RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/lying-china-joseph-klein/

If we are to believe China’s figures, the number of Covid-19 coronavirus cases in China as of March 31 was 82,240, with 3,309 deaths. The United States has now just under 165,000 cases and has surpassed 3000 deaths attributed to the virus – about double the official number of China’s cases and fast approaching China’s official death total. China claims that it has largely defeated the coronavirus and is opening public transportation, schools, and factories. The Chinese Communist Party has promoted itself as the global role model for how to lead a “people’s war” against COVID-19 and save many lives. “Party officials have tried to spin the crisis as a testament to the strength of China’s authoritarian system and its hard-line leader, Xi Jinping,” the New York Times reported, “even announcing plans to publish a book in six languages about the outbreak that portrays him as a ‘major power leader’ with ‘care for the people.’”

China’s officially reported case and death totals to date just happen to be remarkably close to a prediction last February by Stanford University biology professor Michael Levitt. Dr. Levitt, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, predicted that China would peak with around 80,000 cases and 3,250 deaths. Dr. Levitt  has spent a couple of months a year in China. “I became much more interested in China, and seeing the country through the eyes of somebody who has lived there made it very different,” he said. Dr. Levitt was appalled by the travel restrictions imposed by the United States. “It’s crazy,” he said, as quoted by China Daily. “Travel bans don’t help at all. I think all this punishment just leads to under-reporting, and it’s not a good idea.” Although he is not an epidemiologist, the Chinese government featured him with appearances on the Chinese State broadcaster China Global Television Network.

Dr. Levitt is now claiming that the growth of new cases worldwide should slow much faster than many health experts predict, just as he claims happened in China. We hope Dr. Levitt is right but have good reason to be skeptical regarding the validity of China’s official data. Dr. Levitt’s predictions more likely were used by Chinese authorities to lend credibility to the range of numbers that China is willing to report as the peak, rather than constituting validated forecasts of what actually happened.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/jew-hate-france-stephen-brown/

Last December, vandals desecrated 107 Jewish graves with anti-Semitic inscriptions in Westerhoffen in eastern France. Anti-Jewish graffiti was also found in the nearby town of Schafhouse-sur-Zorn. No suspects were arrested. Earlier in 2019, in February in Alsace, also in eastern France, 100 Jewish graves were desecrated with Nazi symbols.

The desecration occurred just hours before the French government’s lower legislative house was to adopt a motion modeled on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism which states that denying Jews their right to self-determination is anti-Semitic.

In the same month, an Israeli student was attacked by two strangers on the subway for speaking Hebrew into a cell phone. His nose was broken. A 17-year-old, arrested with a stolen phone and known to police, was taken into custody. His ethnic origin was not given.

And perhaps most frightening, U.K.’s leading freedom fighter Katie Hopkins stated in a recent Glazov Gang video that 18 Jewish families in Paris had received letters telling them to “get out” or be killed.

Perhaps to indicate the senders of these poisonous letters meant business, Hopkins also cited the case of the 82-year-old Jewish woman last year who lived in one of the poorer suburbs surrounding Paris. She was stabbed to death and thrown off her balcony by her Muslim neighbor.

Anti-Semitic attacks are on the increase in France. According to Wikepedia, in 2018, they rose by 69 per cent amounting to about 500 assaults. Anti-Semitism surged during the Second Intifada from 2002-2004 to disturbing levels.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15826/china-coronavirus-deceit

Any hope that the West may have harbored in the past about China evolving into a member of the liberal-democratic international order, should by now be considered dead, expired, extinct.

Worse, the wet markets, which were to have been closed, have apparently been reopening.

China is a threat to all of us. That is why it is more important than ever for the U.S. and the rest of the West to be aware of the risks involved in developing further alliances — technological or otherwise — with a country that has served up nothing but duplicity to its own people as well as to the rest of the planet.

The coronavirus may be strengthening the determination of China’s government. So far, it has been trying to guarantee absolute loyalty from its populace through surveillance technology and turning China into a spookily Orwellian society. Any hope that the West may have harbored in the past about China evolving into a member of the liberal-democratic international order, should by now be considered dead, expired, extinct.

China has not only been stealing intellectual property from the West for years, as US President Donald J. Trump has long observed; it has also behaved abysmally during the coronavirus crisis in Wuhan — and maybe also before. It is still not known if this coronavirus originated in one of China’s “wet markets”, which have probably caused other diseases, or in a bio-weapons laboratory — and we may never know. What we do know is that when the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control offered to help, China ignored them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/denmarks-race-bottom-lars-hedegaard/

During a discussion in May 2004, Amir Taheri noted that Islam is incompatible with democracy for the simple reason that democracy is based on one fundamental principle, namely equality. This is unacceptable to Islam, according to which a non-believer cannot be the equal of a believer. To be sure, Jews and Christians, labeled “people of the Book”, are accorded human status and some protection by their Muslim masters (at least in principle) provided they agree to submit to a form of apartheid known as dhimmitude, which has been exhaustibly chronicled by writers such as Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom.

The very concept of democracy is anathema in Islam, according to which power belongs only to God. The man exercising that authority on Earth is known as the khalif and holds all religious, political and military power.

In Islam the people cannot have any say over legislation because Allah revealed his eternal law to his prophet 1400 years ago, wherefore it would be blasphemous for men to change a single word.

Almost all Muslim states have man-made laws, but the true believers regard these laws as an affront to their religion and the regimes upholding them as illegitimate imposters. Which goes a long way towards explaining the constant instability and occasional bloodshed throughout the Muslim world.

But surely, such medieval ideas cannot long survive a confrontation with the enlightened West? Regrettably they can.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/british-stasi-rising-katie-hopkins/

Neighbors spying on neighbors, people encouraged to report each other, curtains twitching as you walk by. Sound familiar?

The tactics used by the Stasi in East Germany in 1950, creating a secret police organization through a vast network of informants, are now being encouraged by British police in the UK in 2020. And the Chinese Virus was all it took for people to willingly comply.

Humberside Police (in the east midlands of England) has created an online portal where people can report those they suspect of not following social distancing rules, such as exercising only once a day or leaving the house only to buy food or for medical emergencies.

They say:

‘Reports will be assessed based on the information provided and we would ask people to please consider the circumstance before making their report.’

Another force – Derbyshire Police (central midlands) – sent drones to a remote walking spot in the Peak District, an area known for its beautiful views, and captured actual footage of … dog walkers. There is something very disconcerting about police filming innocent people without their permission.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15815/iran-coronavirus-nuclear-program

The Iranian regime now has enough enriched uranium to refine and build a nuclear bomb if it desires to do so. Approximately 1000 kg of uranium enriched at just 5% can be refined to create one nuclear bomb…. Moreover, “the agency identified a number of questions related to possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities at three locations in Iran,” according to a recently published second report by the IAEA.

It is important to point out that the three undeclared nuclear locations to which the IAEA is referring are in addition to another, fourth, clandestine nuclear site in Iran that was first revealed by Israel.

The Director General of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, admitted , as reported on March 3, 2020, “The fact that we found traces (of uranium) is very important. That means there is the possibility of nuclear activities and material that are not under international supervision and about which we know not the origin or the intent. That worries me.” … Iran is also breaching several UN resolutions by not allowing the IAEA to inspect its nuclear sites.

If the Iranian government is advancing its nuclear program for peaceful purposes, why has Tehran repeatedly failed to report its nuclear facilities, including those at Natanz and Arak, to the IAEA? Also, why does the Iranian government keep refusing to answer the IAEA’s questions regarding its secret nuclear facilities?

The United Nations needs to break its silence and, before it is too late, take seriously Iran’s latest rapid nuclear escalation.

While many governments around the world are focusing on how to halt the spread of the COVID-19 virus, the Iranian regime appears to be concentrating on another issue: rapidly advancing its nuclear program.

Amid the coronavirus, Iran has crossed a major threshold concerning its nuclear plans. The United Nations’ atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), reported that Tehran has increased its enriched uranium stockpile, which now stands at the equivalent of 1,510 kg. Iran is allowed to possess 300 kg of low enriched uranium — a substantial increase in Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile in a short period of time.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-path-to-venezuelan-democracy-11585645210?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

As the coronavirus spreads around the world, it’s easy to forget the Venezuelan people’s suffering at the hands of Nicolás Maduro’s regime. The Trump administration hasn’t. Today we are announcing a Democratic Transition Framework to help Venezuelans escape from the national crisis that falling oil prices and the coronavirus have now deepened.

We present this framework as a path for Venezuela to emerge from years of repression and political conflict. It proposes that both Mr. Maduro, the former president who has clung to power, and Juan Guaidó, the interim president, step aside so that the elected members of the National Assembly from both sides can create a Council of State to serve as the transitional government, which would hold free and fair presidential elections. In last year’s negotiations, the team representing Mr. Guaidó and the National Assembly proposed this path forward toward the restoration of democracy.

Democracy isn’t only about elections. A new, balanced and independent National Electoral Council is also critical, and an independent Supreme Court must replace the current one, which is but an arm of the Maduro regime. A vibrant democracy also demands a free and independent media with an end to the regime’s pervasive censorship.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-common-sense-dictates-prudence/#slide-1

Uncertainty still reigns, so prepare for the worst. A lockdown would be prudent, not the end of the world.

As of today, half of mankind is confined at home because of the coronavirus pandemic, although the severity of the confinement varies greatly depending on countries and regions. This situation must be all the more disconcerting given that, less than a month ago, many government officials and public-health experts were still claiming that Western countries would be able to weather the storm without any difficulty and encouraging people not to change their behavior because of the virus. On that point, Trump’s handling of this crisis has been atrocious, but as Zeynep Tufekci recently pointed out, he’s hardly the only one to have underestimated the seriousness of the threat.

Although I think people underestimated the seriousness of the threat until recently, many now seem to underestimate how much uncertainty there is about what is going to happen. To be clear: No matter where we are headed exactly, this is no flu. As of March 29 in France, 2,606 people who tested positive for COVID-19 had died in hospitals alone. Perhaps even more worrisome, there were already 4,632 people in intensive-care units, up from approximately 1,500 one week earlier. Between the number of people who left intensive care because they had died and those who left because their condition had improved, it means that probably almost twice as many people have already required admission to intensive care since the beginning of the outbreak in France. By comparison, during the entire 2018–19 season, 490 people who had the flu died in hospitals, and 2,915 people required admission to intensive care. Not only are we already way past that with the COVID-19 pandemic, but, even in the most optimistic scenario that I consider plausible, those figures will be at least 15 times higher.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/29/pandemic-plague-and-protests-will-chile-join-the-sh-hole-country-club/

Lower-case, doctrinaire democrats in America doggedly conflate the “will of the people” across the world with liberty. This Disneyfied view of democracy ignores that, in a democracy, the right to vote gives one man control over another’s life and livelihood.

Before the coronavirus pandemic and the plague of locusts came the protesters.

From the affluent locales—Chile, France, Britain, Hong Kong, Catalonia—to the impoverished ones—Algeria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon and more the world was on fire (to borrow from Amy Chua’s brilliant book).

The reasons cited for a worldwide conflagration ranged from the evils of free-market capitalism (says the Left) to the “socialist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela” (says the Right), to “economics, demography, a sense of powerlessness . . . and social media.”

Some experts spoke of a “youth bulge” of overeducated young people chasing too few jobs. In truth, this was more like ill-educated youngsters with useless degrees who thought it chic to don a balaclava and lob hard objects at the police and the property they were protecting.

Chile is the jewel of Latin America. In 2014, it even surpassed the United States on the Index of Economic Freedom, ranking seventh to America’s 12th. Since 1990, economic growth in Chile has been as steady as the stability of its institutions. Poverty rates had plummeted and social services had been extended to the needy.

On the Right, Pat Buchanan has described Chile as “the country with the highest per capita income and least inequality in all of Latin America.”

On the Left—yet still on the side of a competitive market economy—the Economist agrees. Chile “is the second-richest country in Latin America, thanks in part to its healthy public finances and robust private sector.”