RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-is-advancing-on-poor-nations-and-the-prognosis-is-troubling-11585149183

The new coronavirus is now taking off in the world’s poorest countries, which join the battle with even fewer weapons than developed nations, some of which have fumbled the pandemic’s early stages.

From Venezuela to Pakistan to the Democratic Republic of Congo—and nearly every developing country between—confirmed cases have started to spike in recent days, a sign the contagion is advancing exponentially, disease-control experts say.

“Extraordinary action is required if we are to prevent a human catastrophe of enormous proportions in our country,” said President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, among the nations hardest hit by the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Addressing the country Monday night, he announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown to be enforced by the military.

South Africa on Wednesday declared 709 confirmed cases of coronavirus, a number the government said has risen sixfold in a week and could rise to hundreds of thousands without decisive action.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ordering a nationwide shutdown, said Tuesday in a televised address: “I appeal with folded hands, don’t come out of your homes.

China, where the outbreak began, had its powerful government to throw at the coronavirus, which across the globe as of Wednesday had infected more than 450,000 and left more than 20,000 dead with Covid-19, the disease the virus causes, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. South Korea could react quickly thanks in part a technologically sophisticated economy. And the West despite its struggles, has robust health-care systems, wealth and deep-rooted institutions to battle the contagion’s spread.

The world’s poorest areas—Africa, parts of Latin America, and Southeast and South Asia—start with few of those advantages. Their health-care systems and social mechanisms to fight the virus often aren’t just at risk of being overwhelmed, many join the epidemic already overwhelmed.

Number of confirmed cases around the world

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15292/germany-hate-postings-day

The Federal Police asked the German public to become informants and notify them about online hate speech….

In view of what Germany faces on the terrorism front, it seems an odd priority for the Federal Police to be hunting down online thought crimes in two nationwide “Action Days against Hate Postings” in one year alone….

In between online thought crimes and terrorists, the German police would seem to have their work cut out.

In Germany, police recently completed their fifth nationwide “Action Day against Hate Postings”.

German authorities initiated the action day more than three years ago; since then, it has been held once a year. According to the Federal Police, the number of recorded cases of hate crime linked to the internet has actually fallen — from 2,458 cases in 2017 to 1,962 in 2018.

Despite the decrease in cases, German authorities nevertheless decided to have not just one, but two action days this year. The first took place on June 6, when German authorities launched coordinated police raids in 13 federal states against suspects who had allegedly posted hate speech online. In a total of 38 cases, homes were searched and suspects interrogated, the Federal Criminal Police Office reported.

The second action day in 2019 took place on November 6, when the Federal Criminal Police Office in Wiesbaden, which coordinated the action, launched police operations in nine federal states — Hesse, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saarland and Saxony — against suspects believed to have posted hate speech online. In 21 cases, there were apartment searches or interrogations.

The decrease in online hate speech, however, is no cause for celebration, according to the Federal Police:

“Many criminally relevant posts are not displayed or are not made known to the security authorities as they are expressed in closed forums and discussion groups.”

Instead, the Federal Police asked the German public to become informants and notify them about online hate speech:

“Support us and contribute to the fight against hate crime: … Anyone who encounters hate postings on the net or becomes a victim should report this to the police. Some federal states have internet portals available for this purpose, through which anyone can also report such crimes anonymously. An overview of these online stations can be found at: www.bka.de/DE/KontaktAufnehmen/Strafanzeigen/strafanzeigen_node.html or on the Internet portal of the German police: www.polizei.de”.

Regarding hate postings, according to Federal Police, 80% of online hate crimes are “incitement to hate”, as well as “insult, coercion and threats”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15802/britain-huawei-china

“China is trying to turn its health crisis into a geopolitical opportunity. It is launching a soft power campaign aimed at filling the vacuum left by the United States.” — Yu Jie, a senior research fellow at London’s Chatham House

China’s cynical attempts to use the coronavirus pandemic to its own advantage are not just deeply unethical: they should be taken as a warning that Beijing is not to be trusted, a lesson the West should take on board as it contemplates its future relationship with the Chinese, on trade and other issues such a 5G.

In Britain, for example, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision earlier this year to allow Huawei access to the country’s new 5G network was taken despite the fact that the country’s security services have long-regarded Huawei as a “high-risk vendor”.

Mr Johnson’s decision in favour of Huawei continuing its involvement in constructing the 5G network is said to have been influenced by threats from Beijing that Britain’s vital trading relationship with China would be adversely affected if Huawei was excluded.

China’s shameful attempt to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to further its own global ambitions should be seen as yet further evidence of the mounting threat Beijing poses to the West.

The blatant hypocrisy of China’s attempts to use the pandemic for its own ends should persuade countries such as Britain to undertake a fundamental reappraisal of their relationship with Beijing, especially when it comes to sensitive technological issues, such as allowing the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei access to the 5G network.

Far from being embarrassed that the rank incompetence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in dealing with the initial outbreak has resulted in the world suffering its worst public health crisis in a century, Beijing has instead embarked on a charm offensive aimed at providing support for affected countries.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/christian-martyrs-islamic-jihad-raymond-ibrahim/

Last February 15 marked the five year anniversary of the martyrdom of 21 Christians—20 from Egypt and one from Ghana.  One human rights group summarized the incident in a statement:

This week in 2015, 21 men were brutally beheaded on a Mediterranean beach in Libya, by members of ISIS. They had been captured by ISIS a few months earlier and pressured to renounce their faith in Christ and convert to Islam. These 21 modern martyrs chose their faith and love for Jesus Christ over the opportunity to extend their mortal lives….  All were given the opportunity to convert to Islam to save their lives, yet each chose the love they had for Jesus above the love they had for their families and own lives. Reportedly, the Ghanaian captive on seeing the faith of his fellow Coptic Orthodox captives chose their faith and death over saving himself.

The slain are ultimately modern day reflections of an ancient (and ongoing) phenomenon that permeates nearly fourteen centuries of history: Muslims slaughtering Christians who refuse to renounce Christ and embrace Muhammad.

Indeed, earlier this month, on March 6, the martyrdom of 42 other Christians was commemorated.  They too were beheaded—1,171 years before half their number (the 21 Egyptians/Ghanaian) were executed under very similar circumstances.  Known as the 42 Martyrs of Amorium, their dramatic story follows:

In 838, Caliph al-Mu‘tasim—at the head of eighty thousand slave-soldiers—burst into Amorium, one of the Eastern Roman Empire’s largest and most important cities. They burned and razed it to the ground and slaughtered countless; everywhere there were “bodies heaped up in piles,” recalled a chronicler. The invaders locked those who sought sanctuary inside their churches and set the buildings aflame; trapped Christians could be heard crying kyrie eleison—“Lord have mercy!” in Greek—while being roasted alive. Hysterical “women covered their children, like chickens, so as not to be separated from them, either by sword or slavery.” 

About half of the city’s seventy thousand citizens were slaughtered, the rest hauled off in chains.  There was such a surplus of human booty that when the caliph came across four thousand male prisoners he ordered them executed on the spot. Because there “were so many women’s convents and monasteries” in this populous Christian city, “over a thousand virgins were led into captivity, not counting those that had been slaughtered. They were given to the Moorish and Turkish slaves, so as to assuage their lust,” laments the chronicler.

When the young emperor, Theophilus (r. 829–842), heard about the sack of Amorium—his hometown, chosen by the caliph for that very reason, to make the sting hurt all the more—he fell ill and died three years later, aged 28, reportedly from sorrow.  Meanwhile, the Muslim poet Abu Tammam (805‐845) celebrated the caliph’s triumph, since “You have left the fortunes of the sons of Islam in the ascendant, and the polytheists [Christians] and the abode of polytheism in decline.”

Among the many captives carted off to Iraq were forty-two notables, mostly from the military and clerical classes.  Due to their prestigious status and in order to make them trophies of Islam, they were repeatedly pressured to convert:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trudeaus-coronavirus-power-grab-11585174923?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Toronto

“Emergency bill would grant cabinet sweeping powers to tax and spend without parliamentary approval through end of 2021,” announced Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper Monday. I readied for a feeling of resignation: I guess Aung San Suu Kyi really has lost it. Or perhaps cynicism: Putin decided to make it official, eh? But to my surprise, the article was about Canada and its progressive prime minister, Justin Trudeau. If this is multiculturalism, he’s taken it too far.

Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party planned to introduce economic relief legislation Tuesday morning and had already distributed copies to some opposition parliamentarians in preparation. At 44 pages, the draft bill was relatively brief. Then again, how complicated is it to define arbitrary power?

The bill would have allowed Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet to raise taxes, impose new taxes, spend and borrow by fiat, all without a vote in Parliament. Apparently the coronavirus pandemic is so dire that Liberals thought there wouldn’t be time, at least until 2022, to vote on matters of fiscal policy.

This power grab quickly fizzled. Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals won a mere 33% of the aggregate popular vote in this past October’s election, the lowest percentage for a governing party in Canadian history. Leading a minority government, the prime minister needs some support from his opponents to enact legislation. How did he imagine that conversation would go?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15765/muslim-extremists-coronavirus

According to the report, the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS have, through a number of fatwas, called on Muslims to produce “human biological weapons” to attack the enemies of Islam.

In addition, 35% of the fatwas judged that the outbreak of the virus underscored the need for women to wear the niqab.

The report noted that Islamist cleric Osama Hijazi recently claimed that wearing the niqab is an “effective treatment” for the coronavirus.

The bad news is that extremist Muslims and their allies are again exposing their contempt for human life, including the life of Muslims who oppose their ideology, terrorism and jihad. These are the Muslims that urgently need the world’s help.

As countries across the world are turning themselves inside out to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, Muslim extremists and terrorists have been expending their energy on promoting terror attacks against other Muslims as well as “infidels.”

These terrorists and extremists are probably praying for the “infidels” to discover a vaccine for the virus — thus enabling them to return to their mosques and resume their calls for killing the “infidels.” Many Arab and Islamic countries have banned prayers in mosques to help prevent contagion during the war on the coronavirus.

As scientists and other “infidels” around the world, including Israel, are working around the clock to find a vaccine for the virus, the Muslim Brotherhood organization and some of its allies are issuing fatwas (Islamic religious opinions) that expose dangerous goals, a dangerous ideology, and a disregard for human life.

Sheikh Aid al-Qarni, for instance, long affiliated with the Sahwah (“Awakening”) branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, said — before his detention, death sentence and public recantation in Saudi Arabia:

“I pray to Allah that He will make the enemies fall into their own trap and that He will destroy the Jews and their helpers from among the Christians and the Communists, and that He will turn them into the Muslims’ spoils. I praise the Jihad, the sacrifice, and the resistance against the occupiers in Iraq. We curse them all of them every night and pray that Allah will annihilate them, tear them apart, and grant us victory over them… ”

In another video, al-Qarni remarked, “Throats must be slit and skulls must be shattered…This is the path to victory, to shahada, and to sacrifice.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/cannibal-man-wuhan-lloyd-billingsley/

Vince Weiguang Li was born in Dandong, People’s Republic of China, on April 30, 1968, and graduated from University of Wuhan Institute of Technology with a degree in computer science. From 1994-1998 he reportedly worked as a software engineer in Beijing, but in Canada, where Li immigrated in 2001, he worked at menial jobs, fast-food restaurants, Wal-Mart and such. Li became a Canadian citizen in 2006, and on July 30, 2008, he boarded a Greyhound bus for Winnipeg.

Li sat next to Timothy McLean, 22, returning from work at a summer fair. Li suddenly brandished a large knife and began stabbing McLean in the chest. The larger, stronger man killed McLean then cut off his head, displaying it like a trophy to terrified passengers outside the halted bus.

Li frightened off would-be heroes then reentered the bus, where he dismembered McLean and began eating his victim’s innards. Li had no gun but a heavily armed Royal Canadian Mounted Police squad did not force entry and take down the murderer. Instead they waited several hours until Li broke through a window. The “Canadian cannibal,” as headlines described him, was then subdued and arrested. Officers declined to identify the killer or the victim.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/muslim-priorities-dangerous-pandemic-anjuli-pandavar/

Yesterday I popped into hospital to have a recovering wound on my leg checked. The pedestrian entrance had been blocked off, with a temporary field hospital set up right on the road. The doctors at the entrance wanted to know whether I had any of the COVID-19 symptoms. I did not, but asked them to check anyway. I’m clear. It’s safe to continue reading.

Had I still been a Muslim, this very simple no-brainer encounter with doctors would have  thrown up any number of complications:

1. I might’ve objected to being asked such a question because I’m a Muslim and Allah protects me. They should ask such questions of infidels.

2. I might’ve refused to be checked, objecting that Shari’a determines that a Muslim shall not submit to an infidel.

3. I might’ve refused to be checked on the grounds that my faith is strong. As a Muslim, dying of a virus benefits me as I become a martyr and will have a good Afterlife.

4. If they told me that I might infect others, I would say that it is my duty as a Muslim to adhere to the doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’. If it is Muslims I’m infecting, Allah will take care of them. If I’m infecting infidels, then Allah will be pleased with me.

5. Had I previously seen sheikh Saajid Lipham’s Thoughts on Coronavirus (COVID-19) video of a couple of days ago, I would have asked myself what my priorities are: this life or the next life? Who knows how I would’ve answered that question? The point is that had I still been a Muslim, the distinct possibility exists that I would’ve prioritised the “next life” of this one, and refused the test.

6. Had I previously seen sheikh Yasir Qadhi’s Advice in Light of Coronavirus (COVID-19) video of last week, I might’ve lectured the arrogant doctors that no matter what they do, if Allah decrees that we will all die of the virus, then we will all die of the virus. If Allah decrees that we will all be cured, then we will all be cured, even if we all infect one another. I might then have turned around and walked away, feeling sorry for the poor fools who do not have Islam.