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Why Trump Should NOT Send Corona Aid to Palestinians By Moshe Phillips

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/why-trump-should-not-send-corona-aid-to-palestinians/2020/04/21/

President Trump’s decision to send millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority is a grave mistake. Although motivated by humanitarian sentiment, the aid package will serve a very different purpose — it will free up funds for the PA to continue paying salaries to terrorists.

The reason that the United States cut off economic aid to the PA in the first place was precisely because providing that aid allowed the PA to maintain its policy of paying more than $134-million to imprisoned terrorists and to the families of dead and released terrorists.

The legislation mandating the cut-off, called the Taylor Force Act, was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in early 2018. The law did not cut off only aid that was used directly to pay terrorists. The law cut off all U.S. economic aid — because aid is fungible, so even aid which goes to, say, hospitals, frees the PA from having to help those hospitals, so it can use the money instead for terrorists.

And that’s exactly what’s about to happen.

The Trump Administration announced on April 16 that it will — through some legal loophole — send $5-million in American taxpayer money to PA hospitals to help cope with the coronavirus crisis. Sounds like a kind humanitarian gesture. But it’s badly misguided.

That $5-million is money which the PA would have otherwise had to pay, since obviously, it’s not going to let its hospitals collapse, especially in the midst of the crisis. So the PA will be able to turn around and apportion another $5-million to its “Pay for Slay” program.

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MY SAY: NOTES FROM NEW YORK CITY EPICENTER

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

The guv and the mayor and coercive role reversed children decree that all “senioras” and “seniores” must shelter in place.

All I can do is quote Richard Lovelace the English poet (1642) who wrote:

“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coronavirus: The West’s 9/11 Moment by Richard Kemp

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15915/coronavirus-west-911-moment

Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on…. Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.

For decades China has been working on its three-pronged strategy: building its economy and fighting capability, including intelligence, technology, cyber and space as well as hard military power; developing global influence to exploit resources and secure control; thrusting back and dividing the US and its capitalist allies.

China’s arms exports are not motivated primarily by revenue generation, but as a means to impose influence and control, create proxies and challenge the US.

Chinese investment penetrates every corner of the UK, giving unparalleled influence here as in so many countries. Plans to allow Chinese investment and technology into our nuclear power programme and 5G network will build vulnerability into our critical national infrastructure of an order not seen in any other Western nation. Even the BBC, which receives funding from China, has produced and promoted a propaganda video supporting Huawei to the alarm of some of its own journalists. All this despite MI5’s repeated warnings that Chinese intelligence continues to work against British interests at home and abroad.

The coronavirus pandemic is a 9/11 moment. Al Qaida had been at war with the West for years before the destruction of the twin towers. But it took that barbarism to galvanise its largely supine prey into action.

Now we have Covid-19. Unlike 9/11 we have seen no evidence so far that China deliberately unleashed this virus on the world. There is certainly evidence, however, that it resulted from the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and that Beijing’s habitually duplicitous and criminally irresponsible actions allowed it to spread around the globe, leading to tens of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.

Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on. The reality, in Beijing’s book, is that the cold war between China and the West, which began with the communist seizure of China in 1949, never ended. Despite the Sino-Soviet split and subsequent US-China rapprochement in the early 1970s, for the Chinese leadership the US was still the implacable enemy.

Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coronavirus: Belgian Carnage by Drieu Godefridi

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15916/coronavirus-belgium-carnage

There were no masks, so the government decided to announce that no masks were needed. This supreme culmination of the ineptitude of the Belgian government still can be found online on the personal website of Health Minister Maggie De Block: “Wearing masks to protect yourself from the coronavirus makes little sense”.

No masks, no screening, almost no tests and people left to die in nursing homes — that has been Belgium’s situation in the middle of the worst pandemic since the Spanish Influenza of 1918. This Belgian carnage is entirely due to the tragic incompetence of the Belgian governing “elites” — and was completely avoidable.

It is too soon to make a final assessment on the management of COVID-19 by the countries of the world, but one thing is sure: Belgium is in the middle of a great carnage.

It all began in 2015, when the government of Prime Minister Charles Michel (today’s European Council president) decided to destroy Belgium’s entire “strategic stock” of 63 million protective face-masks, including the precious FFP2 type — 1,200 pallets carefully stored and guarded by the army in the Belgrade Barracks, in Namur. Because they were “out of date,” said Minister of Health Maggie De Block, who is still on the job today. “Not at all,” said the main union of the Belgian army, “these masks were incinerated… to ‘make room’ for housing refugees.” In 2015, Belgium and Europe were overwhelmed by migrants at the invitation of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the laws of the EU and the European Convention on Human Rights made it effectively impossible to reject them.

The entire strategic stock was thus incinerated, and never replaced — another decision of De Block, which, given the regularity of epidemics and pandemics, amounts to a crime. “To govern is to foresee”, said Emile de Girardin.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Privilege of Identity Politics The ritual of offense has been rehearsed a million times before, but it doesn’t fly when death and disease, job loss and financial ruin are in play. By Mark Bauerlein

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/21/the-privilege-of-identity-politics/

Last month, Melinda Gates announced that “we need to apply a gender lens to solving this [coronavirus] crisis.” She linked to a March 12 story in the New York Times reporting that with women making up to 70 percent of healthcare workers worldwide, women are at “disproportionate risk.” COVID-19 may very well end up “exacerbating gender, social and economic fault lines,” Gates claimed.

Buried in the Times story, however, was an inconvenient detail. It appears as an afterthought in parentheses at the end of a paragraph. The preceding phrase talks about women being “squarely in the virus’ path,” but then comes this: “(although some early studies of coronavirus in China suggest men have a higher death rate).”

Well, one would think that before asserting the greater vulnerability of women to the disease a reporter would check on mortality rates or at least wait until more information comes in. But, of course, that would be to allow the possibility that males have a higher susceptibility, and that would yield the wrong gender equality. The whole story would be shot. Let’s go with the female vulnerability instead.

That’s what Melinda Gates did. After all, she has steered piles of cash at the Gates Foundation to the issue. Last October she wrote a story in Time Magazine under the headline, “Here’s Why I’m Committing $1 Billion to Promote Gender Equality.” And on March 7, she published an op-ed in the New York Times with the title, “How to Start a Conversation About Gender Equality.” A photo accompanying the story showed a sign announcing, “WOMEN’S RIGHTS are HUMAN RIGHTS.”

That conversation might begin with this: Can you explain why men are more likely than women to die of coronavirus, thus far making up more than two-thirds of all fatalities?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Army Ranger School Is a Laboratory of Human Endurance Will by Bardenwerper

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.outsideonline.com/2411895/army-ranger-school?utm_source=pocket-newtab

The military’s toughest training challenges have a lot in common with outdoor sufferfests like the Barkley Marathons and the Leadville Trail 100: you have to be fit and motivated to make the starting line, but your mind and spirit are what carry you to the end. A Ranger graduate breaks down an ordeal that shapes some of the nation’s finest soldiers.

Why the hell am I standing here, shivering on a remote mountain trail in the Appalachians?

The answer can be found in my dreams. Starting in 2006, I spent 13 violent months serving as an infantry officer in Iraq. Thankfully, I rarely revisit that experience while I sleep. But hardly a month goes by when I don’t wake up with a jolt, my heart racing. Each dream is different, but the basic plot is the same: I have to go back to Army Ranger School, which I graduated from in 2004.

And so I do.

In late February of 2019, I join 363 soldiers and officers comprising Ranger Class 05-19 at Camp Rogers, which occupies a remote corner of Fort Benning, just outside Columbus, Georgia. These young men, and a few women, are starting what is arguably the most demanding course in the military. (The Navy SEALS would beg to differ. Debate about whose training is tougher is never-ending.)

For the next 61 days, I’ll track them as they shed their ranks and any past military accomplishments. The course they’re taking on is divided into three parts: Benning Phase; Mountain Phase, at Camp Frank D. Merrill, in north Georgia; and Swamp Phase, at Camp James E. Rudder, on the Florida Panhandle. Aside from a few short trips home to check on my family, I’ll lug my own, much lighter rucksack alongside the students, over mountains and through swamps, as I experience what I believe is the first opportunity for a journalist to embed with a class all the way, observing every aspect of their training.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Can We Please ‘McKinsey-Proof’ America? Chris Buskirk

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/21/can-we-please-mckinsey-proof-america/

The “experts” Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to hire to help New York reopen have a history of doing little more than helping failing institutions fail in style while growing rich in the process.

Andrew Cuomo has a plan for a “Trump-proof” reopening of New York. Or actually, he has a plan to hire some people to develop a plan. According to CNBC, “Cuomo has hired high-powered consultants to develop a science-based plan for the safe economic reopening of the region.” Wow, a science-based plan from high-powered consultants!

The report goes on to say that these consultants will be “producing models on testing, infections, and other key data points that will underpin decisions . . . .”

Expert models have been pretty spot-on this year, so this sounds really amazing. Remember how last month, a model by an expert predicted 2.2 million Americans would die from COVID-19? Or how about the professionals (and nonprofessionals!) who just a few weeks ago were telling us that masks don’t work and that ordinary people lack the proper training and competence to wear one right anyway? Now, they’re mandatory.

So who are these consultants who will advise America’s loudest governor? The answer, of course, is McKinsey & Company. Some people—not me, you understand—have been known to describe McKinsey’s business model thus: “You give them your watch so they can tell you what time it is.”

No, I wouldn’t say that. It’s too generous.

One of Cuomo’s top advisers said, “we are reaching out to top experts and other professionals to come up with a bullet-proof plan.” Bullet-proof. So far Cuomo’s track-record on planning for the future is pretty dismal. But then again, the “top experts” he’s hired have pretty dismal records, too.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Far Left Groups Aiming to Elect Another Anti-Israel House Democrat Targeting pro-Israel House Foreign Relations Committee Chair. Joseph Klein

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/far-left-groups-aiming-elect-another-anti-israel-joseph-klein/

Jamaal Bowman is one of these stage-managed candidates who would push the House Democratic caucus even further to the left and add to the hate-Israel bloc. He must be stopped.

The far-left organization Justice Democrats is continuing its campaign to purge certain left of center, pro-Israel Democrats from Congress. In 2018, Justice Democrats endorsed Democratic-Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – all radicals who support the anti-Semitic Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS). One of Justice Democrats’ current targets is long-time Israel-supporter Rep. Eliot Engel, who is the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Justice Democrats has endorsed Jamaal Bowman (pictured above), a middle school principal at the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx, who is mounting a primary challenge against Rep. Engel. There are other primary challengers seeking to unseat Engel, but Bowman is Justice Democrats’ choice.

Rep. Engel is normally a reliable Democrat vote against President Trump’s domestic and foreign policy agendas. He has supported progressive initiatives including the New Green Deal and received top grades for his voting record from a host of leftwing organizations. But that is not good enough for even more extreme leftist groups such as Justice Democrats. Engel is nowhere near as radical as his primary challenger Bowman who, for example, tweeted on April 16, 2020 that “There is systemic oppression and terror and racism that lives in every American institution.” The following day, Bowman tweeted, “I support a $1 trillion investment over 10 years to rebuild public housing into green social housing with net zero carbon emissions.” Bowman called “white male domestic terrorism” the “biggest issue in our country.” He also claimed that “99.9 percent of our immigrant neighbors that come here, come here in peace and come here looking for asylum.” Bowman, whose own school registered well below the New York City-wide average in its students’ scores on the state’s math and reading exams, has attacked public school standardized testing as “a form of modern-day slavery.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Tampa Terror Convict’s Coronavirus Makeover News stations shill for Palestinian Islamic Jihad member Hatem Fariz and PIJ mosque. Joe Kaufman

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/tampa-terror-convicts-coronavirus-makeover-joe-kaufman-0/

This month, Tampa, Florida’s local news affiliates headed over to the al-Qassam Mosque, a.k.a. Islamic Community of Tampa (ICT), to get footage of the mosque and its director, Hatem Fariz, distributing food, in what ICT and these networks are claiming is an effort to help the neighborhood during the coronavirus crisis. Yet what these news outlets are ignoring, in the process, is the extensive terrorist history of ICT and Fariz. Any perceived goodwill coming from the two is nothing more than a cynical effort to whitewash their radical past and distract from their extremist present by exploiting the crisis for a ‘feel good’ photo op.

Fox, ABC and CBS were all on hand to take film footage of ICT’s community food distribution project, as titled by the mosque, ‘ICT Relief Program For All.’ The results were news puff pieces making ICT and its director appear as saints. Fox 13’s reporter Mark Wilson began his segment with the following: “We continue to see people all across the Tampa Bay area, who are really stepping up, to see people struggling and help them… We certainly found that today at the Tampa Bay Islamic Center. Fox anchor Kelly Ring ended the segment with, “What a blessing!”

ICT or al-Qassam was the brainchild of then-University of South Florida (USF) professor Sami al-Arian. The mosque was named after Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, the man who was the inspiration for the founding of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Al-Arian, a co-founder of PIJ, had succeeded in creating a PIJ network throughout the Tampa-area. In April 2006, al-Arian pled guilty to conspiring to provide services to PIJ and later was deported from the US. He now makes his home in Turkey, where he is a professor at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University and the head of the school’s Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA).

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Progressive Governors Indulge Their Inner Despot What really lurks behind their façade of concern for the “people” and the “oppressed.” Bruce Thornton

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/progressive-governors-indulge-their-inner-despot-bruce-thornton/

Poet Sylvia Plath’s slur against women, that they “adore a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute,” is more true about progressives, with one big difference: they want to be the ones wear the boot. Behind their façade of therapeutic concern for the “people” and the “oppressed” lies something that Vladimir Lenin was honest enough to express in 1906: the lust for “power, which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.”

Thankfully, those impulses so far have been checked by our Constitutional order, which was created to inhibit the concentration and excesses of power that threatens citizen freedom. But as we have seen over the last century, at times of crisis the technocratic progressives have chipped away at those Constitutional guardrails and serially encroached on our freedoms. The current virus crisis is the latest opportunity for the Dems to indulge their inner despots.

We’ve all seen the catalogue of overweening unilateral diktats enforced by police power coming down from Democrat governors. Under the guise of enforcing social distancing in order to slow the spread of the disease, governors have quickly violated the Bill of Rights: closing gun stores at the same time they release felons from prison; shutting down church services while leaving liquor stores open; criminalizing the right to peaceful assembly; arbitrarily deeming some economic activities as “essential,” like abortion clinics and pot dispensaries, while proscribing others like buying paint or vegetable seeds. Even our freedom of movement that doesn’t endanger others, such as surfing alone or playing with our children in a deserted park, has been interdicted by overzealous police.