RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/no_israeli_coronaivirus_vaccine_for_me_iranian_journalist_tweets.html

As coronavirus panic spreads, scientists around the world are working to develop a vaccine to combat the disease.  Along with scientists in other countries, scientists in Israel and the U.S. announced they’ve had some early successes in the development process, although obviously much more remains to be done before anything is ready for humans.  

Amid fears of a looming pandemic, scientists in the US and across the globe are scrambling to develop vaccines — including in Israel, where one group of researchers says it could be ready in just three weeks and available for use within 90 days.

The scientists at the Galilee Research Institute, known as MIGAL, are adapting its vaccine against the avian coronavirus infectious bronchitis virus, or IBV, to work for the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19, the Jerusalem Post reported.

“Congratulations to MIGAL on this exciting breakthrough. I am confident that there will be further rapid progress, enabling us to provide a needed response to the grave global COVID-19 threat,” said Ofir Akunis, Israel’s minister of science and technology. …

MIGAL CEO David Zigdon said the vaccine could “achieve safety approval in 90 days,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15719/eu-closing-borders

Even Germany is unwilling to take any of the migrants shuttled by Erdogan to the Greek-Turkish border.

“I thank Greece for being our European ‘aspida’ [the Greek word for shield].” — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, March 3, 2020.

The “solidarity” with Greece expressed by leading EU representatives seems to have come from having no alternatives other than relying on Greece to struggle with the situation.

Even if the EU manages to resolve its issues with Erdogan, which is doubtful and bound to be only temporary, Europe’s fundamental problem will remain: As long as migrants think that a better future awaits them in Europe, the welfare states, which have shown themselves extremely accommodating in receiving migrants and granting them all sorts of social rights, can continue expecting migrants to try breaching Europe’s borders.

On February 27, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made good on his many threats to send millions of migrants and refugees to Europe, despite a 2016 dealbetween Europe and Turkey to hold them. Apparently seeking to make Europe experience the full force of his intentions, Turkish officials sent busloads of migrants — predominantly young men from Afghanistan and Iran, according to several reports — to Turkey’s border with Greece.

“We prepared a plan with our colleagues and we are committed to arranging free buses for the refugees in Bolu towards the border town of Edirne,” said Tanju Özcan, the mayor of Bolu, a town in northern Turkey, 550 kilometers from the border with Greece. “Refugees willing to go to Edirne can apply to the Bolu municipality and its branches. We are ready to assure the transport whatever the number [of refugees].”

https://quillette.com/2020/03/12/china-exploiting-false-accusations-of-racism/

When confronted, China frequently accuses its critics of racism. Last month, for example, Beijing expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters in retribution for an opinion column titled “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia.” China Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, declared the headline “astonishingly racist”—despite the fact the term “sick man” is routinely used idiomatically to describe countries facing economic challenges, and isn’t connected to the Coronavirus outbreak.

In January, the Chinese embassy in Denmark demanded an apology after a Danish newspaper printed a cartoon related to the Coronavirus outbreak: a Chinese flag with virus icons where the stars should be. Embassy staff stated flatly that the cartoon “is an insult to China and hurts the feelings of the Chinese people.” In 2018, similarly, China’s ambassador in Ottawa said Canada’s arrest of a politically connected Chinese tech executive was motivated by “white supremacy.” (Beijing then retaliated by arresting two Canadians in China.)

To be clear, the Coronavirus outbreak truly has led to some racist attacks on Chinese people (and other Asians) around the world. The specter of an epidemic often brings out the worst in us. And even in the best of times, xenophobes need little provocation to rail against foreigners. Such prejudice is unacceptable, and should be condemned.

Yet we must also be aware that the Chinese government has learned to weaponize our own progressive tendencies, and has learned to exploit false accusations of racism against democratic societies. Ironically, this same Chinese regime encourages racism and xenophobia domestically.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/13/communist-chinese-propagandists-now-claim-u-s-military-made-wuhan-virus/

No country can afford to rely on its greatest adversaries for survival.

In case Americans were not already convinced Communist China constituted such a foe, since the Chinese coronavirus spread across the globe, the country threatened by way of its leading propaganda publication to impose pharmaceutical export controls that “plunge[] [America] into the mighty sea of coronavirus,” and now its senior propagandists are pinning the pandemic on the U.S. military.

Friendly nations do not falsely accuse their friends of spreading pandemics that originated on their own shores; nor do they steal hundreds of billions of dollars per year in intellectual property; nor do they demand that those who transact with them fastidiously toe their government line; nor do they engage in rampant national security-imperiling espionage efforts.

Therefore, when the fog of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) coronavirus chaos clears, the most important geopolitical takeaway for America ought to be the imperative to decouple from China in every strategically significant area, from medicine to military hardware.

This will not be possible if our media, political class, and business community prioritize political correctness and partisanship—not to mention profit—over the well-being of our country. Certainly not if they continue actively contributing to CCP information operations, like the one currently underway.

https://voiceofeurope.com/2020/03/czech-republic-follows-trumps-lead-and-bans-entry-of-citizens-from-15-nations/

(AP) Czech citizens coming home from 15 countries that are considered risky due to the virus outbreak will have to stay under quarantine for two weeks.

The announcement Friday by the Czech Republic’s government listed the following countries: China, Iran, Korea, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Britain.

Foreigners from those countries are barred from traveling to the Czech Republic and Czechs are not allowed to travel to those countries.

Those measures become effective Friday midnight when the country renews border checks with Austria and Germany.

The Czech Republic has 117 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/11/evidence-china-executes-political-prisoners-to-harvest-organs/

China’s organ transplantation system appears capable of working miracles. Need a new liver? You can get one in 24 to 72 hours—for a price. To anyone familiar with the voluntary organ donation system in the United States, where the median wait time for a liver exceeds 300 days, such availability raises the question about organ sourcing.

How does the Chinese system locate, identify, and match a deceased donor within such a short timeframe?

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) on Tuesday released “Organ Procurement and Extrajudicial Execution in China: A Review of the Evidence,” a report by China Studies Research Fellow Matthew P. Robertson that examines the evidence underlying allegations of extrajudicial killing for the harvesting of organs by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The report, together with the final judgment of the China Tribunal charged with investigating the question of the criminal liability of the Chinese state with respect to forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, challenges international complacency on the topic.

The World Health Organization and the International Transplant Society simply accept the assertion of the CCP that the Chinese organ transplant system is both ethical and voluntary. World governments do not publicly challenge China as to the source of its organs, and international medical and human rights organizations fail to raise public concerns as to the scale of the PRC transplant system and the real source of organs.

Given the evidence of ongoing organ trafficking, the falsification of official datasets, and the signs that Uyghur Muslims may be the latest victims of this form of state predation, the necessity of coordinated, international action is clear.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/will-irans-regime-survive-coronavirus/

Soaring inflation. Deepening domestic discontent. An expanding environmental crisis. Even before the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in recent weeks, the Iranian regime was struggling under the weight of domestic problems that increasingly threatened to undermine the integrity of the Islamic Republic. With the advent of COVID-19, however, matters have become much, much worse for the Iranian regime — so much so that it isn’t unreasonable to think that the Iranian regime could buckle under the weight of its own internal contradictions. That’s because, for Iran’s ayatollahs, coronavirus represents a true “black swan” event.

The term, popularized by the scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2008 book of the same name, refers to an improbable occurrence that cannot be reasonably predicted, but which has profound — and potentially catastrophic — consequences. This is what COVID-19 is for Iran.

The problems start with the failing health of Iran’s ruling class. The upper echelons of the Iranian leadership are overwhelmingly aging and infirm, and coronavirus is exacting a deadly toll on this cohort. As of March 4, the Washington Post had documented that the disease had afflicted “about two dozen members of parliament and at least 15 other current or former top figures.” That figure has expanded significantly since then, as has the number of high-profile casualties within the Islamic Republic. To date, the virus is known to have claimed the lives of Mohammad Mirmohammadi, an adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, former deputy foreign minister Hossein Sheikholeslam, parliamentarians Mohammad Ali Ramezani Dastak and Fatimeh Rehber, and at least three other officials. More can certainly be expected in coming days.

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/visible-from-space-irans-coronavirus-mass-graves-give-the-lie-to-the-mullahs-propaganda/

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has dismissed the coronavirus as “not that big a deal” but Iran’s Health Ministry has reported that 429 people have died of the virus, and the country’s deputy health minister has contracted the virus. New satellite imagery shows that mass graves in Qom, the mullahs’ spiritual center, are visible from space. This graveyard lends weight to the opposition party’s claim that the regime is underreporting the deaths and the number is closer to 1,500.

The Washington Post published images from the Colorado firm Maxar Technologies showing the mass graves visible from space.

The images show the Behesht-e Masoumeh complex in Qom, about 80 miles south of Tehran, where the excavation of a new section of the graveyard began as early as February 21, according to satellite imagery. The digging rapidly expanded as the virus spread. By the end of the month, two large trenches — their lengths adding up to 100 yards — had become visible from space, the Post reported.

Coronavirus spread quickly in Iran, spurred on in part by the Islamic regime’s close ties with China, according to The Wall Street Journal. The regime has reported that more than 10,000 people have contracted the disease and 429 have died. The dead include members of parliament, a former diplomat, and even a senior adviser to the supreme leader. The regime has reported that more than 846 people have contracted the coronavirus in Qom, a city of about 1.2 million.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/turkey-confronts-greece-more-hordes-syrian-joseph-klein/

Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to engineer a mass invasion from Turkey into Greece of thousands of Syrian refugees and migrants. He has broken a deal reached with the European Union in 2016 to close its border with Europe to stem the flood of immigrants from the Middle East. He took Europe’s money that was part of the deal but is now reopening his country’s border with Greece to extort more concessions. “We will continue the current measure on our frontiers until all of our expectations are concretely met,” Erdogan said recently.

When Greece pushed back to protect its border from the invasion, Erdogan lashed out. “There is no difference with what the Nazis did and the images from the border,” he declared as he made unproven claims of “barbaric” tactics supposedly used by Greek border guards.

As Breitbart pointed out, “The slur against Greece is notable, as some 300,000 people were killed during the 1941 Nazi occupation of the country, which near-wiped out Greece’s Jewish population.” Then again, we should not be surprised. Erdogan is an avowed anti-Semite who has indulged in conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the world’s problems.

“Greece does not accept lessons in human rights and the respect of international law from the Turkish president,” said a spokesman for the Greek government. He claimed that Ankara’s actions were aimed at destabilizing Greece.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15729/coronavirus-europe-crisis

The number of new coronavirus cases in Europe has been doubling, on average, every 72 hours.

“It has increased in some countries over the last two weeks by one thousand… There is nothing to stop that expansion… unless those societies move aggressively… including introducing social distancing…. We need to modify our behavior. We need to start practicing that now. We have to modify our behavior in ways that reduces the risk of transmitting the virus….” — Dr. Richard Hatchett, Chief Executive Officer of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

“I think we need to start thinking in terms of the social risk. If I have a cold and I go to work and shake hands with my older colleague who has a chronic medical condition, I could be responsible for that colleague’s death. We all need to think about our responsibility to each other as we govern our behavior. We can’t view the epidemic in terms of our personal risk, we need to act collectively in a cooperative manner…” — Dr. Richard Hatchett.

Merkel said that her government’s top priority was to slow down the contagion to prevent a collapse of the German healthcare system.

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has now reached more than 45 countries in Europe, where (as of March 12) more than 30,000 people have tested positive for the disease, according to a Gatestone Institute tally based on calculations from European health ministries.

The disease is spreading fast: more than 28,000 coronavirus cases (93% of all cases) in Europe were confirmed during just the first twelve days of March. The number of new cases has been doubling, on average, every 72 hours.