RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15752/coronavirus-comes-for-europe

The Italian health system is in appallingly bad condition. There are not enough intensive care units and, as everywhere, the possibility of a major crisis simply was not anticipated. In Italy there are 2.62 acute-care hospital beds per 1,000 residents (by comparison, the number in Germany is 6.06 per 1,000 residents). The Italian health system is entirely governed by the government…. Public hospitals must manage shortages, and when an exceptional situation occurs, rationing care leads to horrific choices.

The Italian government was hoping for help from the European Union, but neither the other member states nor the European Union itself has given any at all…. The dismissive attitude of the EU and the other members states seems to have been dictated by the fear of sliding into a situation as calamitous as that of Italy.

No country in the European Union has taken a clear, hard look at the danger Europe is facing.

Italy’s healthcare system is in a state of almost total collapse. As of today, 31,506 people in Italy have been infected with the coronavirus; of which 2,503 people have died. The numbers continue to grow. Hospitals are overwhelmed. Doctors have to choose which sick person to save and which sick person not to save.

The country has almost completely shut down. Many businesses are running in slow motion or have stopped. Prisoners are staging uprisings. Millions of people have been ordered to stay home and are allowed out only briefly to buy food. Most shops are shut. All public gatherings are prohibited, even funerals. Big cities look like ghost towns.

No other Western country has been so severely affected by the pandemic as Italy. Why?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-china-response-will-weaken-it-on-world-stage/

Its bad behavior in the wake of COVID-19 will leave it in its weakest global position in memory. And the U.S. will emerge stronger.

S ometime in late November the Chinese Communist Party apparat was aware that the ingredients of some sort of an epidemic were brewing in Wuhan. Soon after, it was also clear to them that a new type of coronavirus was on the loose, a threat they might have taken more seriously given the similar Chinese origins of the prior toxic SARS coronavirus and the resources of a Level 4 virology lab nearby.

Yet the government initially hid all that knowledge from its own people in particular and in general from the world at large. Translated into American terms, that disingenuousness ensured that over 10,000 Chinese nationals and foreigners living in China flew every day on direct flights into the United States (Washington and California especially) from late November to the beginning of February, until the Trump travel ban of January 31.

All this laxity was also known to the Communist apparat in Beijing, which must have been amused when Trump was roundly damned by his liberal critics as a xenophobe and racist for finally daring to stop the influx on January 31 — the first major leader to enact such a total ban.

Yet, no thanks to the Chinese, America, so far, has been comparatively lucky — despite the grave risks of damaging a multi-trillion-dollar economy with the strictest quarantining, isolation policies, and social distancing in its history. Half the country lives in the interior away from ports of entry on the coasts. Medical care, sanitation, hygiene, and meat markets operate on different premises than in China, the supposed fated global hegemon. Transparency in a consensual society together with a free-market economy is encouraging tens of millions of citizens to work in tandem and independently to figure out creative ways to ameliorate the epidemic, politically, medically, socially, and economically. The result is that as of mid-March, the U.S., the world’s foremost immigration destination and among the most visited of nations, had suffered fewer virus fatalities than some European countries a fifth or sixth of its population size.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15751/coronavirus-europe-open-borders

“Merkel knows that the instruction to close the border, in general to take consistent national measures to protect her own citizens, would be tantamount to her own declaration of political bankruptcy.” — Ferdinand Knauss, commentator on the German blog Tichys Einblick, March 16, 2020.

“Merkel is now fighting. But as always in her chancellorship, she is not fighting for her country and its citizens, for which she is responsible. She is fighting for her power, for her legacy. When the citizens come to understand this, the corona crisis will have been Merkel’s last fight in the political arena.” — Ferdinand Knauss, March 16, 2020.

In a March 13 press conference, the president of Italy’s hard-hit Veneto region, Luca Zaia, said that Europe’s borderless zone was “disappearing as we speak.” He noted that the stringent border controls imposed by Austria shows that Schengen “no longer exists and will be remembered in the history books.”

As a growing number of countries close their borders to fight the coronavirus pandemic, the European system of open internal borders — a cornerstone of European integration — is on the brink of collapse.

The so-called Schengen Area, which comprises 26 European countries, entered into effect in 1995 and abolishes the need for passports and other types of control at mutual borders. It is a key practical and symbolic achievement of European integration and is now falling apart.

In a move packed with political significance, Germany, the largest and most powerful country in the European Union, on March 16 introduced controls on its borders with Austria, Denmark, France, Luxembourg and Switzerland after it registered 1,000 new cases of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in just one day.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15745/coronavirus-china-communism

Beijing has, according to President Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro, already nationalized one American factory making medical masks. Moreover, Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo on air repeatedly said the Chinese forced at least one ship carrying masks, gloves, and other protective gear to the United States to return to China.

Trump’s optimism is not shared in Beijing…. China, using the epidemic as an excuse, is now pushing to change the agreement by deferring its purchase obligations, the heart of the arrangement as far as the U.S. is concerned.

Xi Jinping, after all, knew about the coronavirus epidemic long before he signed the deal in the White House. In February, he said he had chaired a meeting of the Party’s Politburo Standing Committee on January 7 in which he issued orders to contain the epidemic. Xi’s knowledge of the outbreak on January 15 and his push for relief now, therefore, makes him look cynical. In all probability, he had no intention of honoring his side of the bargain from the beginning.

Americans — and the Chinese people, who are now demanding fundamental political change — realize that the real disease is communism.

Last July, five American analysts who have been consistently wrong told us “China is not an enemy.”

Actually, this time they were technically right. China’s communism is not an enemy. It is the enemy.

After the coronavirus pandemic subsides, Americans should not forget Beijing’s malicious campaign against their country.

For more than a month, the central government’s foreign ministry and the Communist Party’s Global Times have been trying to tar the Trump administration. The campaign culminated in a series of tweets from rising Beijing star Zhao Lijian, foreign ministry spokesman and deputy director general of the ministry’s Information Department.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/taiwan-treats-coronavirus-decisively-china-don-feder/

Taiwan is 81 miles from China. There were 60,000 direct flights between the two nations last year, carrying over 10 million passengers.

As of March 16, the People’s Republic of China, where the coronavirus originated, had more than 80,880 diagnosed cases and close to 3,213 deaths. The Republic of China on Taiwan had 67 cases and one death.

Taiwan has treated the pandemic decisively. China has treated it ideologically, as one would expect from a totalitarian state.

On December 31st, China told the World Health Organization that it had several cases of pneumonia. On the same day, Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control began monitoring passengers who arrived from Wuhan. (The 2003 SARS epidemic made it skeptical of health data from China). Taiwan screened these passengers for 36 viruses. On January 26, it banned flights from Wuhan, making it the first country to do so.

Taiwan instituted 124 safety protocols for the virus. It distributed 6.5 million masks to primary and secondary schools, along with 84,000 liters of hand sanitizer and 25,000 forehead thermometers. Public and private buildings screened entrants for signs of fever. Apartment buildings have hand sanitizers in or near elevators.

After China finally admitted that it had a problem, it took another month for researchers from other countries to get in.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/major-islamic-conference-reform-upholds-radicalism-raymond-ibrahim/

Largely unknown to and unreported in the West, a large, two-day conference was recently hosted by Al Azhar University in Egypt and attendant by the leading clerics and politicians from 46 nations on January 27-28.  Titled, “Renewal in Islamic Thought,” it is currently the most significant response to Egyptian President Sisi’s calls for reform, which he forcibly made on January 1, 2015.

The conference focused on the most pressing topics affecting the Islamic—and in some cases non-Islamic—world, including women’s rights, government and society, and of course the question of “radicalization” and the emergence of jihadi terror groups such as the Islamic State, etc.

I’ve watched many of the panels with great interest, and in the coming weeks hope to remark on some of these, but for now I wish to discuss what can be learned from the closing remarks of the Grand Imam of Al Azhar (and Pope Francis’ good friend), Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. 

First, in consensual agreement with the other clerics present, he closed the door on the possibility for reform on a great number of issues: “Renewal,” he announced, “is in no way possible concerning those texts which are irrefutable in their certainty and stability; as for those texts that are not entirely credible, they are subject to ijtihad [reinterpretation, especially based on changing circumstances].”