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Turkey threatens NATO with the ‘refugee weapon’ By John Dietrich

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/turkey_threatens_nato_with_the_refugee_weapon.html

The Middle East conflict between Russia and Turkey being played out in Syria has a real possibility of escalating to world-shaking proportions.  Business Insider states, “For most close observers, it has long seemed only a matter of time before the long, bloody proxy war between Turkey and Russia for regional predominance in the Middle East would break out into full-scale direct hostilities.”  Of course “close observers” are experts and experts have had a very poor prognostication record in the Middle East.  But a major conflict cannot be ruled out.

Turkey became a full member of NATO in 1952.  Article 5 of the NATO treaty states that an attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all members.  The United States would be obligated to enter a Russian-Turkish conflict according to this treaty.  Of course, NATO will not enter a Third World War to save Turkey.  When Russian-backed Syrian forces attacked a Turkish military outpost killing more than 30 Turkish soldiers, Business Insider described NATO’s response as utterly impotent.  Turkey joined NATO at the beginning of the Cold War when the major threat was the Soviet Union.  Present conflicts frequently involve Islamic groups opposed to the West.  Islamic Turkey sometimes appears to have divided loyalties. 

There is significant evidence that Turkey aided ISIS in the past.  A Foreign Policy article contends that Turkey “helped fuel the rise of the Islamic State in the first place.”  30,000 militants traveled through Turkey to Iraq and Syria in 2013 to join the Islamic State.  Turkey was also a major buyer of ISIS-extracted crude oil and therefore a major funder of ISIS. Putin complained, “We see from the sky where these vehicles [carrying oil] are going.  They are going to Turkey day and night.” Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov asserted, “President Erdogan and his family are involved in this criminal business.”  Israel’s former Minister of Defense Moshe Yaalon called Turkey “Hamas’ terror headquarters outside of Gaza.”

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Biden and Sanders: Tweedledum and Tweedledee By Patricia McCarthy

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/biden_and_sanders_tweedledum_and_tweedledee.html

“Why is it that people with the most narrow of minds seem to have the widest of mouths.”  –Lewis Carroll. ”

That was some debate this pair had, each expecting us to up and vote for one of them.

At Pajamas Media, Stephen Green rightly titled his live blog on the debate, “Grumpy Old White Men:  Drunkblogging the Democratic Diversity Debate.  But these two old codgers are beyond grumpy; they are both tethered to the already done or distant past.  

The first half hour of this match was dedicated to the current crisis of the coronavirus.  They both puffed themselves up to tell us all what they would do; each and every suggestion from both of them were things President Trump has already done, already put in place.  It was as though neither of them has paid a bit of attention to how on top of this pandemic Trump has been while they were thoroughly absorbed by his attempted impeachment.  Biden bragged about the Obama administration’s action on H1N1 in 2008-09, but didn’t mention that it was disastrous. Nothing was implemented in that case until a thousand Americans had died and 300,000 were hospitalized.  Neither Biden nor Sanders prescribed a single thing that has not already been achieved.  Both of them repeatedly mixed up past epidemics.  It was a thoroughly wasted first half hour of the debate.  Not a word uttered by either candidate would comfort or likely win over a single new voter.

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Won’t You Be My ‘Helpful, Not Hurtful’ Neighbor? By Janet Levy

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/wont_you_be_my_helpful_not_hurtful_neighbor.html

Big Tech’s threat to our continued freedom of expression is extensive, pervasive, and personal

The suppression of conservative opinions and venues by social media giants — Google/YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Instagram — has been an issue for years.  Those attempting to present “non-progressive” points of view have battled in court to keep alive the constitutional right of freedom of speech.  But this dangerous suppression of viewpoints exists even at the micro-level, as I recently discovered after sharing a link to a video on a community forum app.  Suddenly, I became the target of vitriolic posts and was even chastised by the app censors, all of which demonstrates how extensive, pervasive, and personal is the threat to our continued freedom of expression.

I saw that threat played out in the realm of political opinion and followed the battles against it.  In 2017, PragerU filed a lawsuit against YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, for unlawfully censoring over 200 videos and curtailing its right to free speech.  Founded in 2009, within six years, the site had attracted over 1 billion viewers to its videos.

But access to those videos was soon limited by social media, with restrictions placed on viewing such titles as “Israel’s Legal Founding” by Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz; “The Ten Commandments: Do Not Murder” by Torah scholar Dennis Prager; and “Why Did Americans Fight the Korean War?” by Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and recipient of a National Humanities Medal.  The damage to PragerU resulting from YouTube’s censorship has been substantial, as YouTube is the largest forum for video viewership in the world.

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Interfaith Dialogue ‘Icon’ Omar Suleiman: Sharia Supremacist, Islamic Jew-Hater Another example of the dangerous willful blindness of our politicians and religious leaders. Andrew G. Bostom

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/interfaith-dialogue-icon-omar-suleiman-sharia-andrew-g-bostom/

Imam Omar Suleiman gave a U.S. Congressional invocation May 9, 2019, and just participated in a high profile “inter-faith dialogue” event Thursday March 5, 2020, at North Carolina State University, with J.D. Greear of  the Southern Baptist Convention. Both the Democrats who invited him to “prayerfully” address Congress, and Mr. Greear, were willfully blind to the good Imam Suleiman’s open espousal of Sharia supremacism, and traditionalist Islamic Jew-hatred.

Suleiman has defended Sharia’s hadd punishments for adultery [stoning] and theft [amputation], advocated for both “societal Sharia” and a Caliphate, so that Sharia could “be applied in totality,” and even defended Muslim concubinage and sex-slavery (and see this compilation of video clips, embedded below).  He is also a virulent Muslim Jew-hater, who proudly lauds Islam’s Antisemitic canon, in particular, the Koranic epithet (Koran 5:60) for Jews as “apes and pigs.”

Suleiman’s intense canonical Islamic Jew-hatred was elaborated at length during a 5-part, nearly 6-hour 2012 lecture series, “Lost Chronicles of Bani Israel,” still available online (video extracts embedded below).

In prelude to his discussion of Allah’s “very dramatic action” against a particular group of Jews—transforming them into apes and pigs [Koran 7:166, and 5:60]—Suleiman elucidates what characterizes most Jews—past as prologue—with Koranic indelibility:

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

I Am Woman, Hear Me Whine Why do the luckiest, most privileged women ever to exist keep on whining about “patriarchy” and “sexism”? Bruce Thornton

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/i-am-woman-hear-me-whine-bruce-thornton/

After Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the primary race, the predictable whining commenced from all those supposedly independent, anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better feminists. The stock clichés filled their complaints: “misogyny,” “patriarchy,” “sexism,” all the usual suspects rounded up to excuse the glaring electoral incompetence of a terrible candidate. As is the case with Hillary Clinton, criticism of a political persona dripping with schoolmarm condescension, self-righteousness, and arrogant disdain is redeemed by transforming these flaws into question-begging slurs like “shrill” and “strident,” and dismissing them as an “irrational prejudice,” a neurotic failure on the part of men to acknowledge her superior talents and  “competence.”

Once again, we see how a movement that started as the removal of barriers to equal opportunity and women’s agency, has degenerated into an identity-politics weapon that strangely reinforces what equity feminism tried to eliminate: The notion that women who are supposedly equal to men are in fact victims still needing protection from men and their stubborn sexist prejudices and “toxic masculinity.” Half a century after feminists started to “roar,” as Helen Reddy sang, they’ve regressed to the whining of the weak.

One manifestation of this incoherence is the return of the once demonized “double standard,” with feminists now employing it to serve their interests. So a Clinton or a Warren should not be criticized by men, at the same time women can be as vicious as they want to their ideological rivals. Just ask any conservative Christian woman like Sarah Palin. An accomplished politician and hunter who raised a Downs child instead of killing him for her own convenience, was viciously demonized and slandered with impunity by her progressive feminist “sisters.” And who can forget what Hillary and her minions did to Bill’s sexual assault victims like Juanita Broaddrick?

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Iran on the Brink – as Killer Pathogen Ravages the Country Regime asks for $5 billion in IMF aid as it continues to propagate conspiracy theories and bankroll terrorist groups. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/iran-brink-ari-lieberman/

According to the latest coronavirus statistics emerging from Iran’s health ministry, 724 people have succumbed to the disease while nearly 14,000 are infected. Nothing the regime says can be trusted and most experts agree that these figures represent a gross understatement. In fact, it would be fair to say that Iran is now the global epicenter for COVID-19.

Based on open sources and utilizing various mathematical models, The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood demonstrates how it is possible, and even likely that the virus has already infected at least 586,000 Iranians. Some of the models posited by Wood indicate that as many as 8,000,000 Iranians have been infected. The article was published on March 9, so we can assume that the numbers have increased exponentially since then.

According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization, COVID-19 has claimed 6,492 lives and infected 168,834 globally. Even if we were to adopt the lower estimate cited in Wood’s article, the Islamic Republic’s infection rate is still nearly 3.5 times higher than the entire world’s infection rate combined. We do not know how many Iranians have died from the Wuhan virus but a figure of 22,268 would not be an unreasonable estimate. We arrive at this number by multiplying the conservative infection rate estimate of 586,000 by 3.8 percent, which represents the global mortality rate.

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The CDC was Fighting Racism and Obesity Instead of Stopping Epidemics The CDC should be driven by science, not social justice. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/cdc-was-fighting-racism-and-obesity-instead-daniel-greenfield/

The Centers for Disease Control has a $6.6 billion budget and one job which it messes up every time.

The last time the CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis. Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans until they showed undeniable symptoms of the disease. There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States.

At the height of the crisis, confidence in the CDC fell to 37%. Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. And the heads of the health bureaucracy blamed the lack of funding for their failure to have an Ebola vaccine.

The self-quarantine measures adopted in response to the coronavirus outbreak are partially a response to the lessons of the Ebola disaster.

But during the Ebola crisis, Democrats tried to shift responsibility from the Obama administration by blaming Republicans for cutting the CDC’s budget from $6.5 billion to $5.9 billion. Sound familiar? Where do those billions for the CDC actually go? Among other things, pushing gun control. The terrible budget deal from December allocated $25 million to the CDC and NIH to study gun violence.

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

1620 – 2020: The 400th Anniversary of the US-Israel Kinship Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

1620 – 2020: The 400th Anniversary of the US-Israel Kinship
**Just published**
March 2020 eBook available on Amazon and Smashwords
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”

From the 1620 “Mayflower,” through the 1752 Liberty Bell, 1891 “Blackstone Memorial” and the 1968 “Apollo 8,” to the 2005 Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s  decision on the Ten Commandments, and the 2020 statues of Moses in the US Supreme Court , Chamber of the House of Representatives, Justice Department and the Library of Congress….

Table of Content:
The Early Pilgrims and the Modern Day Exodus
The Hebrew language embraced by the early US intelligentsia
The Founding Fathers, the Ten Commandments and the Bible
The Abolitionist anti-slavery movement inspired by Moses
400 years of US identification with the idea of a Jewish State
Modern day Presidents highlight the Bible
Biblical footprints in modern day USA
The US civil religion
The lasting US-Israel kinship
John Adams, the 2nd US President: “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fauci: Possibly ‘a few months’ until life gets ‘back to normal’ Zack Budryk

Posted By on March 15th, 2020

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/487625-fauci-possibly-a-few-months-until-life-gets-back-to-normal?rnd=1584276483

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that it is possible it will take “a few months” before life goes “back to normal” amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“Can you try to help us understand, when will life get back to normal?” ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Fauci on “This Week.”

“It’s going to be a matter of several weeks to a few months, for sure,” Fauci responded.

“If you look at the dynamics of how outbreak curves go, you just need to take a look at China and take a look at South Korea right now,” the health official added. “With China, they went to their peak, and they’re coming down right now. There were, just a day or so ago, 11 new cases in China, which is miniscule compared to where it was.”

South Korea, meanwhile, is “starting to flatten,” Fauci said, adding that the change in the trend occurred over about a month and a half in both countries.

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Fear factor: Press and politicians should help pause the panic By Douglas MacKinnon

Posted By on March 15th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/487538-fear-factor-press-and-politicians-should-help-pause-the-panic

Most people have heard of the news-business truism, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Sensational or alarming news stories have proven a profitable attention-getter since the dawn of newspapers — and, later, of radio and television — and preying on our various anxieties has been a staple of the news business ever since.

The same is true of politics: Fear and anxiety are among the surest provocations to get your political base out to vote or to support your campaign. Politicians have used those successfully since the first elections were held.

Knowing both, it sure seems as if the nonstop frightening, even terrifying news and political rhetoric being spread across the globe regarding the newest coronavirus, COVID-19, could be the mother of all cash-cows for some in the news business and in the political world.

Just as a very recent example, we have this news item: “Quarantined couple die of coronavirus two hours apart in Italy.” If the editors were looking for cheap, easy online clicks, then mission accomplished. When I saw the story as it ran this past Thursday morning, it already had well more than 200,000 views.

Those who actually bothered to read the story accompanying the sensational headline would learn that, although the couple did indeed tragically pass within hours of each other, the husband was 86 years of age and the wife, 82. For those who didn’t get that far and only consumed the headline, it was just one more fear-inducing straw being piled upon the thousands of others now sitting atop our troubled minds.