WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coronavirus Poses a Greater Threat to the Ayatollahs than US Sanctions Do by Con Coughlin

Posted By on April 2nd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15836/coronavirus-iran-sanctions

The Iranian regime’s failure to grasp the significance of the outbreak in its own country has led 16 other countries in the region to claim that their own outbreaks originated in Iran. These include Iraq, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates.

The European aid package, which is said to be worth $548,000, is the first transaction conducted under a trade mechanism known as the Instrument In Support Of Trade Exchanges, or Instex, which has been set up by the Europeans to enable them to barter humanitarian goods and food with Tehran after the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal.

Tehran would be well-advised, though, not to regard the aid delivery as raising the prospect of the sanctions being eased. The new trading arrangements set up by Europe have been designed not to breach the Trump administration’s policy of applying “maximum pressure” against Iran, so that Instex can only be used for the delivery of humanitarian aid and food.

This means that, while the aid delivery might help to fight the coronavirus pandemic, it will do little to alleviate the pressure on Iran’s incompetent, and increasingly unpopular, leadership.

The Iranian regime’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic could ultimately pose a greater threat to the survival of the ayatollahs than the impact of Washington’s uncompromising sanctions regime.

Up until the coronavirus outbreak, the main challenge facing the clerical regime was the devastating impact the Trump administration’s hard-hitting sanctions were having on the Iranian economy.

With the economy shrinking at the rate of 10 percent a year, and unemployment hovering around the 20 percent mark, the regime was under increasing pressure from anti-government protesters angry at the regime’s mishandling of the economy.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Truth about the National Security Council’s Pandemic Team By Rebeccah Heinrichs

Posted By on April 2nd, 2020

ttps://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-truth-national-security-council-pandemic-team/

If anyone is to blame for the spread of the novel coronavirus, it’s ultimately Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party, thanks to its lies and obfuscations. Nonetheless, at this stage in the pandemic, President Trump is responsible for protecting Americans, working with our allies, and mitigating the effects of COVID-19.

Many are already condemning the Trump administration’s handling of the disease. It’s generally too early for that. We won’t be able to see the extent of the wisdom in most of the administration’s decisions and the timing of them until the country gets through this crisis, and we have the benefit of hindsight. Even so, the scale and scope of the domestic response would have been much better informed had we had more information sooner from the Chinese.

As for the matter of containing and mitigating the disease, Americans should have an idea about whether they can have confidence in their government. Dealing with a potentially devastating new disease to which the population has no immunity and of which there are no known vaccines is frightening enough without worrying about the government’s competence.

That’s why this charge from former Obama-administration officials — including Beth Cameron, who served as the senior director for global health security and biodefense on the National Security Council (NSC) under Obama — is so serious: that the Trump administration’s decision to “dismantle” the directorate the Obama administration created to quarterback pandemic responses is to blame for “leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19.”

Former Trump officials, including former national-security adviser John Bolton and Tim Morrison, have disputed Cameron’s characterization.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Blundering Pelosi, Irrelevant Biden Fade As Shrewd Cuomo Rises by Thomas McArdle

Posted By on April 2nd, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/02/blundering-pelosi-irrelevant-biden-fade-while-shrewd-cuomo-rises/

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Joe Biden may have spent their lives rising to power within the Democratic Party, but clearly somewhere back in their early days they were absent for Politics 101. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, was obviously sitting attentively in the front of the classroom, probably with his father and predecessor, Mario, the late three-term chief executive of the Empire State, serving as professor.

Far worse than letting a serious crisis go to waste, per Democrat hatchet man Rahm Emanuel’s infamous maxim, is being seen as exploiting a global emergency for the sake of petty politics. On CNN on Sunday, Pelosi did just that, charging that President Donald Trump’s management of the coronavirus pandemic is costing American lives and talking up an eventual congressional probe.

This week, she actually used the most famous line from the Watergate hearings: “What did he know and when did he know it?” Pelosi asked, echoing the late Sen. Howard Baker, the Republican who signaled that President Richard Nixon’s own party was not going to be able to protect him.

Pelosi also compared Trump to Nero, the corrupt first century emperor who allowed Rome to burn – if he didn’t actually instigate the fire – then blamed Christians: “As the president fiddles, people are dying,” she charged.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The epidemic of non-compliance James Comey left behind still ails the FBI ‘A careless and negligent culture’ was allowed to fester under Comey’s leadership, former top FBI official says.By John Solomon

Posted By on April 2nd, 2020

https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/epidemic-non-compliance-james-comey-left-behind-still-ails-fbi

Often one to claim the high ground, ex-FBI Director James Comey lectured lawmakers in the aftermath of the bungled Russia collusion investigation, assuring them that the bureau’s procedures for securing a warrant to spy on Americans were top-notch and conscientiously followed.

The FBI’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act compliance is a “labor-intensive” and “top-tier” program that protects Americans civil liberties by ensuring evidence is “very, very carefully scrubbed” for accuracy, Comey told House members in a closed-door deposition back in December 2018.

Fifteen month later, the Justice Department’s inspector general blew a hole in Comey’s representation. His review of warrant applications in more than two dozen FISA cases over the last five years that found that every one of them failed to meet the requirements of the Woods Procedures, which mandate the compilation of documentary evidence in support of each fact in a warrant application.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Did China unleash COVID-19 malevolently or accidentally? By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 2nd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/did_china_unleash_covid19_malevolently_or_accidentally.html

The big takeaway is that there’s no evidence that the Chinese intended to weaponize COVID-19. Therefore, at a guess, the disease’s genesis was a research laboratory that didn’t have good safety protocols.

Tucker Carlson did a segment discussing COVID-19’s origins. While saying that the virus probably started in a laboratory, he was careful not to accuse China of deliberately creating or releasing the virus. China’s long history of shoddy products and disregard for human life makes it’s a good bet that China didn’t weaponize the virus. Instead, COVID-19 is probably just another shoddy Chinese product.

Back in the 1960s, Japan was synonymous with cheap, but not shoddy products. By the 1980s, though, Japanese people’s meticulous habits meant that, if it came from Japan, it was well-made and worth the price.

When China started selling cheap products in the West, most people assumed it would follow the same trajectory that Japan did. That never happened because China is not Japan (nor is it Korea, which also makes meticulous products). Unlike Japan or Korea, it’s neither clean nor orderly. From chaos comes garbage.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

As Long As Communist China Controls The World Health Organization, It’s Completely Unreliable Ben Weingarten

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/31/as-long-as-communist-china-controls-the-world

While the WHO gives China its imprimatur, evidence continues to mount of China’s malign role in every aspect of this pandemic.

With each passing day, it becomes clear that the world’s most prominent global health institution, the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO), has been capturedby communist China. This is particularly disastrous because in matters of life and limb, politicization of any kind can kill.

The WHO’s peddling of narratives from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the pandemic mushroomed — including denying human-to-human transmission and calling it racist to focus on the Chinese origin of the virus — undoubtedly contributed to the spread of the virus. It’s been mimicked by health officials, the media, and politicians.Yet this toxic relationship continues unabated.

WHO China Mission Leader Kowtows to the CCP

For the latest indicator of WHO fealty to the CCP, look no further than this breathtaking clip from an interview between Radio Television Hong Kong journalist Yvonne Tong and Dr. Bruce Aylward, leader of the WHO’s February 2020 joint international mission to China regarding coronavirus:

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Warning From A Cancel Culture Cassandra Scott Shepard

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/01/warning-from-a-cancel-culture-cassandra/

Modern traditional and social media, in all of their multiplying and increasingly malevolent forms, provide replete evidence of our collective failure in recent decades to raise children properly. The end of scoring and the efflorescence of “everybody’s awesome” trophies that praise mere participation in order to boost self-esteem have created a generation (and more) of young people who, though demonstrating few actual skills, think themselves excellent at everything. Helicopter parenting and the swaddling of the young straight up through college and beyond has left these same young people without sufficient coping strategies or knowledge of the world. 

The abandonment of college curricula and speakers’ lists to the strident demands of the most mulish among them has denied them the true value of education. Such education can only really proceed if all parties understand that the primary flow of knowledge must pass from the teachers and to the young people; too many students today make demands about what they will study, when they should instead shut up and gratefully learn the things that people with more wisdom and experience than they yet have think they should know.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Democrats Plan Star Chamber Investigation into Trump Response to Pandemic By Rick Moran

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/trending/democrats-plan-star-chamber-investigation-into-trump-response-to-pandemic/

People are still getting sick and dying from the coronavirus, but when did that ever stop a politician from trying to score points against the political opposition?

With the country on its knees, Democrats want to kneecap Trump and the Republicans by trying to blame the president for however many deaths result from the pandemic. They will investigate the administration response to the crisis — especially the earliest days of the outbreak when no one knew how bad things were going to get.

That won’t matter to Democrats who will say Trump should have known and spent billions of dollars preparing for something that might not have happened.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Free speech comes at a price In the age of microaggression, fighting words are ubiquitous David Goldman

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/

“Thane Rosenbaum, a distinguished law professor and prolific writer, proposes to set limits to free speech in order to protect it. The matter is a minefield, and he wades into it fearlessly. But I am not convinced that he has found a solution.”

Saving Free Speech From Itself, by Thane Rosenbaum. Fig Tree Books; 305 pages, Hardbound. US$24.95

With some trepidation and the dissent of men like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the founders of the United States included in its Constitution a guarantee of free speech unlike any other in the world. The First Amendment bars restrictions on public expression. That does not include speech or writing that amounts to an act of violence.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes set the standard for prohibited speech with the celebrated dictum that one does not have the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. The case in question was Schenck vs. United States, in which the court ruled that a defendant did not have the right to oppose mandatory conscription during the First World War. That shows how difficult it is to define violent speech: By today’s standards, verbal opposition to a government’s policy in wartime surely would be protected.

For the past 80 years, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire has defined prohibited speech as “the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous and the insulting or ‘fighting’ words – those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”

EDUCATION, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

American Professors Whitewash Islamic Terror By Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/american-professors-whitewash-islamic-terror/

Muslims have at times allied with Europeans, sometimes even against fellow Muslims; as such, why see any Muslim attacks on Europe as ideologically driven—as jihads (“holy wars”) against the infidel? Why not see them all as generic wars? Such is the academic world’s main apologia against the notion that Islam’s military expansion throughout history was driven by a theological mandate.

Thus, weeks before my recent lecture on the topic of my book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, at the U.S. Army War College, another speaker was brought in to present an “alternative view.” That speaker was John Voll,* professor emeritus of Islamic history and past associate director of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. (This center was “gifted” 20 million dollars from Prince Alwaleed—a Wahhabi who suggested that the 9/11 attacks were based on America’s position “toward the Palestinian cause”—for the express purpose of improving Islam’s image in the West.)

According to the Army War College’s advertisement:

In contrast with the well-known story of Muslim-Christian military conflict, less well-known is the long history of Muslim-Christian alliances and cooperation, even in times of conflict. Voll will address risk of misunderstanding when the history of clashes between Islam and the West is viewed in broad generalizations. Voll will focus his discussion on alliances and conflicts in the modern era…

Weeks after he presented, Voll reasserted these themes in a less-than-honest Army Times report that depicted him as “a more mainstream speaker … who CAIR-Philadelphia did not object to” (as opposed to me):

Voll does not agree with Ibrahim’s view that Christians and Muslims are almost inevitably at odds. Extreme advocates of this “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis tend to deal with only half of the historical record of relations between the West and Islam, he said in an email.