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Apartheid and Coronavirus in the Middle East by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on May 8th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15979/apartheid-coronavirus-lebanon

Many Arabs and Palestinians took to social media to remind everyone that the only apartheid in the Middle East exists in an Arab country [Lebanon].

The latest Lebanese measure did not surprise those who are familiar with this Arab country’s long-standing discriminatory policies of apartheid towards Palestinians.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), “Palestinians in Lebanon cannot work in as many as 39 professions and cannot own property [real estate].”

The Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Samidoun… revealed that Palestinian refugees are “barred from 72 regulated professions, including medicine, public transit, farming and fishery.”

It now remains to be seen whether “pro-Palestinian” groups and individuals in the West will denounce Lebanon for its continued racism and discrimination against Palestinians.

Is Lebanon using the coronavirus pandemic to carry out ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?

A directive issued on May 1 by the Lebanese General Security, an agency responsible for immigration in Lebanon, bars, until further notice, the return of “foreign maids” and Palestinian refugees, even if their families have lived in Lebanon for generations. In the eyes of the Lebanese, there is apparently no difference between a “foreign maid” and a Palestinian Arab.

A Palestinian born and raised in an Arab country, in other words, is still considered by that Arab country to be a foreigner.

The May 1 directive, signed by Brigadier General Walid Oun, director of general security at the Rafik Hariri International Airport in Beirut, says, “accompanying maids and people of Palestinian descent” may not board Lebanese expatriate evacuation flights. These are Palestinians from Lebanon who left the country to search for work and are now seeking to return home.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Chinese Espionage Made Possible By Immigration Failures What visa fraud does to our national security and public health. Fri May 8, 2020 Michael Cutler

Posted By on May 8th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/chinese-espionage-made-possible-immigration-michael-cutler/

With all of the focus on the Coronavirus pandemic other major issues. such as the immigration crisis, is being utterly ignored by the news media.

There is however, a direct nexus between failures of the immigration system and the current Coronavirus Pandemic.  China has robbed America blind of intellectual property that has included high tech research into biology, chemistry and physics. 

Indeed, Chinese espionage has become so routine across a wide array of areas including military secrets that the intelligence community has given it the sarcastic nickname of “Chinese Takeout!”

Obviously, in order to spy on America, Chinese operatives need to enter the United States.

Border security involves much more than our northern and southern borders, it also includes the vetting process conducted at ports of entry by CBP (Customs and Border Protection) inspectors and the issuance of visas at U.S. embassies and consulates overseas.

The preface of the official report 9/11 and  Terrorist Travel begins with the following paragraph:

It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

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The Pulitzer Prize and the Corruption of History and Journalism History has been subordinated to the “passions and interests” of the present. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on May 8th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/pulitzer-prize-and-corruption-history-and-bruce-thornton/

The Pulitzer folks have awarded their prize to the New York Times for the lead essay in its “1619 Project,” a bit of lefty agitprop so egregious that even throwback liberal American historians have ripped it to shreds. This offense comes two years after a joint Pulitzer award to the Times and the Washington Post for its brazenly partisan coverage of the Russian collusion lie cooked up by rogue clerks in the FBI and DOJ. Indeed, this bias is a long tradition for the Pulitzer. The Times’s man in Moscow, Walter Duranty, was rewarded with the prize for helping Stalin  obscure his mass murders, which suited the leftist inclinations of the Times and the Pulitzer board.

Yet this latest Pulitzer awarded for corrupting two of our esteemed and prestigious institutions is nothing new. What we have been experiencing since the Sixties is the tearing away of the last few shreds of the emperor’s stained and threadbare clothes. As a result, ideological activism has driven truth and critical thinking from both these professions.

First, we should remember that the Pulitzer Prize, like the Oscars, the Emmys, and with a few exceptions the Nobel Peace Prize, is a trade-guild marketing tool, not merit-based objective rewards for true excellence and achievement. Political and ideological preferences are branded by such awards and made into megaphones for publicizing biases for those preferences. It’s no coincidence that the Nobel Peace Prize has historically favored evangelical globalists and one-world anti-nationalists, or enemies of the West like the leftist ventriloquist’s dummy Rigoberta Menchu, and the murderous thug Yasser Arafat.  Watching the Oscars and listening to the winners’ speeches provide a seminar in left-wing platitudes and semi-literate bromides. Or look at this year’s Pulitzer Board members and you will find reporters, media executives, foundation functionaries, and university faculty all of whom are notoriously progressive.

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What Does Michelle Obama Have to Complain About? By Kyle Smith

Posted By on May 8th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/television-review-becoming-what-does-michelle-obama-have-to-complain-about/

Michelle Obama has had a blessed American life, but she’s all about her grievances in her Netflix documentary.

There’s a curious joy deficit in Michelle Obama’s video memoir Becoming, the Netflix documentary produced by her and her husband. As she glides from one beautiful space to another, surrounded by beautiful and famous people, with beautiful daughters and a beautiful bank account and much else to be grateful for, the viewer keeps waiting for her Flounder moment: Oh, boy, is this great!

Instead, the tone is mostly dour, pained, even somber. I suspect (and hope!) that, off-camera, the Obamas are a bit more full of joie de vivre than Michelle Obama is in this film, which is largely a litany of complaint. She says she felt so much pressure to be perfect for eight years in the White House that when it was over she let the dam burst by crying for half an hour (half an hour?) when she and her husband departed on Air Force One. She talks about the various times she feels she was targeted by racism, exaggerating what actually happened. She walks us through her press coverage, which she finds indescribably unfair and hurtful.

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COVID-19: Government’s Bad Choices and the Impact on Doctors By Keith R. Jackson

Posted By on May 8th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/covid19_governments_bad_choices_and_the_impact_on_doctors.html

Private physicians’ offices across the country have had to furlough core staff, often with decades of service to their businesses, because of the coronavirus-induced, government-mandated shutdown.  Doctors who own these small business ventures, many of whom were on the front lines in the battle against AIDS back when it was 100% lethal, have been forced to sit on their hands at home for this pandemic.  Surgery centers, frequently the lifeline between economic solvency and bankruptcy for both private surgeons and hospitals, are lying dormant, their fixed costs still accruing.

Promised federal bailout money is not going to come close to repairing the long-term damage done by this medieval “fix” recommended by “the scientific experts.”  Those advising our leaders have provided a great excuse for the forces seeking to justify government-run health care and expand the power of an unchecked, totalitarian federal bureaucracy.  Medical practices, like many small businesses across the country, are being killed off for the cause of “saving just one more life.”  What they have done is unconscionable, poorly justified, and quite frankly, un-American.

History will not be kind to the CDC when the dust settles from this crisis.  The Communicable Disease Center exists to help us with situations just like COVID-19, pandemics being its purview.  It could be argued that having the nation prepared with accurate means of testing for novel viruses and being equipped with an adequate number of masks and ventilators would be an obvious first purpose for the agency.  Yet in the past couple of years, the agency has spent well over a billion and a half dollars for things like chronic disease prevention, health promotion, environmental health, and injury prevention.

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Don’t Forget Why the Deep State Targeted Mike Flynn By David P. Goldman

Posted By on May 8th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-p-goldman/2020/05/07/dont-forget-why-the-deep-state-targeted-mike-flynn-n389003

Now that the Justice Department has abandoned its prosecution of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, it’s important to remember what made the case of Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn so central to the Intelligence Community’s mutiny against Trump. As a reminder, here is what I wrote in Asia Times last November:

As chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Flynn had warned that American support for Sunni jihadists in Syria had the unintended effect of supporting the new caliphate movement, that is, ISIS. Among all the heads and former heads of the 17 agencies that make up the US intelligence community, Flynn was the only one who had objected to the disastrous covert intervention in Syria and foreseen its baleful consequences. Obama fired him, but Donald Trump hired him as a top campaign aide and then appointed him national security adviser.

The Syrian debacle brought Russia into Syria in 2015; the American-backed jihad had turned into a Petri dish for Russian Muslims from the Caucasus, as well as Chinese Uighurs and a motley assortment of foreign militants. Russia had interests of opportunity, for example, a warm-water refueling station for its Mediterranean fleet, but the risk of blowback from the Syrian civil war was the most urgent motive for President Vladimir Putin’s intervention.

That is the background to the mutiny in the US Intelligence Community against the elected commander-in-chief.

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Is Iran Going Home? Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on May 7th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/is_iran_going_home.html

Aside from the devastation of the Wuhan virus, Iraq closed its 1,000-mile southern border with Iran for “security reasons” after months of Iraqi protests against Iranian interference in its domestic affairs.  Oil prices flirted with zero in the wake of the Russia-Saudi oil war, and demand dropped owing to the virus, further gutting the treasury.  Iran harassed U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf, but according to Navy sources, the action was clearly for domestic consumption and posed no actual threat (although a mistake on either side could have had major repercussions, making President Trump’s warning more than reasonable).  Germany, Tehran’s strongest defender in Europe, pulled the plug on Iran’s proxy army Hezb’allah.  More than 390 members of the U.S. House of Representatives — including Ilhan Omar, not normally an opponent of the Iranian government — called for extending the international arms embargo against Iran, set to expire in October.

Iran’s Quds Day celebration has been canceled.  The rallies and marches, an annual celebration of anti-Semitic glee, with their slogans and speeches and the “death to Israel” chant, will not take place in 2020, although the Iranian public has been assured that the supreme leader will make a speech.

And in Syria, things are blowing up.

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China’s Massive Trade Imbalance: The Rope with Which They Would Hang Us Beijing’s use of COVID-19 could help them achieve global dominance by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on May 7th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15996/china-trade-imbalance

China’s communist leadership quickly recognized that if the U.S. continued to demand economic reciprocity, China could easily lose its ability to claim solo superpower status for the remaining decades of the 21st Century.

China found an “accidental” biological and economic weapon that has the potential to achieve their singular strategic goal: removing a strong and powerful international competitor, the United States.

As Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Soviet state, is reported mockingly to have said, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” China’s leaders have long believed that America’s unsustainable trade imbalance with China is that rope. Add the global pandemic crisis introduced by China and Beijing sees victory without an artillery shell being fired.

Like blinders falling from the eyes of those who have long avoided the truth, this new clarity will create a united, engaged, and resolute international community prepared to confront Beijing’s agenda of global dominance.

China’s leaders are shrewd students of history and they apply those lessons every day as they pursue their agenda for global dominance.

For example: They know the decline and fall of the Soviet Union came about not because of military might or the square miles under control. Rather, it imploded because the West, and specifically the United States, used freedom of thought, capitalism and the enormous power of the free market to marginalize, reduce, and collapse the Soviet Union. They simply couldn’t compete on any level with the West. From technology to the quality of life provided for its people, the Soviet Union became a nation without a future. Fortunately, it ended with a tired sigh rather than a nuclear exchange.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Media Outlets Mislead Readers about COVID-19 Data By A. G. Hamilton

Posted By on May 7th, 2020

he public overwhelmingly relies on the press to provide them with accurate information and proper context. When it comes to COVID-19, many press outlets are consistently failing to do that. In fact, the reporting on data related to the epidemic has increasingly led to conclusions that aren’t accurate and an audience that is misinformed.

The perfect example was an article from The Hill that told readers Texas was seeing “thousands of new coronavirus cases days after state’s stay-at-home order lifted.” Seems rather obvious that The Hill started with a view that moving into a re-opening phase is a mistake and things are getting worse, and then looked for a way to support that conclusion. This claim managed to mislead readers in two key ways:

(1) Given the incubation period and a lag in testing, new cases that are identified on a certain day are unlikely to have any relationship to policies implemented days earlier.

(2) “New cases” is a very misleading metric because it does not account for increases in testing. The rate of positive tests in Texas has declined significantly.

Mainstream outlets have attempted to tie new cases and deaths to recent re-opening actions in Florida, Georgia, and Texas, despite it being clear that any spike in cases or deaths would not be apparent for weeks after such policy changes. Such actions could lead to a spike in new cases, but trying to tie them to those seen right now is clearly incorrect.

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Let the Doctors Work By Joel M. Zinberg

Posted By on May 7th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/let-the-doctors-work/

Sweeping bans on ‘non-essential’ procedures have left medical professionals idle and patients less healthy.

Buried in the recent announcement by the Bureau of Economic Analysis that real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 4.8 percent in the first quarter of 2020 was a remarkable fact: Nearly half of the GDP decrease was due to reduced spending on health-care services. You read that correctly — in the middle of the worst pandemic in over a century, and after decades of unrelenting expenditure growth, we spent less on medical care. How can one explain this anomaly?

It is because Americans, in response to government guidance and fear of an unfamiliar pathogen, are putting off medical care — care that is often essential to their health. Both the CDC and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) instructed hospitals and outpatient facilities to delay elective procedures and to reschedule all non-urgent ambulatory visits and hospital admissions, in order to preserve medical manpower, hospital beds, ventilators, and personal protective equipment (PPE) for treatment of an expected surge of COVID-19 patients. State and local authorities issued stay-at-home guidelines and travel bans.

Hospitals, health-care providers, and patients have complied. Hernia repairs, hip replacements, colonoscopies, mammograms, and a variety of other common procedures are no longer performed unless urgent need can be demonstrated. Visits to physicians’ offices have plummeted as patients shelter in place and as fear of contracting COVID-19 at a medical facility has taken hold.  Primary-care visits have dropped by 50 percent.