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August 2020

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Bangalore Burning India’s Charlie Hebdo moment. Radhika Singh

By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/bangalore-burning-radhika-singh/

It was pretty late at night; I don’t really remember what exact time though. I was watching some random videos when the phone started to ring. “Don’t get out of the house. Stay put,” warned a friend calling from Delhi.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Your city is burning.”

“What?” I gasped in disbelief.

Bangalore is a peaceful place. The crowd is educated, civilized, white-collared corporate types. Riots are not part of the norm in this city of IT parks. I switched on the TV. Yes. The city was indeed engulfed in flames. The mad mob had come for Bangalore now.

***

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, with their fake narratives about my country, have convinced the world that we are a living hell for the “minorities” — the Muslims who constitute the second largest religious denomination in this country. Far from the truth, these stories are nothing but an orchestrated attempt to paint the Muslim population as a meek, orphaned and harmless segment of our society. The reporting perpetually hides atrocities perpetrated by Muslims and promulgates amplified versions of minor incidents involving a Muslim “victim” — just as the media does worldwide.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mounting Evidence Points to Hezbollah Culpability in Beirut Blast Hezbollah’s central role in Lebanon’s affairs precludes any conclusion but guilt. Ari Lieberman

By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/mounting-evidence-points-hezbollah-culpability-ari-lieberman/

Within an hour of the massive explosion that rocked Beirut on August 4, Hezbollah denied any culpability. Lebanon’s president, Michel Aoun, considered a close Hezbollah ally, immediately attributed the blast to the presence of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that ignited after a nearby warehouse housing fireworks caught fire. Lebanese authorities claim that the ammonium nitrate was confiscated from a Russian cargo vessel in 2013 after the ship took a detour from its original destination and docked at the port.

The ammonium nitrate, which can be used to make explosives, was stored at the port for seven years before it blew up with catastrophic consequences. There is ample reason to believe that Hezbollah was responsible for the blast and resulting carnage. The collective evidence is in fact, damning.

First, one must understand that in Lebanon, Hezbollah controls all ports of entry, either directly through force of arms or indirectly, through graft. The obvious purpose is to control the flow of weapons, money and narcotics that pass through these ports of entry. Therefore, it is logical to assume that Hezbollah was aware of the presence of the ammonium nitrate.

In 2008 the Lebanese cabinet headed by the Western-backed Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, attempted to remove security cameras installed by Hezbollah at Beirut International Airport. The cabinet also attempted to remove Brigadier General Wafiq Shkeir, widely regarded as a Hezbollah stooge, from his post as airport security chief. Finally, the government attempted to close separate telecommunication infrastructure that Hezbollah was installing throughout the country.

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Austria Must Grapple With Its Past Holocaust education for young Austrians is essential.Joseph Puder

By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/austria-must-grapple-its-past-joseph-puder/

Austria today is one of the friendlier members of the European Union (EU) towards the Jewish state. In fact, the current Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz has been particularly friendly toward Israel, and he regularly speaks out against antisemitism. He has also been the one EU leader to convey Benjamin Netanyahu’s fair charges regarding EU policies toward Israel. Kurz’s Austria is the only West European nation whose government is actively shielding the Jewish state from EU sanctions. This year Austria’s parliament passed a resolution calling the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel a form of antisemitism. It also labeled Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Now, Chancellor Kurz has eased conditions for Israeli citizens to receive Austrian citizenship. Unfortunately, like his predecessors, he has thus far failed to confront Austria’s dark past, specifically Austrians behavior during the Holocaust.  Austria has done very little about educating its young people on the Holocaust or prosecuting its many living Nazi criminals.

Austria conducted two trials of Nazi criminals, both in the 1960’s. The first was the trial of Franz Murer, the SS-Oberscharfuhrer, also known as the “butcher of Vilnius.” Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor Nazi hunter, managed to get him prosecuted in 1963. The trial took place in Graz, Austria, lasting a week, and ended with the Austrians acquitting Murer. The second trial was that of Franz Novak, a senior aide to Adolf Eichmann. He stood trial on October 12, 1964, in Vienna, charged with participating in the deportation of 400,000 Hungarian Jews to the death camps in Poland. Convicted and imprisoned, he was pardoned by Austria’s President Rudolf Kirchschlager. Austrians have not bothered to grapple with their role in the Holocaust crimes. The one-time Austria was forced to face reality was in 1986, when Austrian Kurt Waldheim, the former UN Secretary-General, was running for the Austrian presidency. Press inquiries into his past revealed his role in the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, Austrians elected him as their president. Embarrassed by these revelations concerning Waldheim’s past, in 1991, Austria’s Chancellor Franz Vranitzky declared his nation’s responsibility for Nazi crimes. Austrians, however, were still unable to face up to their sordid history. They went from denial of their role in the Holocaust to historical revisionism.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

For the Democrats’ sake, I hope the DNC viewership is low Organizing a virtual event is a challenge, not to say an exercise in surrealistic self-expression Roger Kimball

By on August 20th, 2020

https://spectator.us/democrats-sake-dnc-viewership-wednesday/

I almost gave tonight’s DNC performance a miss. How could they top the fey chap pretending to be a bat while miming to a poor rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ as a collage of kneeling athletes in ‘Black Lives Matter’ t-Shirts flitted by behind him? It was…special.

I’d say that the chap who tweeted that it was ‘the moment Trump won reelection’ was right, except that there have been so many such moments: positive ones like President Trump’s magnificent speech at Mount Rushmore last month, as well as negative ones like the Biden campaign’s pick of Kamala Harris as his running mate. One wag said that that decision was a huge in-kind donation to the Trump campaign. That sounds right to me.

I want to minute another perspicacious tweet about the mincing batman-For-What-It’s-Worth performance from my friend Roger L. Simon: ‘Stop, hey, what’s that sound…of the Democratic party’s brains falling out of their heads.’ Anyway, I looked it up: the bat fellow with the PoMo Liberace bat duds is called Billy Porter and the geezer playing the guitar was…Stephen Stills. Wow. Nearly 60 years ago he wrote that anti-war anthem. And here he was again, still. Old rockers never die: they just refuse to fade away.

Let’s admit frankly that the DNC was laboring under extraordinary duress. No, I am not thinking of the fact that their nominee is a senile basement dweller who cannot put two sentences together. That is a liability, true, but it is self-chosen. I am thinking rather of the pressure of coronavirus hysteria, which has shut down most of the country and certainly shut down the conventions of both parties. It will be interesting to see if the RNC handles things any better from a technical point of view. I hope they forgo the Zoom clips of people at home clapping: they are just pathetic.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Conformity to a Lie Academia’s monolithic belief in systemic racism will further erode American institutions and the principles of our civilization. Heather Mac Donald

By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/academia-systemic-racism

The lethal arrest of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May triggered widespread riots and a torrent of contempt for America from virtually every institution in the country. Businesses large and small, the education establishment, and the press rushed to condemn the country’s purportedly endemic racism, implicitly accusing the majority of Americans of destroying “black lives.” Banks and law firms pledged that hiring and promotions would now be even more race-conscious than before. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured forth from corporate coffers into activist groups; the corporate benefactors hoped to dismantle America’s white supremacy, they announced.

Colleges and universities also promised increased diversity spending, though in amounts dwarfed by those corporate outpourings. Nevertheless, the academic response to Floyd’s death and the ensuing violence will have the greatest impact on the nation’s future. Academia was the ideological seedbed for that violence and for its elite justifications; it will prove just as critical in the accelerated transformation of the country.

Fealty to “diversity” and denunciations of white privilege have been a unifying theme in academia for decades, of course. What’s different this time is the sheer venom of the denunciations. College presidents and deans competed for the most sweeping indictment of the American polity, rooted in the claim that blacks are everywhere and at all times under threat.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The White House Prepared for a Pandemic A September 2019 report laid the groundwork for Operation Warp Speed.By Joel M. Zinberg and  Tomas J. Philipson

By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-white-house-prepared-for-a-pandemic-11597792593

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched the Democrats’ broadside against the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response. “Our current federal government is dysfunctional and incompetent,” he told virtual conventioneers Monday in a recorded speech. “It couldn’t fight off the virus. In fact, it didn’t even see it coming.”

The report was produced by the Council of Economic Advisers at the behest of the National Security Council’s biodefense team. It detailed the large health and economic losses that could happen from flu pandemic in the U.S. The report discussed how the lack of private market incentives had led to underinvestment in developing and using innovative technologies that can quickly produce vaccines for a new virus.

Influenza vaccines have primarily been manufactured in chicken eggs for the past 70 years. The process is too slow to produce a new vaccine for a novel, unexpected virus and impairs the vaccines’ efficacy against the flu. Public-private partnerships created under a 2006 statute led to the development of newer, faster manufacturing techniques. But these vaccines are more expensive and haven’t been widely adopted.

The main issue is that vaccine developers aren’t rewarded for innovation. Their research-and-development and investment costs for improved vaccines are recovered only through sales that occur in the unlikely event that a pandemic occurs—there have only been four flu pandemics the past 100 years—even though vaccine innovation provides benefits from risk-reduction before any pandemic. Vaccines have insurance value today that provides protection against possible future damage, regardless of whether a pandemic occurs. That means the social return from innovative vaccines is greater than their private return to developers.

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