suffering caused by the epidemic, will be as easily willing to overlook the malfeasance of Chinese officials.

“This is a propaganda operation that hides various truths. The first and most important is that the culprit for this pandemic is the Chinese regime. It does not take any conspiracy theory to point it out.” — Emilio Campmany, Libertad Digital, March 3, 2020.

“China wants to take advantage of this calamity to wrest global leadership from the United States. It will be the communist country that makes us the most energetic medicines to fight the virus. It will discover the vaccine before anyone else and distribute it worldwide in record time. It will buy our assets and invest in our countries to rescue our economies. Ultimately, it will claim to be our savior.” — Emilio Campmany, Libertad Digital, March 3, 2020.

The Chinese government has been fast-tracking shipments of medical aid to Europe, which has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic that first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The largesse appears to be part of a public relations effort by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party to deflect criticism over their responsibility for the deadly outbreak.

Beijing’s campaign as a global benefactor may deliver results in Europe, where pandering political leaders have long been notoriously fearful of antagonizing the European Union’s second-largest trading partner. What remains unclear is if European publics, which are bearing the brunt of the suffering caused by the epidemic, will be as easily willing to overlook the malfeasance of Chinese officials.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15774/european-union-the-end

When an entire continent is in the midst of a highly contagious virus epidemic, solidarity becomes a more complex issue. Every state inevitably considers whether it can afford to send facemasks and protective equipment that might be needed for its own citizens. In other words, every state considers its own national interest first. In the case of Italy’s appeal for help, EU member states made their own interests their highest priority. This is classic state behavior and would not have caused any outrage prior to the establishment of the European Union.

While such revelations may not spell the immediate end of the European Union, they certainly raise questions about the point of an organization that pledges solidarity as a founding principle, but abandons that principle the moment it is most called for.

The current crisis on the Greek-Turkish border has shown the EU not only as unhelpful, but an actual liability: The EU has left an already overwhelmed Greece to deal with the migrant crisis — manufactured by Turkish President Erdogan for political gain — on its own… On top of Europe’s attempts to deal with the coronavirus outbreak, the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, ordered that Greece must allow the migrants that Erdogan transported to the border to apply for asylum.

If the EU were to approve visa-free travel for Turks – or anyone who had the means to buy a Turkish passport – millions of Turks would be able to enter the EU legally and potentially “disappear” there. Already at breaking point, the EU would arguably become a very different kind of “European” Union with Turkey, a country of 80 million people, literally invited to enter Europe.

All Erdogan needs to do now it sit back and wait for the EU, with Merkel at the helm, to meet his demands.

Since the outbreak of coronavirus in Italy, Italians have learned that other European Union member states do not always practice the beautiful words that they like to preach — especially solidarity.

Solidarity is supposedly a fundamental principle of the European Union. It is enshrined in the EU treaties and the EU refers to it as one of its goals. According to article 222 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, one of the two principal treaties of the European Union:

“The Union and its Member States shall act jointly in a spirit of solidarity if a Member State is… the victim of a natural or man-made disaster. The Union shall mobilise all the instruments at its disposal… to assist a Member State in its territory, at the request of its political authorities, in the event of a natural or man-made disaster”.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/justin_trudeaus_canada_is_obamas_dream_for_america.html

To adapt a phrase from Matt Margolis, Justin Trudeau is the worst Prime Minister in Canadian history. Like his American counterpart Barack Obama, he is both a know-nothing and a do-nothing leader, and an unmitigated disaster to the well-being of his country. For example, Trudeau’s unconscionably late and incomplete response to the COVID-19 pandemic — the “19” tells us it has been known for quite some time — much like Obama’s delayed response to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, and his determination to keep an illegal border crossing open, are only the latest of his ill-gotten political escapades.                                                                 

Indeed, like the Obama of 57 states and the Austrian language, Justin Trudeau is a full-blown ignoramus masking as an intellectual prodigy. Former National Post and Walrus editor Jonathan Kay, who acted as an “editorial assistant” for Trudeau’s memoir Common Ground, swooned over his book-lined shelves. “Trudeau probably reads more than any other politician I know,” Kay fawned, even if his “boyish, eager-to-please personality leads him to project publicly in a way that can seem intellectually unsophisticated.” Trudeau is indeed intellectually unsophisticated — not that there is anything wrong with that, but there is something wrong with pretending to know more than one does.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/03/how-freedom-dies/

Islamic terrorism is a tunnel with no way out. It’s Wednesday, January 7, again. A door opens, again. Two black-clothed figures holding weapons enter, again. The balaclavas they hide behind have owl-shaped eye slits: popular knitting with motorbike riders. One hundred and nine seconds later they have fired sixty bullets into the Charlie Hebdo offices and, from religious motives, have murdered eleven people—on the floor their broken bodies lie over, on and between the wounded. Later, it will be widely accepted on the French Left that the dead and mutilated brought their fate upon themselves because the magazine had published a cartoon of Mohammed.

Line drawings are displayed on a wall in the cramped office, proposals for the current edition of the magazine. Among them is Charb’s last picture, a sketch of author Michel Houellebecq. His novel Soumission is published the morning his caricaturist is murdered. Months later the office, most of the blood stains cleaned away, is briefly unsealed to allow Riss (above), an artist and magazine editor, back into the room to collect his belongings. He notices that Houellebecq is still pinned to the wall, and then the portrait disappears. When Riss has file copies of the publication transferred to their new office some copies are seen to have been ripped by a bullet, and in an unused wooden box, one side punctuated with a clean round hole, a bullet is found resting peacefully inside.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-surpasses-that-of-china/

The death toll from Wuhan coronavirus in Italy has surpassed the number of reported deaths in China, marking a new milestone in the coronavirus pandemic.

Italy reported 427 new deaths from the coronavirus on Thursday, with a total of 3,405 to China’s 3,245, according to Reuters.

Italy now has 41,035 confirmed cases of coronavirus. The country remains on lockdown with travel restrictions between provinces as authorities struggle to contain the spread of the illness.

Most of Italy’s cases are centered in the country’s northern Lombardy region, home to the city of Milan. Videos shot by townspeople in Bergamo, near Milan, showed Italian soldiers arriving in a column of military vehicles to remove the bodies of coronavirus victims. Bergamo’s cemeteries did not have the capacity for all the bodies.

Italy’s government is considering further measures to reduce the amount of time spent outside their homes.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15761/european-union-coronavirus

The EU’s failure to address the coronavirus issue earlier has resulted in the Schengen Agreement, which stipulates that the citizens of any EU state can travel freely throughout the union, becoming null and void.

Perhaps the most shameful episode concerning inter-EU relations since the start of the coronavirus outbreak was Germany’s refusal to allow the export of much-needed face masks and ventilators to Italy after the Italian government made a direct appeal to the rest of the EU for help. Instead of demonstrating the so-called solidarity that is supposed to underpin the EU’s founding ethos, the German government issued a ban on the export of the equipment to Italy.

The EU’s handling of the coronavirus has not just been incompetent. It raises serious questions as to whether it is about to become yet another victim of the deadly pandemic.

The emergence of Europe as the new epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic has as much to do with the European Union’s inept handling of the crisis as it does with the resilience of the virus itself.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15766/coronavirus-germany-anti-americanism

The attempt to whip up anti-Americanism appears to be an effort by the German government to blunt public criticism of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her cabinet for their lackadaisical response to the coronavirus epidemic.

The story was quickly picked up and uncritically disseminated by print and broadcast media throughout Europe — and America. Nearly all quoted the Die Welt article verbatim without confirming the story on their own.

“To make it clear again on coronavirus: CureVac has not received from the US government or related entities an offer before, during and since the Task Force meeting in the White House on March 2. CureVac rejects all allegations from press.” — Statement by CureVac, March 26, 2020.

U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell denied the allegations. “Not true,” he tweeted. “The Welt story was wrong. But Business Insider, Reuters and others went with it anyway despite not having their own sources. Now everyone is back peddling.”

The newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, in an article titled, “CureVac Has Not Received an Offer from the U.S. Government,” described the Welt article as “Fake News” concocted by CureVac in order to secure government funding. The paper suggested that the German government helped to promote the lie…

“A German minister, who heard from another German minister, that a German journalist, who was not there, reported that the U.S. president offered $1 billion for a company that has not yet developed a vaccine against COVID-19…. For my taste, much hearsay, the striving of Die Welt for many clicks, the fueling of resentment against Trump and perhaps intelligent marketing by the company for public funding in times of the corona crisis.” — Reader comment in Die Welt, March 17, 2020.

The German government has promoted a fake news story asserting that the United States is trying to gain exclusive access to an experimental coronavirus vaccine being developed by a German biotech firm.

The story — which has sparked anti-American furor in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — has been swiftly debunked by the company, which denied that it had received financial offers from the U.S. government or any related entity.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/video-uk-muslim-rape-gang-members-walk-streets-frontpagemagcom/