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Ramadan in the Time of Coronavirus by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

Posted By on May 18th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16014/ramadan-coronavirus

Ramadan in war-torn Afghanistan is especially hard on the poor who suffer from malnutrition. Lockdown means no work: “If we can’t work, we can’t buy food and we will be fasting for 24 hours.”

It is this year’s Ramadan. More than 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide are currently refraining each day from water and food from sunrise to sunset. The day of fasting is usually concluded by “Iftar”, a communal breaking of the fasting by eating three dates, followed by a meal. The main focus of the daily Ramadan festivities is on the community, the gathering of family and friends. In recent years, Muslim societies in non-Muslim countries have extended their frequently grand Iftar-festivities to include politicians and other stakeholders. For instance, in 2019, the Islamic Faith Community of Austria organized an interfaith Iftar which included a speech by the mayor of Vienna.

This year’s Ramadan is impacted by the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. As Islam does not have a central authority akin to the Pope in the Catholic faith, there are no central rules for the celebration of Ramadan in 2020. Each community, each Muslim denomination, provides its own interpretation of what faithful are generally to do during the annual month of fasting.

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, in order to curb the spread of the virus, has banned the country’s annual “exodus” called “mudik” which commonly occurs at the end of Ramadan, when people return to their villages across the island country. While mosques in Indonesia’s deeply conservative autonomous province of Aceh are packed despite the Covid-19 pandemic, due to a ruling by clerics claiming that Aceh has not been affected by the virus, in other parts of the country, most people are banned from leaving their cities.

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How President Trump Can Retake the Initiative and Rebuild a More Resilient Economy Chris Buskirk

Posted By on May 18th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/17/how-president-trump-can-retake-the-initiative-and-rebuild-a-more-resilient-economy/

Republicans take note: voters across the political spectrum have woken up to the dangers of relying on foreign supply chains for critical products.

There’s trouble brewing for President Trump in Florida. Earlier this year the state seemed out of reach for Democrats. But the must-win state which he carried in 2016, is home to Mar-A-Lago, and which elected Republican Ron DeSantis governor in 2018 may now be vulnerable.

According to publicly available data, registered Republicans in Florida have requested at least 320,000 fewer absentee ballots than in 2016. President Trump doesn’t have that much margin for error in a state he won by only 103,000 votes—especially in a year when older voters may be reluctant to go to the polls for fear of contracting COVID-19.

There are also warning signs coming out of bellwether Arizona, another must-win state. A poll conducted between May 9-11 shows President Trump trailing Joe Biden by 7 points (50-43 percent). Trump won Arizona by 3.5 percent in 2016. It’s worse for Senator Martha McSally, who trails first-time candidate Mark Kelly by 13 points.

So how can President Trump—or any Republican—win? The same poll offers an answer. It asked likely voters if they would be more or less likely to vote for a candidate who had a plan “to make the United States more self-sufficient and to make sure more of the food, energy, and medicine” is produced in America. The results were remarkable. Seventy-five percent said yes, including 88 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of independents, and 64 percent of Democrats. And the issue polls slightly better with women than men (77 percent vs. 73 percent) making it an opportunity for Republicans to close the gender gap.

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The Left Is What It Once Loathed What is the Left, then? Mostly a Jacobin party that operates ad hoc, without principle, or consistency. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 18th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/17/the-left-is-what-it-once-loathed/

Compare the current progressive view about civil liberties against the old liberal positions of the past.

Surveillance and spying on U.S. citizens? Remember liberal Senator Frank Church of Idaho and his 1975 post-Watergate select Senate investigative committee? It found the CIA, FBI, and NSA improperly over three decades had tapped into the phones of Americans, opened their mail, and worked with telecommunications companies to monitor the data of supposedly suspect politicians, actors, celebrities, and political activists. “Collusion” with the communists and the Russians was often the pretense to surveil American citizens.

Consider Church either a bastion of civil liberties protection or a dangerous firebrand who weakened the CIA and FBI. But the point is that the Left’s position had once mostly been that the government’s unelected deep-state intelligence officers simply had too much power to trust. 

Indeed, the ACLU was outraged at what the committee revealed. Church was deified as a liberal hero uncovering government abuse. About the worst thing a government could do, liberals reminded us, was to spy on its own citizens. 

Then we were also warned that the scandal was the result of the government, for over 30 years, targeting mostly liberals on grounds of trumped-up suspicions that they were sympathetic to Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. Yet in addition, the Left argued that the state had no business spying on any American at all, unless it had a certified warrant and ample criminal cause—or we found ourselves in a war with enemies at home among us.

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Stealing The 2020 Election Through The U.S. Mail — Written by J. Frank Bullitt

Posted By on May 18th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/18/stealing-the-2020-election-through-the-u-s-mail/

As we noted in early April, both the New York Times and the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform have agreed that voting by mail has a higher potential for fraud and abuse than other forms of voting.

Writing a few weeks ago for RealClearPolitics, Mark Hemingway pointed out that “a significant increase in mail-in voting this fall could greatly incentivize ‘ballot harvesting,’” in which third parties gather “mail-in ballots on behalf of voters and deliver them to election officials.”

“There’s long been a consensus,” Hemingway continued, “that such a practice incentivizes fraud, and ballot harvesting is illegal in most of the country.”

Apparently it’s a scam that works so well that it “played a key role in ousting several Republican congressmen in Orange County in 2018, a longstanding GOP stronghold” in Southern California that has been moving leftward.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking the Democrats are proposing a mail-in election out of a sense of obligation to health and safety. They are simply doing their best to take advantage of a crisis, and they are highly motivated to do whatever they are able to to remove Trump from the White House.

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YouTube Removes Glazov Gang’s Katie Hopkins Video The truth about ‘Life Under Lockdown in the U.K.’ is too much to handle for the Google-owned video platform.

Posted By on May 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/youtube-removes-glazov-gangs-katie-hopkins-video-frontpagemagcom/

YouTube continues to enforce its totalitarian Deep State obligations diligently. It appears that a recent Katie Hopkins video, produced by a David Horowitz Freedom Center–Glazov Gang collaboration and uploaded to the Glazov Gang channel on April 22, 2020, simply contained too much truth for the Google-owned video platform to handle. YouTube took the video down, stating that it “has been removed for violating YouTube’s Terms of Service.”  How exactly anything Katie said violated its “Terms of Service,” YouTube did not explain.

Katie’s video saw U.K.’s valiant freedom fighter unveil Life Under Lockdown in the U.K., in which she shed a sober and telling light on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Katie discussed the dire consequences of socialized medicare under the Covid-19 crisis, the effects of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the “pandemic,” the lockdown’s consequences on the British economy and on British citizens, and much more. Katie discussed all of these issues in a civilized, factual and scholarly manner. And yet her video was still removed.

We reached out to Katie on her thoughts about YouTube’s removal of her video, and she commented:

The most shameful part of the removing of my video is it assumes people are too stupid to be trusted to form their own opinion. @YouTube is saying you are too thick to think for yourselves.

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Michael Flynn Versus Nidal Hasan Disparities in the deployment of government surveillance. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on May 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/michael-flynn-versus-nidal-hasan-lloyd-billingsley/

The Department of Justice has halted the prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn but judge Emmet Sullivan, who thought the charge should have been treason, is bringing in retired judge John Gleason to argue against the DOJ. The delay provides time to contrast the campaign against Gen. Flynn with government actions against another U.S. military officer.

Gen. Flynn, a Democrat, regarded the previous president as a weak leader and spineless coddler of terrorists. In his speech to the Republican convention in 2016 Flynn said, “We should always remember that our country, was built upon Judeo-Christian values and principles.” Hillary Clinton, Flynn said, “put our nation’s security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private e-mail server,” and “Donald Trump recognizes the threats we face and is not afraid to call them what they are.” That would be radical Islamic terrorists.

The “composite character,” David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama did not want Gen. Flynn to become National Security Advisor, least of all with Trump in the White House. So the president targeted Flynn to facilitate action against Trump that would continue during his presidency.

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Team Obama’s Unmasking Dodge Biden, Clapper and Brennan serve up dubious answers.

Posted By on May 18th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/team-obamas-unmasking-dodge-11589746154?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The media are mostly ignoring the news that 39 Obama officials sought to read the transcripts of Michael Flynn’s conversations with foreigners, but here and there they’ve asked a question. The unpersuasive answers suggest there’s more to learn.

Take Joe Biden, who “unmasked” Mr. Flynn only a few days before leaving office as Vice President. Last week Mr. Biden told ABC that he knew “nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn.” George Stephanopoulos reminded Mr. Biden that he attended a Jan. 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting when the FBI’s Flynn investigation was discussed. Mr. Biden replied that he’d misheard the question and admitted he was “aware that there was, that they’d asked for, an investigation. But that’s all I know about it.”

This was more straightforward than what Mr. Biden told MSNBC when he was asked about his “involvement in the investigation of Michael Flynn.” Mr. Biden replied: “I was never a part or had any knowledge of any criminal investigation into Flynn while I was in office.”

Except at the time there was no criminal investigation into Mr. Flynn—as Mr. Biden knows. In 2016 The FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn, and it was under that pretense that it conducted the interview in which it later claimed that Mr. Flynn lied. The lack of a criminal investigation is the primary reason the Justice Department moved this month to drop its prosecution. Mr. Biden still hasn’t explained why he personally unmasked Mr. Flynn.

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A black activist’s article about Stacey Abrams has a surprising admission By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on May 18th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/a_black_activists_article_about_stacey_abrams_has_a_surprising_admission.html

“How is every journalist employed by the Washington Post not named Jennifer Rubin not completely embarrassed by this Stacey Abrams profile. How does something like this even make it past editors who care about their reputations?”

Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, a failed gubernatorial candidate, is trying something new in American politics: With naked ambition, she’s simultaneously begging for and demanding the Vice President’s spot on the Democrat Party ticket.

The media are dutifully playing along, trying to puff her as something other than a local politician who believes her race and gender cards are a handful of aces. However, in the Washington Post’s laughably reverential paean to Abrams, there’s a peculiar slip revealing what leftists actually think of African-Americans – and it’s all the more aberrant given that the author is himself an African-American.

In some ways, Stacey Abrams is a laudable woman. One of six children, she grew up in an intact family, and excelled in school, eventually earning both a Master of Public Affairs and a law degree. Despite being a leftist activist from an early age, she held real jobs after law school, working as a tax attorney and founding two companies, one a beverage company focusing on babies and toddlers, and the other a consulting firm.

Entering politics, Abrams was elected to the Georgia General Assembly in 2006, representing parts of Atlanta and unincorporated DeKalb county, and held that seat for a decade. She eventually became the Democrat minority leader.

In 2018, Abrams ran for governor, only to lose by 50,000 votes to Brian Kemp. And that’s when she made her name at a national level, not for running and making a good showing, but for refusing to admit that she’d lost. Instead, she dug out the tropes about voter suppression and racism. Abrams insists to this day that she won. In Democrat circles, being a sore loser is a winning issue.

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China’s Happy Harmony Hell By Dave Brat

Posted By on May 18th, 2020

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

David Alan Brat is the dean of the Liberty University School of Business. He served as the U.S. Representative for Virginia’s 7th congressional district from 2014 to 2019. He defeated smug Eric Cantor in the GOP primary and won the general election…..

Dear World: Are you happy yet? This is not a story about coronavirus; it’s worse. It is a story about War, Unrestricted War. The Chinese have promised the world Happiness and Harmony, but have instead lost the “Mandate of Heaven” and delivered Hell. A few courageous experts have been right all along and this is a letter of thanks to them — and a note to the Americans who may want to follow. After you see the scale of deception unleashed upon our country and after your emotions calm, please take economic action! China is at war. Are we?

General Robert Spalding, in his book, “Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept” gives it away in the title. But the stories of deception will send chills up your spine. Up front, the damage from the war is real. “Simply put, 3.4 million US jobs vanished between 2001 and 2017 due to our trade relationship with China….with 75% of the jobs lost in manufacturing.” All of this occurred under the false assumption that this is just “normal free market competition.” How do you adhere to free markets when your competition is communist and does not respect the price system, private property, or the rule of law? Economic elites have no answer. Everyone should know by now that “China welcomes investment, but it won’t let investors take their profits out of the country (China). Chinese companies set up shop all around the world, but the totalitarian CCP (Chinese Communist Party) puts all kinds of limits on foreign companies (USA) growing in China.” Is this the free market system the elites have in mind? Adam Smith knew better.

How has the language and economic logic been so tortured and twisted in China’s favor?

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Saudi Opposition to a Palestinian State Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on May 17th, 2020

 https://bit.ly/2ZnY231

*Notwithstanding Saudi philo-Palestinian talk, Riyadh considers the Palestinian issue a low priority.  It ranks significantly lower than the clear and present lethal threat posed by Iran’s Ayatollahs; the potential tectonic eruption in Iraq; the lethal threat from volcanic Yemen; and the domestic powder keg in the oil-rich and Shia-dominated Qatif and al-Hasa areas. It is much lower than the imminent threats of ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood; the potential threat of Turkey’s Erdogan; the regional implications of the domestic upheaval in Syria and Lebanon; the vulnerability of all pro-US Arab regimes (e.g., Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt), etc.

*The House of Saud does not forget, nor forgive, the Palestinian track record of intra-Arab terrorism and treachery, most notably the 1990 Palestinian collaboration with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which was the most generous Arab host of Palestinians.

*Riyadh is convinced that the Palestinian track record would yield a Palestinian state, which would constitute another rogue anti-Saudi regime. They consider the Palestinians (the Palestinian Authority and Hamas) a role model of subversion and treachery, and active and potential allies of Turkey’s Erdogan, Iran’s Ayatollahs, Hezbollah and the Moslem Brotherhood, as well as rogue elements in Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Libya and Yemen, which aim to topple the House of Saud.

*At the same time, Saudi ties with Israel (as has been the case with all pro-US Arab countries) have expanded substantially – militarily, commercially, technologically, medically and agriculturally – despite the lack of progress on the Palestinian issue, and in the face of mutual threats and challenges.  

*Irrespective of the warm pro-Palestinian Saudi talk, which welcomes every Western dignitary to Saudi Arabia, the Saudi walk has always been cold.

*Saudi Arabia has never flexed its military muscle on behalf of the Palestinians (nor has any other Arab country), while flexing very limited diplomatic muscle.