RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/iran-brink-ari-lieberman/

According to the latest coronavirus statistics emerging from Iran’s health ministry, 724 people have succumbed to the disease while nearly 14,000 are infected. Nothing the regime says can be trusted and most experts agree that these figures represent a gross understatement. In fact, it would be fair to say that Iran is now the global epicenter for COVID-19.

Based on open sources and utilizing various mathematical models, The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood demonstrates how it is possible, and even likely that the virus has already infected at least 586,000 Iranians. Some of the models posited by Wood indicate that as many as 8,000,000 Iranians have been infected. The article was published on March 9, so we can assume that the numbers have increased exponentially since then.

According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization, COVID-19 has claimed 6,492 lives and infected 168,834 globally. Even if we were to adopt the lower estimate cited in Wood’s article, the Islamic Republic’s infection rate is still nearly 3.5 times higher than the entire world’s infection rate combined. We do not know how many Iranians have died from the Wuhan virus but a figure of 22,268 would not be an unreasonable estimate. We arrive at this number by multiplying the conservative infection rate estimate of 586,000 by 3.8 percent, which represents the global mortality rate.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15737/coronavirus-europe-lockdown

The unprecedented restrictions on the movement of people, unimaginable only two weeks ago, is bringing life in Europe to a virtual standstill.

“We have to be prepared for the fact that Europe will be hit hard, that Europe will be hit even harder than China and that we will be dealing with this challenge for months.” — Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

“The numbers are growing alarmingly fast.” — Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

Europe is now the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic that has reached more than 45 countries on the continent. As of March 14, upwards of 42,000 people have tested positive for the disease, according to data from European health ministries.

The so-called Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is spreading extremely fast: roughly 40,000 of the cases (95% of all cases) in Europe were confirmed during just the first 14 days of March.

Italy is Europe’s worst-affected country, followed by Spain, Germany, France, Switzerland and Norway.

In Europe as a whole, more than 1,600 people — 4.0% of those confirmed as having been infected — have died from COVID-19. In Italy, the lethality rate currently is 5.8%, according to the Ministry of Health.

As the scale of the unfolding crisis has come into view, European leaders have started to implement increasingly severe measures aimed at slowing the spread of the disease. The unprecedented restrictions on the movement of people, unimaginable only two weeks ago, is bringing life in Europe to a virtual standstill.

In Italy, the epicenter of Europe’s coronavirus outbreak, where more than 21,000 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 (as of March 14), Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte ordered a nationwide lockdown. The quarantine of Europe’s third-most populous country, with 60 million inhabitants, bans non-essential travel to, from and within Italy; prohibits all public events; requires people to maintain a distance from each other of at least one meter (three feet); and shutters all bars, restaurants and shops (except for grocery stores and pharmacies).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15730/please-please-help-us-the-persecution

A report cited by Fox News found that more than 6,000 Christians have been slaughtered by Islamic terrorists since 2015 — a thousand of them in just 2019.

“It is… genocide…. the longer we tolerate these massacres, the more we embolden the perpetrators. We give them a ‘green light’ to carry on killing.” — Baroness Caroline Cox, Fox News, December 24, 2019, Nigeria.

“Christian Syrian refugees … have been blocked from getting help from the United Nations Refugee Agency… by Muslim UN officials in Jordan.”

“You have this absurd situation where the scheme is set up to help Syrian refugees and the people most in need, Christians who have been ‘genocided,’ they can’t even get into the U.N. camps to get the food. If you enter and say I am a Christian or convert, the Muslim U.N. guards will block you….” — Paul Diamond, a British human rights lawyer, CBN News, December 4, 2019, United Nations in Jordan.

The following are some of the abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of December 2019, and categorized by theme:

The Slaughter of Christians

Nigeria: The Islamic State in West Africa Province released a video of the execution of 11 Christian aid workers on the day after Christmas. The brief video shows one Christian being shot, followed by 10 others, tied up and being beheaded by masked jihadis standing behind the hostages. “This message is to the Christians in the world,” a man’s voice narrates over the footage.

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.