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International Counter-Terrorism Group Addresses Ever-Changing al-Qaeda Threat By Ella Kietlinska

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/international-counter-terrorism-group-addresses-ever-changing-al-qaeda-threat_3270200.html

The Warsaw Process Counterterrorism and Illicit Finance working group convened in Marrakech, Morocco, on March 4-5, with the goal of working out a solution to counter the potential threat posed by al-Qaeda and its affiliates, in preparations for the ministerial-level meeting to be held in Washington this year.

Al-Qaeda, overshadowed by ISIS over the past several years, took advantage of this situation to strengthen and expand its abilities to operate, adapt to using new technologies, and exploit conflicts and vulnerabilities in different parts of the world, e.g. the wars in Yemen and Syria, says a statement from the working group.

Threats Posed by al-Qaeda

Despite losing its main leader in 2011, al-Qaeda adapted to the changes in the world’s political situation and exerted its ideological influence. Its affiliates still pose a threat to the entire African continent and there is a possibility for al-Qaeda to engage in a relationship with ISIS, according to the statement. Al-Qaeda also operates in Asia and the Middle East.

Al-Qaeda’s tactics and methods may also evolve. It could exert more attacks outside of conflict zones, utilize more low-cost technology, and develop “more effective use of the internet” as well as “a sophisticated network of communication tools,” threatening global security and stability, the statement says.

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Israel Helps Palestinians Prevent Coronavirus: Arabs Betray Them

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15739/israel-palestinians-coronavirus

It is worth noting that Egypt, which has a shared border with the Gaza Strip, did not send any test kits or disinfectant materials to the Palestinians living there.

“After more than seventy years, Lebanon remains the country where Palestinian refugees suffer the most, where they are deprived of many of their economic and human rights, including working in certain professions, procedural complications in obtaining work permits, and denial of the right to own property.” — Dr. Mohsen Saleh, Director-General of the Zaitouna Center for Studies in Beirut, arabi21.com, July 20, 2019.

Assad Abu Khalil, a Lebanese-American professor at California State University, who claims to be “pro-Palestinian,” does not seem concerned about the severe restrictions imposed on Palestinians by his own country — Lebanon. Nor does he seem bothered that a Lebanese (and not Israeli) official is the one who is actually calling for placing Palestinians in “mass prisons.”

Egypt, for its part, long ago abandoned the Palestinians by essentially sealing its border with the Gaza Strip. The Lebanese, Egyptians and most Arabs perceive the Palestinians as Israel’s problem. When the current virus crisis has passed, it is to be hoped that the Palestinians will remember that one country alone came to their rescue: Israel. They might also remember that their Arab brothers betrayed them — not for the first time, and no doubt not for the last.

While Israel is working overtime with Palestinians to curb and prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the Arab states appear to be doing what they do best when it comes to helping their Palestinian brothers: nothing at all.

In the past few days, Israeli authorities delivered 200 coronavirus testing kits to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. In addition, Israeli and Palestinian professional teams have been working together to prevent the spread of the virus.

The Israeli authorities have also delivered another 200 coronavirus testing kits to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, despite the thousands of rockets and incendiary and bomb-carrying balloons that the ruling government, Hamas, has launched from there towards Israel.

In addition, Israeli authorities have coordinated the transfer of 20 tons of disinfectant material from Israeli factories to the Palestinian health sector. The material included chlorine and hydrogen peroxide, used for disinfection, preservation of hygiene and sanitation. These disinfectant materials are used for cleaning surfaces in open areas and help in cleaning closed areas, including mosques and churches.

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Iran’s Coronavirus Cover-up by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15744/iran-coronavirus-coverup

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Intelligence and Security have taken charge of dealing with the coronavirus by cracking down on any individual or institution that attempts to reveal accurate information about the origins of the virus or how Iran has become an epicenter of the virus which spreads to other nations.

Massoud Pezeshkian, an Iranian reformist politician, pointed out: “We should have quarantined Qom from day one… This disease is not a joke, which is the way we are dealing with it… The economy and everything will be ruined; it is no joke. What would have happened if they shut down the country for 15 days? If we had done so on the first day, it would not have spread….”

The regime has also threatened to imprison people who provide news about the actual scope of the crisis. Hassan Nowrouzi, the Speaker of the Judiciary Committee of the Parliament, said on February 26 that those who “disseminate fake news regarding coronavirus” will be sentenced from one to three years of imprisonment and lashes.

The Iranian regime continues to decline taking appropriate measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus that is not only threatening the Iranian population but also people across the region.

During a meeting with Ireland’s Prime Minister Leo Varadkar at the White House, President Donald J. Trump offered to help the Iranian authorities fight the coronavirus, but Iranian authorities rejected the offer as “hypocritical” and “repulsive”. “We do not need American doctors,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said.

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The Real Threat(s) from Coronavirus :Chris Buskirk

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/15/the-real-threats-from-coronavirus/

Social distancing is nothing compared to a crisis that leads to mass casualties, economic collapse, and a legacy of bad policies that leaves the country weaker than ever before.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that Americans must prepare to “hunker down” to avoid a worst-case scenario with the rapid spread of the Chinese coronavirus. Nevertheless, plenty of skeptics are asking if coronavirus is “something” or if it is “nothing.” That’s the wrong question to ask. And asking the wrong question leads you to the wrong answers.

Of course it is something, but what is it? That’s the question we need to answer.

I know that people reading this will fall broadly into two groups. The first group, which is strongly represented among political conservatives, maintains that coronavirus is nothing or, if not precisely nothing, then it is asymptotically approaching nothing. For them, it is as real as the Fusion GPS dossier on President Trump.

Then there is the other group. These are people who are concerned that an outbreak in one or more American cities that goes undetected and thus uncontained for too long could cause a repeat of the Wuhan or Northern Italy scenario. Those scenarios followed roughly the same pattern: the virus went largely undetected due to a lack of testing capacity and soon became widespread before public health officials could act.

This led to a surge in hospitalizations that overloaded existing resources and spiked the number of fatalities as well as the fatality rate. That’s why the delay in increasing testing capacity in the United States until the past few days has been a cause for concern. The Wuhan virus should not have a high mortality rate, but when left unnoticed and thus unchecked it can spread and lead to deaths of people who would be able to recover if they’d had proper treatment.

The scenes from Italy have been horrible. By Sunday, Italy had nearly 25,000 confirmed cases, more than 1,800 deaths—and 368 of those deaths came in the prior 24 hours. That single-day death toll exceeds the worst day China ever reported.

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America In a New Upside-Down World : Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 16th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/15/america-in-a-new-upside-down-world/

Who can game the election-year politics of these chaotic times, especially the more macabre calculations of the electoral beneficiaries of the media-driven hysteria over the COVID-19?

The world is changing at a pace not seen in years, and it is no time to become captives of fear despite the real and immediate dangers we face.

The coronavirus and the ensuing panic, at least for a few more weeks, have stagnated the economy and scared global financial markets, accompanied by both collateral, and independent and simultaneous, bad news. Rumor- and panic-mongers predominate; the rational and reasonable are written-off as naïve and out of it. Thousands may die, but millions who will not are terrified into anxieties and sleeplessness that they will.

COVID-19 itself has raised fundamental questions about the merits of globalization in general, and in particular the wisdom of any sovereign nation outsourcing key industries like high-tech, pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and food processing to an autocratic, non-transparent—and dangerous—nation like China.

The current oil glut and price crash—a result of a Saudi-Russian price war, in part directed at record U.S. production, in part due to the crumbling of OPEC, and less demand as a global public, frightened by the specter of the Wuhan virus, stays closer to home—are radically changing the relationship between oil sellers and buyers. In particular, vulnerable cash-hungry exporting countries like Iran, Russia, and Venezuela are losing clout. Interest rates are also dropping. The world at large may for a time experience historic de facto negative interest.

Trump Was Right About China

Ostensibly, all of this news should be terrible. And, of course, terrible is the reality that as I write over 6,000 people have died worldwide (out a global population nearing 8 billion) from the disease caused by the coronavirus. But that said, there will emerge winners and losers in every crisis, whether medical, economic, psychological, or political.

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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:

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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?