If we are to believe China’s figures, the number of Covid-19 coronavirus cases in China as of March 31 was 82,240, with 3,309 deaths. The United States has now just under 165,000 cases and has surpassed 3000 deaths attributed to the virus – about double the official number of China’s cases and fast approaching China’s official death total. China claims that it has largely defeated the coronavirus and is opening public transportation, schools, and factories. The Chinese Communist Party has promoted itself as the global role model for how to lead a “people’s war” against COVID-19 and save many lives. “Party officials have tried to spin the crisis as a testament to the strength of China’s authoritarian system and its hard-line leader, Xi Jinping,” the New York Times reported, “even announcing plans to publish a book in six languages about the outbreak that portrays him as a ‘major power leader’ with ‘care for the people.’”

China’s officially reported case and death totals to date just happen to be remarkably close to a prediction last February by Stanford University biology professor Michael Levitt. Dr. Levitt, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, predicted that China would peak with around 80,000 cases and 3,250 deaths. Dr. Levitt  has spent a couple of months a year in China. “I became much more interested in China, and seeing the country through the eyes of somebody who has lived there made it very different,” he said. Dr. Levitt was appalled by the travel restrictions imposed by the United States. “It’s crazy,” he said, as quoted by China Daily. “Travel bans don’t help at all. I think all this punishment just leads to under-reporting, and it’s not a good idea.” Although he is not an epidemiologist, the Chinese government featured him with appearances on the Chinese State broadcaster China Global Television Network.

Dr. Levitt is now claiming that the growth of new cases worldwide should slow much faster than many health experts predict, just as he claims happened in China. We hope Dr. Levitt is right but have good reason to be skeptical regarding the validity of China’s official data. Dr. Levitt’s predictions more likely were used by Chinese authorities to lend credibility to the range of numbers that China is willing to report as the peak, rather than constituting validated forecasts of what actually happened.

For example, while the official death toll in Wuhan was around 2,500 people as of March 27, Radio Free Asia reported serious doubts among residents that the true number was that low. “Since the start of the week, seven large funeral homes in Wuhan have been handing out the cremated remains of around 500 people to their families every day,” according to Radio Free China, “suggesting that far more people died than ever made the official statistics.” One Wuhan resident was quoted as saying, “It can’t be right … because the incinerators have been working round the clock, so how can so few people have died?” The true death toll could be as many as 40,000.

Bloomberg has reported on “long lines and stacks of ash urns greeting family members of the dead at funeral homes in Wuhan” which have called into question “the true scale of coronavirus casualties at the epicenter of the outbreak, renewing pressure on a Chinese government struggling to control its containment narrative.”

No mass testing in China is another reason the numbers should not be compared to the United States, “where we are now doing, late, mass testing,” the chief economist at the China Beige Book said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Moreover, before this Tuesday, China had not included asymptomatic patients in its publicly released totals of confirmed coronavirus cases.

In any event, there is no reason to believe China’s official numbers today, given the fact that Chinese authorities have been deceptive about the coronavirus outbreak in their country from its earliest days. First, they denied for weeks that the virus could spread through human to human transmission, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. They silenced a Wuhan doctor, who tried to warn early on about the possibility that a troubling cluster of viral infections in one Chinese province could get out of control. The doctor turned out to be right to the nth degree, falling victim himself to the disease. Authorities censored any negative stories in the media or on the Internet about how the government was handling the outbreak. A March 29^th tweet from 60 Minutes Australia stated: “Just two weeks ago the head of Emergency at Wuhan Central hospital went public, saying authorities had stopped her and her colleagues from warning the world.  She has now disappeared, her whereabouts unknown.”

The Chinese government has also engaged in a massive disinformation campaign, including trying to pin the blame on the U.S. army for precipitating the outbreak. President Trump is not alone in denouncing China’s lies. Senior ministers in the United Kingdom’s government are furious with China’s blame game and refusal to take responsibility for its own failures. A source quoted by the Daily Mail said,  “There is a disgusting disinformation campaign going on and it is unacceptable. They [the Chinese government] know they have got this badly wrong and rather than owning it they are spreading lies.” Prime Minister Boris Johnson “has been warned by scientific advisers that China’s officially declared statistics on the number of cases of coronavirus could be ‘downplayed by a factor of 15 to 40 times.’”

Once we manage to get past this pandemic, our focus will understandably turn to getting back to our normal lives and restoring the health of the economy. However, we cannot simply put what happened in the rear view mirror and forget where the pandemic started. If we do, the reprieve will be short-lived.

Chinese government scientists were reportedly conducting research on deadly bat viruses close to a wild animal market in Wuhan where the transmission to humans may have begun. “Several Chinese state media outlets in recent months touted the virus research,” according to a report in the Washington Times. The Wuhan Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the national center for China’s bat virus research. China kept any international disease specialists away from Wuhan for weeks.

Now that China claims it has successfully contained the virus, wet markets where bats are sold have reportedly reopened. These markets should be shut down permanently. And whether or not this coronavirus came from a Chinese research lab or developed naturally in bats before being transmitted to humans, China needs to be far more transparent about the bat virus related research it conducts and the safety procedures in place at its laboratories. As Steven W. Mosher, a China specialist with the Population Research Institute, said, “China claims that the deadly virus did not escape from its biolab. Fine. Prove it by releasing the research records of the Wuhan lab.”

Last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a speech entitled “Working Together to Defeat the COVID-19 Outbreak” at the Extraordinary G20 Leaders’ Summit. He said, “We must comprehensively step up international cooperation and foster greater synergy so that humanity as one could win the battle against such a major infectious disease. I propose a G20 COVID-19 assistance initiative for better information sharing and policy and action coordination with the support of the World Health Organization [WHO].  China supports WHO in leading the global efforts to develop science-based and proper control and treatment and minimize cross-border spread.”

President Xi’s proposal to improve information sharing comes several months too late. The World Health Organization accepted at face value the inaccurate information it received from China during the early weeks of the outbreak, when the virus’s spread could have been much more easily contained. WHO has lavished undeserved praise on China’s handling of the virus outbreak. The assistant director-general of WHO said back in February “if I had Covid-19 I’d want to be treated in China.” This same WHO official ducked questions last week about Taiwan’s response to the coronavirus and whether WHO would reconsider Taiwan’s quest to join WHO, which China opposes. He said only that “we’ve already talked about China. And when you look across all the different areas of China, they’ve actually all done quite a good job.”

With WHO effectively serving as China’s propaganda auxiliary, no wonder China wants WHO in the driver’s seat. Without significant reforms, WHO should take a back seat.

11.

Former US vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden told the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC on March 2 that Israel’s annexation and settlement policies are undermining support for the Jewish state among young people.

What is “undermining support” for Israel “among young people” and others is the failure of those politicians like Biden who consider themselves “pro-Israel” but are misinformed about the legal status of the West Bank, and consequently are not capable of understanding, explaining, and defending Israel’s rights to that area. Biden himself does not know why the settlements are legal, and merely assumes, like tens of millions of others, that they are illegitimate because everyone tells him so — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, the U.N. General Assembly, the Arab League, the O.I.C. But his statement at AIPAC merely reveals his ignorance of the history of the Jewish state. It is not enough to consider oneself “pro-Israel” – you have to get Israel’s history straight, in order to adequately defend the country. This Joe Biden has not done. He doesn’t dislike Israel, unlike some in his party, including the infamous “Squad” and Bernie Sanders; Biden likes Israel, but doesn’t know enough to make its case.

Let’s review the history of the Mandate for Palestine. Biden does not know that when the League of Nations established the Mandates system, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, several mandates were created exclusively for the Arabs. France held the Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, Great Britain held the Mandate for Iraq. Those European powers were responsible for guiding the local populations to achieve independence. In the end, as we all know, the Arabs have by now managed to acquire 22 separate states, far more than any other people, places where they treat non-Arab Muslims – Kurds, Berbers, black Africans – with contumely or worse. And in many of those Arab states, non-Muslims are often humiliated, persecuted, and sometimes killed.

The one territory reserved for the Jews was that set aside for inclusion in the Mandate for Palestine. It extended from the Golan in the north to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south, and from an area east of the Jordan River “out into the desert” to the Mediterranean. The British, who held the Mandate for Palestine, then unilaterally decided that all the territory east of the Jordan — 78% of the territory that was originally to be included the Mandate – would be closed to Jewish immigration, so that it would instead become part of the newly-created Emirate of Transjordan (later the Kingdom of Jordan). What was left in the Palestine Mandate for the Jews was 22% of the territory that was originally to have been included. This was the sliver of land that went from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, and from the Golan to the Gulf of Aqaba. That Mandatory territory, that was to have formed the future Jewish state, included all of what became known as the West Bank. I doubt that Joe Biden knows any of this. He doesn’t strike me as having done his homework. He doesn’t feel he has to, you see, because his heart’s in the right place, he’s “pro-Israel.” How wrong he is.

When the League of Nations closed in 1946, soon to be replaced by the United Nations, there remained the question of what would happen to the Mandate for Palestine. Article 80 of the U.N. Charter – “the Jewish people’s article,” as it was called – made clear that the provisions of the Mandate still held, and would be honored by the United Nations as the successor organization to the League of Nations. The Mandate finally came to an end on May 14, 1948, when Israel, the successor state to the Mandate, declared its independence.

In the 1948-49 war, at the end of hostilities the Arab Legion of Jordan held onto those parts of Judea and Samaria west of the Jordan that the Jordanians soon renamed the “West Bank.” In taking possession of the West Bank, Jordan did not establish a legal claim; it remained a military “occupier.” Israel, which did have a legal claim to the West Bank, was not in a position to enforce that claim; that would come only after the Six-Day War. But juridically the West Bank remained, as it had been under the Mandate, part of the Jewish National Home. In 1967, Israel did not establish a new legal claim, but merely became able, through force of arms, to enforce the claim it had always possessed since the Mandate was created . Joe Biden needs to understand the exclusive intent of the Mandate for Palestine – to create the Jewish National Home – and to recognize the territory , including the entire West Bank, that had been assigned to it. He might then take quite a different view of Israeli villages and cities (tendentiously described by so many as “settlements”) and of Israel’s so-called “occupation” of the West Bank. He owes it to Israel, and to himself, to get this story straight.

When Biden tells an AIPAC audience that he thinks Israel’s “settlement and annexation” policies are causing Israel to lose support, instead of blaming Israel, he should have made a different claim: “We who are pro-Israel need to do better to make the case for that embattled country. We need to understand Israel’s overwhelming legal right to the West Bank. Even if, on practical grounds, some may question the wisdom of Israel annexing the entire West Bank, no one should deny that Israel has a perfect right to do so. We need to study the relevant history to make the case for Israel, instead of mindlessly repeating such loaded, and inaccurate descriptions, as “occupied Palestinian lands.”

Biden should deepen his own understanding, by reading – perhaps for the first time though he has been in Washington for the past 40 years — the Mandate for Palestine. The most important part of the Mandate document is the Preamble:

Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The declaration of November 2, 1917, which is referred to in the preamble, is the Balfour Declaration, which declared British support for the establishment of the Jewish National Home.

Note the phrase, too, about how “nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The drafters quite deliberately left out any mention of “political rights” because, of course, a Jewish National Home, leading to the establishment of a Jewish state, would necessarily impinge on the political rights of local Arabs.

Article 4 of the Mandate makes clear that it is to lead to the creation of a single Jewish National Home, and not to the creation of two states, Jewish and Arab, in the territory west of the Jordan that was ultimately assigned to the Mandate:

An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine, and, subject always to the control of the Administration to assist and take part in the development of the country.

The Zionist organization, so long as its organization and constitution are in the opinion of the Mandatory appropriate, shall be recognised as such agency. It shall take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty’s Government to secure the co-operation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home.

Then there is Article 6 of the Mandate, which Biden might profitably commit to memory. It calls on the mandatory authority to “facilitate Jewish immigration” and “encourage…close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands”:

The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.

So to repeat yet again for Joe Biden’s sake, and it deserves this constant repetition, the West Bank was always intended to be part of the Jewish National Home. Thus it was intended by the Mandates Commission, headed by the distinguished Swiss law professor William Rappard, who was outraged when the British ended all Jewish immigration in the land east of the Jordan, which had supposed to have been subject to the provisions of the Mandate. Had the Jews managed to hold onto the West Bank in the 1948-49 war, it would have become, as the Mandate always intended, part of Israel, every bit as much as Tel Aviv or Haifa or Ashdod. No one in the Western world would have objected. When the Jordanian army seized and held territory west of the Jordan in the 1948-49 war, Jordan emulated the Romans, who had renamed “Judea” as “Syria Palaestina” or “Palestine” to efface the Jewish connection to the land. The Jordanians renamed the parts of Judea and Samaria it now controlled as “the West Bank” for the same reason.

Jordan remained the illegal “occupier” of the West Bank from 1948 to 1967; its only claim was that of military occupation. The “Palestinian people” had not yet been invented, so Amman made no move to hand the West Bank over to the non-existent Palestinians. The juridical situation was quite different for Israel, its claim to the West Bank is based not on its “occupation” of the territory since 1967, but on the Mandate for Palestine itself. But, someone might object, hadn’t the Mandates system expired when the League of Nations, which had created the many mandates, ceased to operate in 1946 and was soon replaced by the United Nations?

No, because by its own charter, the United Nations recognized the continued relevance of the Mandates system. The UN Charter, and specifically Article 80 of that Charter, implicitly recognize the “Mandate for Palestine” of the League of Nations. This Mandate granted Jews the irrevocable right to settle in the area of Palestine, anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Professor Eugene Rostow, then Dean of Yale Law School, has explained:

This right [of settlement] is protected by Article 80 of the United Nations Charter. The Mandates of the League of Nations have a special status in international law, considered to be trusts, indeed “sacred trusts.”

Under international law, neither Jordan nor the recently-invented “Palestinian” Arab people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have a substantial claim to the sovereign possession of the West Bank.

To sum up: the Jewish claim to the “West Bank” is based clearly on the Palestine Mandate of the League of Nations, which gave Jews the right to settle anywhere between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and from the Golan in the north to the Red Sea in the south. That right was not extinguished when the League of Nations came to an end. Article 80 of the U.N. Charter recognized the continuing relevance of the Mandate’s provisions. The West Bank always formed part of the territory assigned to the Jewish National Home, where the British were to “facilitate Jewish immigration” and to “encourage close settlement by Jews on the land.” Jordan was an “illegal occupier” of the West Bank from 1948 to 1967; in 1967, through its military victory, Israel at last became able to enforce the claim it had never relinquished.

Biden is almost certainly unaware that the Mandate for Palestine assigned all of the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean to the Jewish state. Such ignorance is widespread; few among the political and media elites in the Western world have bothered to read the Mandate, or Article 80 of the U.N. Charter. If they did, they would understand that the Mandate itself gives Israel the right to build settlements – which then naturally grow to become villages and cities – all over the West Bank. Biden’s remarks to AIPAC’s annual Policy Conference in Washington, DC strongly criticized what appears to be growing momentum toward unilateral Israeli annexation of large parts of the West Bank.

Israel has to stop the threats of annexation and settlement activity,” he said. “That’s going to choke off any hope for peace.

Biden has things all wrong. First of all, it is insulting to describe Israel’s people and government discussing the merits of annexation of part or all of the West Bank as constituting “threats.” Israel does not intend to “threaten” anyone in debating the question of how much of the West Bank to annex at first, and according to what timetable. No threats have been uttered or implied. It’s the Arabs and Iranians who have a long history of “threatening” about one thing or another if they do not get their way. Some, like Iran, threaten to wipe out Israel or to attack America. In October 1973, the Gulf Arabs threatened to decrease their deliveries of oil so as to destroy the economies of the West. Iran has repeatedly threatened to shut down the shipping lanes in the Straits of Oman and to hit American bases in the Middle East; Turkey has threatened to close the American base at Incirlik and threatened the leaders of Germany and the Netherlands for not allowing Erdogan’s men to campaign among the Turks in both countries.

Biden believes the very opposite of the real situation. He thinks Israel is “choking off any hope for peace” with its settlement-and-annexation policy. Hopes for peace have been repeatedly dashed not by Israel, but by the Palestinian leaders – first Arafat and then Abbas – who came to Washington, were offered deals by Israeli negotiators that gave them 95%, and then 97%, of the West Bank, but the Palestinians disdained to even consider such offers. They wanted a total Israeli withdrawal and a “return” to the 1949 armistice lines, which the Arabs, who refused an Israeli offer in 1949 to make those armistice lines into internationally-recognized borders, now want to do so. It’s too late. The offer no longer stands. The train left that particular station 70 years ago. And even today, it’s Mahmoud Abbas who is “choking off any hope for peace” by refusing even to discuss the Trump peace initiative.

What keeps the peace between Israel and the Arabs, including both the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and the neighboring Arab states, is precisely the deterrent power of the IDF. And a critical, even indispensable component of that deterrence is Israel’s continued possession of the West Bank. It needs to have some minimal strategic depth on its eastern flank, so that the IDF can hold off a potential invasion force from the east while Israel reservists are still being mobilized. If Israel were forced to surrender the West Bank – as Biden implicitly thinks it should – it would be all of eight miles wide at its narrowest point, from Qalqilya to the Mediterranean.

Biden warns that such moves –any expansion of settlements, an, a formal annexation of some or all of the West Bank settlements that exist — are damaging Israel’s cause in the US:

To be frank, those moves are taking Israel further from its democratic values, undermining support for Israel in the United States, especially among young people of both political parties. That’s dangerous. We can’t let that happen.

Israel is not moving “further from its democratic values.” In Israel itself, a thriving democracy treats Israeli Jews and Arabs equally. Arabs serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, are high-ranking diplomats, and are even officers in the IDF. They study, live, and work beside Jews. There is no apartheid, contrary to the claims of pathological Israel-haters. As for the Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel has welcomed the Trump Plan, which not only contemplates an independent Palestinian state, but also hopes to raise some $50 billion in aid for that new state, a colossal sum that would do much to increase the prosperity among Palestinians. Abbas turned down flat the Trump Plan even before reading it. Nor did he wish to discuss that potential aid of $50 billion for the Palestinians that had been mentioned in the meeting in Manama, Bahrain – a meeting that Abbas refused to attend or to send representatives. Now that Mahmoud Abbas and his sons have amassed a family fortune of $400 million, they don’t appear too concerned about the people, many of them living on the edge, whose interests the Palestinian leadership is supposed to further.

Israel has no desire to rule over Palestinians in the West Bank; it wants them to have a separate state, where they have full control over their own domestic destinies. Israel only wants to ensure that such a state would be sufficiently demilitarized – as, for example, by not having an air force – so as to not be able to threaten Israel. But otherwise, Israel is ready to accept a state of “Palestine,” even on land that Israelis know belongs to them, as long as it will lack the wherewithal to militarily threaten Israel. This readinesss of Israel to yield land on the West Bank so that it might become most of “Palestine” has gotten Israel no credit; Biden should give recognize that sacrifice and give the Israelis the credit they deserve.

You don’t have to be anti-Palestinian to be pro-Israeli,” Biden told the conference. “Israeli and Palestinian children are equally deserving of safety, security, and an opportunity to pursue their dreams.

Is Biden suggesting that Israel standing on its rights, both under the Mandate for Palestine, and according to an entirely independent justification for its holding onto the West Bank, U.N. Resolution 242, which guarantees Israel the right to “secure and recognizable boundaries,” is somehow illegitimate? Are “Palestinian” children, who are raised in a culture of extreme violence, who are taught to hate and to want to kill Jews – on Palestinian children’s shows you can see these serious-faced youngsters, ages four to seven, making stabbing notions with their knives as they chant slogans about killing Jews — really the moral equals to Jewish children, who are not taught to hate at all? And when Biden thinks that “Palestinian children are equally deserving of safety, security, and an opportunity to pursue their dreams,” he’s not taking into account what really goes on.

It’s the Palestinian terrorist leaders who endanger the lives of Palestinian children, by deliberately placing weaponry in schools, hospitals, and in apartment buildings, in order that children will be killed by incoming Israeli fire. It is the terrorist leaders who deliberately place Palestinian children in the front rank of the marchers during the Great March of Return, hoping they will be wounded or killed and thus become grist for the propaganda mill of Hamas. And what are the “dreams” of these Palestinian children? Their main “dream” is to kill Jews, all the Jews. How does Joe Biden intend to undo their entire upbringing, based as it is on the Qur’an itself, and the more than one hundred verses that command Muslims to engage in endless warfare – to fight, to kill, to smite at the necks of, to strike terror in the hearts of, the Infidels, and especially to fight and to kill the hated Jews, the worst enemies of the Muslims. Biden does not realize the depth of the pathological hatred of Jews among the Palestinians, a hatred based on the immutable Qur’an. When he refers to giving the Palestinian children their “opportunity to pursue their dreams,” he should be made to understand that while an Israeli child’s dream might be to become a pilot, or a journalist, or to work in a high-tech or agricultural start-up, the dreams of the Palestinian children are always to kill as many Jews as they can.

However, Biden said, the Palestinians must take steps to advance peace as well.

“Palestinians need to eradicate incitement on the West Bank,” he said. “They need to end the rocket attacks from Gaza. They need to accept once and for all the reality and the right of a secure democratic and Jewish State of Israel in the Middle East.”

Vaste programme, monsieur – as De Gaulle once answered a heckler who had cried out “Mort aux cons!” (“Death to all dopes!”). The Palestinians are not going to “eradicate incitement on the West Bank.” Whether you are a Slow Jihadist of the Palestinian Authority, or a Fast Jihadist of Hamas, you want the same goal: an end to the Jewish state and its replacement by “Palestine.” Biden assumes that Israel is invincible. Sadly, it isn’t true. The numbers of precision-guided missiles, as many as 140,000, that Hezbollah possesses in southern Lebanon aimed at Israel, the similar stockpile of rockets that Hamas has in Gaza, Iran’s bases both in Iran for long-range missiles that could potentially strike anywhere in Israel and, from closer up, in Syria (though Israel has been carefully destroying them) – these are the unprecedented dangers the Jewish state faces. It cannot be expected to perform miracles; it should not be asked to live with dangers no other country has. Israel requires a minimum of strategic depth, and for that it needs the West Bank.

Biden does not realize the Islamic basis of the pathological hatred for Israel. It cannot be waved away. The Palestinians will never eradicate incitement on the West Bank or — still more unlikely — in Gaza. Why did Biden not mention the threat from Gaza? Was it oversight, or his realization that the terrorists in Gaza, those of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, will never stop such incitement to violence against Israel; it is their reason for being?

Biden should say something like this: ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕ ΑΜΕΣΩΣ ΠΑΡΑΚΑΤΩ ΤΗΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ!!!

Look, here’s the deal: Israel is the only state the Jewish people have. They have lived in the Land of Israel for more than 3000 years. It came into existence against all odds. It was the refuge that took in hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors of the Nazi camps. A little later, Israel took in 800,000 penniless Jews who had fled or been expelled from Arab countries. It managed to fight, and win, three major wars for its survival. It has fought, and won, many smaller campaigns as well against the PLO, Hamas, and Hezbollah. The Arabs already have 22 states. They are, in fact, more richly endowed with states than any other people in the world. That matters. They’ve proven to be masters of propaganda. The Arabs, with some help from Soviet experts in disinformation, deliberately created the ‘Palestinian people’ in the 1960s and managed to convince the world that the local Arabs were this separate people, so that the lopsided war of the Arabs against on Israel could be presented merely as a conflict between ‘two tiny peoples, each wanting its homeland.’ There was nothing to distinguish ‘Palestinian’ Arabs from other Arabs in the same region. Not language, not religion, not customs, not anything. Zuheir Mohsen, a leader of the Palestinian terrorist group As Saiqah, succinctly explained – and please listen closely because it’s important, and I just wish Bernie was here to hear it — ‘The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.’

Now – and here’s my other point – it’s not just the Mandate for Palestine that gives Israel the right, should it wish, to hold onto, and allow Jews to settle on, the West Bank. All of the West Bank. There is U.N. Resolution 242. Any of you remember it? Well, it’s very important. It’s the Resolution that was passed by the General Assembly in the fall of 1967. And it gave Israel the right to retain territories it won ‘in the recent conflict’ – the Six-Day War – if it was necessary for its security. The phrase used was to assure Israel it would have ‘secure and recognizable boundaries.’ Now back in 1967, President Johnson had the Joint Chiefs send some military experts to Israel to report on what territories Israel would have to keep for defensive reasons. And they came back the report – I read it recently – that said that in the West Bank, the Israelis would have to keep, at an absolute minimum, the Jordan Valley, so as to protect against invasion from the East. At a minimum. That’s what they said. And Israel’s military has no intention of giving up control of the West Bank. You have to see Israel, as I have –see how very small it is, and how much it needs the West Bank in order to survive.

Lord Caradon, the British ambassador to the U.N. who was the main author of Resolution 242, when subsequently interviewed explained that the Arabs kept trying to change a particular phrase in that Resolution, which calls for Israeli withdrawal ‘from territories’ won in the recent conflict. The Arabs kept trying, and kept failing, to have that phrase changed to ‘all the territories.’ They never got it. And so, reinforcing the Mandate for Palestine, there is U.N. Resolution 242, which gives Israel an independent right on which to stake its claim to the West Bank.

Look, the Palestinians have an offer: a state of their own, with a capital in a suburb of East Jerusalem, and what’s more, $50 billion in aid. $50 billion! Think of what they could do with that money. I don’t agree with President Trump on almost anything. But his peace initiative is worth a try. A half-dozen Arab countries – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahrain, Oman – gave it their initial approval, as a starting point. They had to vote with all the others against the plan at the Arab League, and the O.I.C. Nobody wants to stand out. It was a pro-forma protest. But it’s pretty clear to me that many of them are tired of the whole Palestinian business. They’ve got civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. They’ve got problems with the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic State remnants around the Middle East. Egypt is in a water war with Ethiopia. Lebanon’s economy is cratering, and Hezbollah has taken over the whole shebang. And above all, they’ve got to worry about an aggressive Iran, which is in Yemen, and Iraq, and Syria, and Lebanon, causing as much mischief as it can. That’s gotta be more important than whatever Mahmoud Abbas wants.

The time is ripe for the Palestinians to realize that this is the last, best deal they’re going to be offered. It’s not just me saying that. Not just Joe Biden. It’s the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Bahrainis, the Egyptians. That’s the difference between me and Bernie on the Middle East. He’s just got it in for Israel. It’s weird. He thinks Netanyahu is a ‘racist.’ He thinks Israel is a ‘racist’ state. He might even move the Embassy back to Tel Aviv. I think he’s nuts. My position is clear: I want the Israelis to stay safe, to have their IDF always able to deter any would-be aggressors, and to keep the territory it needs – it’s Israel’s decision, not ours — to make that deterrence credible. There’s a lot I didn’t know before. But now I’ve read the Mandate, and Resolution 242, and a lot else besides. So let’s stop talking about ‘occupied Palestinian lands’ and have Israel’s rights to the West Bank — the whole West Bank — recognized. And let Israel take it from there.

Yes, I know. A fantasy. Feel free to send that fantasy to the Biden campaign. Someone just might persuade him to read it. Stranger things have been known to happen.

The world has been sent reeling by the Coronavirus pandemic that has yet to run its course.

However, even though this deadly pandemic is still ongoing, it is not too soon to take stock of a number of critical issues.  In point of fact, it is probably best to begin this process before the pandemic ends and the public permits this global crisis to fade from their minds as it fades from the news reports.

To begin with, as I noted in my previous article, Because of the Coronavirus, Borders Suddenly Matter.  For all of the bogus slanderous claims hurled by the radical Left in the media and politics, securing borders against those infected with a dangerous virus is not a matter of racism and xenophobia – but survival.

Unlike most politicians, President Trump has the chutzpah to call things as he sees them.  This, by itself, is enough to traumatize the Left.  Trump has come to refer to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) by the term “China Virus,” sending many “journalists” into paroxysms of rage and disgust, claiming that referring to this virus that, in point of fact, originated in China, demonstrates that Trump is a racist.

Time for a reality check.

Various illnesses have traditionally been named for the locations where the diseases originated.  The devastating Spanish Flu of 1918 was so-named because, it originated in Spain.

In 1972, at the beginning of my career with the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), I became infected with a very serious illness that was referred to as the London Flu.  I was an Immigration Inspector at JFK International Airport at the time and consequently was exposed to a variety of pathogens brought to the United States by foreign visitors.  I wound up in the hospital and nearly died, my fever maxed at more than 105 degrees.  Some of my colleagues were similarly sickened by this particularly virulent illness.

The doctors and nurses who treated me all referred to my illness as the London Flu.  I doubt that they disliked Brits or Londoners.

Clearly the mainstream media and the radical Left despise the President and on a nearly daily basis demonstrate an irrational response to virtually everything he does and says.

But could it be that their extreme abhorrence of the term “China Virus” has a more deep-seated origin?  Perhaps it goes back to how they were educated in American colleges.

When misleading terms are used, such as the term “immigrant” instead of “alien” most write this off as being Politically Correct.  In reality this is nothing short of Orwellian Newspeak and it must always be described as such.

Today. as we will see, many of Ameria’s premier universities are under the influence of the Chinese government and other governments that are hostile to the United States.

Chinese Aggression Against the U.S.A. manifests itself in many ways, especially through widespread espionage.

The Communist, totalitarian Chinese regime is extremely sensitive to the way that they are perceived around the world.  They have infiltrated many universities around the United States for a number of significant purposes that include having their scientists, engineers, computer programmers and other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) professionals trained in the United States, and maintaining strict control over those students when they are in the United States.

Many Chinese students are coerced in spying on the United States when they secure “Optional Practical Training” by working for American companies.

It has been recently alleged by the U.S. Department of Education that China and other countries have been allegedly pouring billions of dollars into American Universities that went unreported by those universities, in violation of U.S. laws.

On February 12, 2020 the Department of Education (DOE) issued a press release:  U.S. Department of Education Launches Investigation into Foreign Gifts Reporting at Ivy League Universities that included this subtitle:

Since July, the Department has uncovered more than $6 billion in unreported foreign gifts from countries including Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

The DOE press release also included these excerpts:

The Department is also concerned Harvard University may lack appropriate institutional controls over foreign money and has failed to report fully all foreign gifts and contracts as required by law. This comes after Dr. Charles Lieber, chair of Harvard University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, was indicted for lying about his involvement with the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents Plan and admitting that Harvard lacks adequate institutional controls for effective oversight and tracking of very large donations.

*          *          *

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations described foreign spending on U.S. schools as “a black hole” because colleges and universities “routinely” fail to comply with the law, and reported foreign money can come with strings attached that might compromise academic freedom.

*          *          *

Additional Information on the Department’s Section 117 Enforcement Actions:

• Since July 1, 2019, the Department’s enforcement efforts have triggered the reporting of approximately $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign money.
• Ten schools, including Cornell University, Yale University, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, Texas A&M University, and Carnegie Mellon University reported approximately $3.6 billion in previously unreported foreign gifts.
• The Department has opened eight civil compliance investigations since June 28, 2019.
• The Department has reported its preliminary findings to Congress including:
• The largest colleges and universities are multi-billion dollar, multi-national enterprises using opaque foundations, foreign campuses, and other sophisticated legal structures to generate revenue that is intermingled with domestic sources of funding from tuition, grants, and the like.
• These colleges and universities actively solicit foreign governments, corporations, and nationals for funds although some donors are known to be hostile to the United States and may be seeking to project “soft power,” steal sensitive and proprietary research and development data and other intellectual property, and spread propaganda benefitting foreign governments.

At the beginning of the onslaught of the Coronavirus, President Trump quickly decided to bar the entry of nonimmigrant aliens from China to prevent the spread of the virus into the United States, invoking 8 U.S. Code § 1182(f), a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that he previously used to prevent the entry of aliens from countries associated with international terrorism and where our officials were unable to effectively vet those who sought entry into the United States.

As the disease spread through Europe, especially Italy, the President expanded the list of countries whose nonimmigrant citizens would be barred from entering the United States to try to slow the spread of the disease.

The Democrats, led by Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the other “usual suspects,” attacked the President for being a racist and xenophobe.  They should have used a different term, “Leader!”

Now many other countries around the world have taken similar measures.  Dr. Anthony Fauci lauded Trump’s important decision stating that this single act, of closing our nation’s borders, has been one of the most effective measures take by Trump to help save lives in America.

For decades China has run roughshod over America.

Out of extreme corporate greed, the production of our essential pharmaceuticals has been shipped to China and other countries that do not have our best interests at heart, leaving America vulnerable.  China has now threatened to stop the flow of vital antibiotics to the United States and has actually accused the U.S. Army of planting the Coronavirus in China!

President Trump is the first president, in decades, to stand up to this Communist dictatorship that openly boasts it plans to dominate the world.  Trump’s actions have undoubtedly done much more than just ruffle some feathers in Beijing.

President Trump has gone on the offensive in his strategies to protect America and Americans.

Our nation has been rendered vulnerable to one of America’s most dangerous adversaries by corporations that seek cheap labor and no regulations and have moved production of vital supplies to China and other countries.  To be able to do this, the corporations have pumped huge amounts of cash into the campaign coffers of politicians who need the money to win their elections.  Not unlike prostitutes they will apparently do whatever it takes to satisfy their donors.

As I noted, in part, in a speech I gave in Washington several years ago:

The practitioners of the two oldest professions will assume any position, no matter how dangerous, ridiculous, uncomfortable or contrary to commonsense – for the right price!

The time has come to finally clean out the bordellos!

[Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of a 3-Part Series.]  

Trump’s task in leading the country’s defense against the coronavirus pandemic has been made immeasurably more difficult by the Democrats’ disloyal attempts to undermine its commander-in-chief at every turn. These attacks are summed up in the absurd caricature Democrats have created of the president as a “pathological liar,” a “narcissist uninterested in anything but himself,” and “out of control,” “incompetent,” “bigoted,” “anti-scientific,” and of course an anti-immigrant racist. And, therefore, a threat to national security rather than its guardian. These attacks have been carried to such extremes that perfectly sensible measures adopted by governments all over the world, such as closing borders, are characterized as “racist” when enacted by him – and carried out in a particularly advantageous fashion, such as his ban on travel from China within days of the virus being designated a global health emergency by the World Health Organization.

Since Trump is a leader who relies on his instincts, a bold risk taker who is willing to buck opposition from all sides if he feels his instincts are right, but is also ready to correct course if his instincts prove wrong, he is an exceptionally easy target for hostile critics. He is particularly vulnerable in the midst of a crisis which calls for alarm and calm simultaneously – for a realistic assessment of the threat but also for a leader who can convincingly provide a basis for optimism to those dependent on him lest they succumb to panic and despair.

This balancing act is made far more difficult in an environment where basic facts are still unknown because of the failures of the CDC and previous administrations to prepare for such a pandemic. Trump’s antagonists have exploited these fault lines to maximum advantage in their campaign to destroy him, seizing on one element to the exclusion of others. When judgments are driven by irrational hatreds any outcome is possible. The victims of the malodorous judgments that follow from these hatreds are all Americans who are dependent on him, since he is and remains the duly elected leader of the country.

Thus, if Trump touts an untested anti-viral drug cocktail like hydroxychloroquine and zythromax, as a possible solution to the crisis, his detractors will find a scientific skeptic whose doubts can serve as a basis to accuse Trump of medical malpractice, or incompetence or dangerous confusion – even though the jury is still out on whether such a cocktail will actually work. Similarly, when Trump raises the possibility of lifting the cloud of the virus on a certain date, like Easter, to avoid an economic collapse and provide hope anew, his antagonists attack him as acting from self-serving motives on behalf of Wall Street and giant corporations which have become – verbally at least – the new enemies of a Marxified Democrat Party.

Or, more pointedly, if Trump seeks to calm a panicking public by saying the situation is “under control” – the innocent equivalent of “your government is on the case” – this is denounced as an irresponsible lie that shows Trump (as usual) doesn’t know what he is talking about and is only concerned with burnishing his image. As Trump’s presidential rival Joe Biden said in his first campaign ad:

Crisis comes to every presidency. We don’t blame them for that. What matters is how they handle it. Donald Trump didn’t create the coronavirus, but he is the one who called it a ‘hoax,’ who eliminated the pandemic response team, and who let the virus spread unchecked across America. He should stop talking and start listening to the medical experts.[1]

These sentiments were hardly designed to instill confidence in the man who is the still the constitutionally appointed leader of the nation’s efforts to defeat the virus.

Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh responded to Biden’s vile attack by shifting attention to the political disaster to which Biden and the Democrats were contributing: “It used to be that Americans faced national adversity with unity,” Murtaugh observed, “but Joe Biden and his allies have abandoned that principle in favor of rank, despicable politics.”[2]

With a few notable exceptions, it is the leadership of the Democrat Party and its media allies who spread the falsehoods that Trump had dismissed the virus as a “hoax,” cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control, and failed to provide an adequate number of surgical masks and ventilators to hospitals and their staffs. The “hoax” charge was particularly absurd since Trump had closed the border with China in the face of Democrat slanders that the measure was unneeded and “racist,” or that Trump had declared a state of emergency making it the top priority of his presidency.[3] But that didn’t stop the disloyal Biden and his Democrat allies bent on advancing their own agendas, however destructive to their fellow citizens.

The scarcity of masks was the result of the failure of the Obama administration to replenish the nation’s mask stockpiles after depleting them in the course of the H1N1 and Ebola epidemics. It was also the Obama Administration which had sought multi-million dollar cuts in the Centers for Disease Control budget, which were fortunately blocked at the time by the Republican Congress. Trump had actually increased the CDC’s funding.[4] Despite Trump’s obvious deference to his medical team, an army of Democrat and media saboteurs relentlessly attacked the president as “anti-science,” while insisting that he didn’t listen to his medical experts. This charge was specifically refuted by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the epidemiologist who headed Trump’s crisis team. Fauci stated that he had never been over-ruled by the president when they disagreed over a scientific issue. Dr. Deborah Birx, who coordinated the task force on the virus, and who reaffirmed Dr. Fauci’s view of Trump as a responsible leader, was viciously attacked for her testimony as a “hack” and “Stepford Doc” by former Clinton shill Joe Lockhart and a legion of other Trump-haters in the media.[5]

The treacherous lengths to which leaders of the Democrat Party have gone to demonize and defame Trump are exemplified in Hillary Clinton’s crusade to tar him as a “racist” for referring to the infection as a “Chinese virus.” Clinton denounced Trump in a tweet, saying, “The president is turning to racist rhetoric,” for using that descriptor. His purpose, Clinton explained was “to distract from his failures to take the coronavirus seriously early on, make tests widely available, and adequately prepare the country for a period of crisis.” Clinton’s attack was framed in the language that had become the creed of the Democrat Party. Calling the term “China virus” a racist epithet was an absurdity to anyone not sharing the ideological assumptions of Identity Politics and Cultural Marxism. The names of other troublesome diseases like “German measles,” “Lyme Disease and “Spanish flu” were also derived from their geographical points of origin. Not only had the virus originated in China, but by concealing its appearance and allowing millions of Wuhan citizens to leave the infected city and travel to unsuspecting countries abroad, the Chinese Communist dictatorship had cynically exposed the global population to its deadly effects.

The president’s characterization was, in fact, defensive. To cover up its malfeasance, the Chinese Communist government had launched a global propaganda campaign accusing the U.S. military of deliberately creating the virus and maliciously spreading it. As Trump explained, “China was putting out information, which was false, that our military gave this to them. That was false, and rather than having an argument, I said I have to call it where it came from.”[6] So seriously did the Chinese Communist rulers take their psychological war based on this falsehood that they launched a $2 trillion lawsuit suit against the United States for allegedly creating and spreading the virus.[7] In this Cold War, the Democrat Party presented itself as appeasers or outright sympathizers with the enemy assault on their own country. So great was their hatred of Trump.

 In other words, not only was Clinton aiding and abetting a disinformation campaign against her own country and its president, but she was actively undermining her commander-in-chief’s efforts to combat the virus threatening American citizens. Clinton’s disturbing readiness to abet China’s psychological warfare against her own country, was immediately praised by China’s ambassador to the United States who said: “Justice Speaks Loudly.”[8] What was loud and clear, however, was not justice, but a fault line in America’s body politic so volatile and deep as to pose an existential threat to the nation itself.

 David Horowitz is the author of the forthcoming Humanix book, Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win.

Notes:

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/25/politics/biden-trump-coronavirus/index.html

[2] Ibid.

[3] The “hoax” comment his enemies were referring to was specifically a reference to the attacks on him, which claimed he was doing nothing to fight the epidemic or fighting it incompetently. Those responsible for these slanders were the same people who had peddled (and were still peddling) the discredited “Russia hoax,” designed to undermine and destroy him. Nor did Trump shut down, disband or fire the White House pandemic team as Biden’s ad (and many other Democrat officials and media allies) falsely claimed. The team had been reorganized within the National Security Council to make it more efficient.

The Truth About the Charge That Trump ‘Eliminated’ White House Pandemic Office Before Coronavirus

[4] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/obama-admin-repeatedly-sought-millions-in-cdc-funding-cuts

[5] https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1243244272335413249?s=20;  https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/03/27/nolte-cnn-analyst-joe-lockhart-belittles-dr-birx-as-stepford-doc/

[6] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/488251-hillary-clinton-trump-using-racist-rhetoric-to-distract-from

[7] https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/03/27/chinese-lawyers-sue-america-on-conspiracy-theory-virus-came-from-u-s/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_campaign=20200327&utm_content=Final

[8] https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/21/chinese-ambassador-lauds-hillary-clintons-attack-on-president-trump-justice-always-speak-loudly/

Wars Visible and Invisible, Part III

The fault line.

Wed Apr 1, 2020 

David Horowitz

[Editor’s note: This is the final part of a 3-Part Series]

In the middle of a war with an invisible virus capable of taking the entire nation down, America’s commander-in-chief is faced with a rear guard campaign to undermine his authority, paint him as an enemy and cripple his efforts to defend us against the attack. This second war is being prosecuted by leaders of the Democrat Party who spent the previous three years sabotaging Trump’s presidency and plotting his removal.

The principal focus of these campaigns has been the president’s rhetoric and character, demonizing him as “unfit for the office,” “racist,” “incompetent,” and a “threat to national security.” While these and other wild complaints have been indispensable weapons in the effort to destroy him, their deployment in the war against the virus exposes a much deeper fault line in the body politic, one that threatens the nation’s future.

Mark Cuban is a highly successful entrepreneur and was a big supporter of Hillary Clinton and opponent of Trump in 2016. A week before the election he called Trump “a threat to the stock market” and within months of his presidency declared that Trump had “no leadership skills.” But evidently Trump’s performance caused him to change his assessment. In the midst of the coronavirus epidemic, Cuban gave an interview to The Daily Caller in which he said Trump should “get all the credit in the world” for his handling of the pandemic.

Not so Cuban’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, who was busy denouncing Trump as a racist and winning praise from China’s Communist dictatorship for doing so; or presidential candidate Joe Biden, who was attacking him as an hysterical xenophobe for banning travel from China, and telling him to “shut up,” i.e., quit the field in the middle of the battle because he was so ignorant and incompetent.

And not so the Machiavellian leader of the impeachment campaign, Nancy Pelosi, who was accusing Trump of killing people by allegedly denying the danger posed by the virus and then failing to deliver vital medical equipment. She concluded her attack by not so subtly threatening to reopen impeachment proceedings to punish him for his crimes.

The underhanded attacks from these figures, their progressive allies and the Democrat leadership, sprang from a much deeper source of hostility to Trump and his followers than objections to language or manners, or other alleged character defects could provide. That source was the fact that Trump had made himself the symbol of an America that the Democrat Party had come to despise. This anti-American animus was given full loathsome expression by Beto O’Rourke at one of the Democrat primary debates, which was not challenged by any of the nine other top polling Democrat contenders:

Racism in America is endemic. It is foundational. We can mark the creation of this country not at the 4th of July, 1776, but August 20, 1619, when the first kidnapped African was brought to this country against his will. And in bondage, and as a slave, built the greatness and the success and the wealth that neither he nor his descendants would ever be able to fully participate in and enjoy.

Not only was this series of historically illiterate slanders unchallenged by any of the Democrat leaders onstage, it was drawn from The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a sinister scheme backed by the Times’ editorial board, and the brainchild of a racist, pro-Castro Times staffer. The project was clearly designed to tar and feather America as a “white supremacist” nation founded on slavery, and to replace its traditional inspiring heritage as a nation dedicated to achieving equality and freedom, which it most surely did. Thanks to the transformation of America’s K-12 schools into indoctrination centers for the left – a travesty spear-headed by Democrat teacher unions – this vile curriculum has already been adopted in 3,500 hundred classrooms spread through all fifty states.

Democrats’ hatred of Trump is at its core a hatred of his patriotism – derided by Democrats as “white nationalism.” It is hatred of his pride in America, his pledge to restore American greatness and to put America first in his priorities as America’s commander-in-chief. It is reflected in the Democrat Party’s tolerance for anti-American, lifelong supporters of Communist dictators and Communist causes like Bernie Sanders, in their attacks on American corporations and billionaires, in their disregard for American security at the borders, and their readiness to embrace America-hating, terrorist-supporting anti-Semites like Ilhan Omar and give her top security clearances, and in their eagerness for communist schemes to nationalize and/or destroy whole industries, and to establish total government control of healthcare putting every American under Washington’s thumb.

But even more telling than their destructive and dangerous policy proposals, their readiness to undermine and obstruct a duly elected president, and their alliances with hate-filled radicals like Sanders, O’Rourke, Harris, Booker and Warren, is their assault on the constitutional pillars of American democracy.

America’s political order is built on individual identity, accountability and freedom. This is the cornerstone of American equality – that individuals should be judged on their merits and not their gender or the color of their skin. Identity Politics is the very antithesis of this value system. Identity Politics is collectivist and racist. It is so embedded in the Democrat Party mindset that Senator Elizabeth Warren could say at a presidential primary debate, without any self-consciousness, or challenge from her colleagues: “We cannot just say that criminal justice is the only time we want to talk about race. We need race-conscious laws.”

It would be difficult to find a more anti-American sentiment than that. Warren is also a senate leader in the campaign to eliminate the Electoral College a fundamental pillar of the founder’s desire to establish a “republic” rather than a direct democracy. What the founders feared most was the division of the country into party factions that would prey on the emotions and illusions of the electorate in order create a tyranny of the majority which would run roughshod over the minority – a pretty accurate summary of the Democrats’ three year campaign to resist, obstruct and remove a president elected by 63 million Americans.

The Electoral College was an institution created by the founders to force compromise and comity – the exact opposite of what the divisive party of Pelosi, Schumer and Schiff set out to achieve, first with their “resistance” to Trump, and then with their attempt – reminiscent of the Salem witch trials – to nullify an election.

Democrat proposals to pack the Supreme Court with leftists to serve their partisan interests, to abolish the Electoral College and the Senate because they are “undemocratic” and “racist” are red flags that we ignore at our peril. Along with the Democrats’ efforts to stamp out voter I.D. laws, blur the distinction between citizens and non-citizens and encourage voter fraud, these are attacks on the constitutional framework the founders constructed.

So it is with their socialist ambitions. In Federalist 10, the constitution’s chief architect, James Madison, warned about the dangers of radical factions and explained that it was the plan of the founders to thwart them, and to protect the new nation from “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project,” – which pretty well sums up the agendas of the Democrat Party today. This is why Democrats hate Trump and in the midst of America’s wars, both visible and invisible, are willing to aid America’s enemies both at home and abroad.

David Horowitz is the author of the forthcoming Humanix book, Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win.

14. ΜΟΝΟ ΝΤΡΟΠΗ ΚΑΙ ΑΙΣΧΟΣ!

Jew-Hate in France

When Jewish students avoid going to public schools.

Wed Apr 1, 2020 

Stephen Brown

Last December, vandals desecrated 107 Jewish graves with anti-Semitic inscriptions in Westerhoffen in eastern France. Anti-Jewish graffiti was also found in the nearby town of Schafhouse-sur-Zorn. No suspects were arrested. Earlier in 2019, in February in Alsace, also in eastern France, 100 Jewish graves were desecrated with Nazi symbols.

The desecration occurred just hours before the French government’s lower legislative house was to adopt a motion modeled on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism which states that denying Jews their right to self-determination is anti-Semitic.

In the same month, an Israeli student was attacked by two strangers on the subway for speaking Hebrew into a cell phone. His nose was broken. A 17-year-old, arrested with a stolen phone and known to police, was taken into custody. His ethnic origin was not given.

And perhaps most frightening, U.K.’s leading freedom fighter Katie Hopkins stated in a recent Glazov Gang video that 18 Jewish families in Paris had received letters telling them to “get out” or be killed.

Perhaps to indicate the senders of these poisonous letters meant business, Hopkins also cited the case of the 82-year-old Jewish woman last year who lived in one of the poorer suburbs surrounding Paris. She was stabbed to death and thrown off her balcony by her Muslim neighbor.

Anti-Semitic attacks are on the increase in France. According to Wikepedia, in 2018, they rose by 69 per cent amounting to about 500 assaults. Anti-Semitism surged during the Second Intifada from 2002-2004 to disturbing levels.

Despite only making up one to three per cent of the population of France, Jews are subjected to 40 per cent of all racially or religiously motivated attacks. There are about 500,000 Jews in France and they make up the third largest number of Jews in the world after Israel and the United States.

Anti-Semitism has a long history in France. From the Dreyfuss affair, in which a Jewish French officer was convicted of treason on false charges, through to the Vichy regime.

But at no time did Jews feel they were in such danger as today with the Muslim immigration to France. Some Jews are now so concerned with their security that they have emigrated to Israel with their families. In 2014, the number of French Jews leaving for Israel for the first time exceeded the United States. Seventy per cent of Jews are concerned about anti-Semitic insults while 20 per cent are concerned about physical assaults. Prior to this, Jews never felt compelled by anti-Semitism to leave France.

Muslim anti-Semitism is virulent and also deadly. The best proof of this occurred when Mohmmed Merah, a petty Muslim criminal, attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse and killed three students and a rabbi. There have also been numerous other attacks on Jews and against Jewish institutions, which are guarded by special security guards with some coming from Israel.

Some of these, such as the one against Ilan Halimi, are notorious. Halimi was a French Jew of Moroccan descent who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Muslims calling themselves “gang of barbarians.”

The problem with anti-Semitism in France is, essentially, that hatred of Israel and the Jews has become a major part of the identity of Muslims of north African and African origin.

“Hatred for Israel and for Jews has become a major component of the identity of French of Arab or African background; it is the cement of the second generation,” said Gil Mihaely, founder and director of the Causeur, a French magazine dedicated to intellectual debate.

Mihaely further states that the anti-Jewish demonstrations of 2014 in France, in which two synagogues were attacked in Paris, “betray a profound need to identify oneself as an adversary of Israel and of the Jews.”

The French historian Georges Bensoussan also states about anti-Semitism in his country that Muslim families in France “drink it with the mother’s milk.”

This does not augur well for the future of a Jewish presence in France.

Anti-Semitism is so bad that Jewish students are avoiding going to public schools.

In a “large number of schools” students are “beaten and insulted because they are Jews,” said the president of the council representing Jewish institutions in France in a story in Le Figaro.

“In my time we all went to secular schools. Today not more than a third of third of Jewish children go to secular schools, the other two thirds go to private schools, either Jewish or Christian,’ said the president.

One high school principal was reported to have warned Jewish students in 2017 not to attend his school for fear of harassment and assaults.

It is also disturbing to see members of the French left ally itself with anti-Semitic Muslims. The Communist mayor of Valenton, a community near Paris, insulted France’s Jewish community in 2014 when he named a street after Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti. Barghouti was actually made an honorary citizen of Valenton five years earlier.

Barghouti was sentenced by an Israel court in 2004 to multiple life sentences for planning deadly terrorist attacks. But that didn’t stop Valenton’s mayor from calling the terrorist “…the face of the of the resistance of the Palestinian people against the occupation,,,”

As a counter, Sammy Ghozlan, founder of The National Bureau For Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, said: “The celebration of a murderer is unacceptable.”

It is noticeable that Muslims in France become very agitated about what they regard as Israeli crimes but don’t utter a word about their 300,000 fellow Muslims killed in the war in Syria or about the thousands killed in Yemen or Libya.

And when in 2012 a moderate imam tried to mobilize people, including Muslims, to demonstrate against Merah’s anti-Semitic crimes, only about 50 people showed up. But such apathy now appears among the entire population. In 1990, after a Jewish cemetery was desecrated, thousands of people showed up to protest against anti-Semitism. But after the Merah murders, only Jews showed up to demonstrate.

As one writer stated about Muslims and non-Muslims in France, the sentiment today is that two communities are forming side by side who regard one another with hostility. One can see this, in one respect, with their different attitudes anti-Semitism. And this sentiment, the writer states, is shared by many. In other words, France is a fractured society.

If the flight of French Jews, and Jews from other western European countries as well, is not stopped, then they all will wind up looking like the Muslim countries of North Africa and the Middle East whose Jewish communities were chased out decades ago. In other words, Hitler’s dream of a Jew-free Europe will finally be realized. Western Europe will be ‘Judenrein’.

15.

Identity Politics Lied. New Yorkers Died

How identity politics pseudoscience left New York exposed to the Coronavirus.

Thu Apr 2, 2020 

Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Last year, New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot was warning that “even brief contact with the police or indirect exposure is associated with lasting harm to people’s physical and mental health”.

“We as a public health department have really been trying to frame criminal justice system involvement as an exposure,” Barbot’s epidemiologist, Kimberly Zweig, claimed.

Zweig had a degree in epidemiology, but her focus was entirely on PTSD and stress. Not on disease.

Why was New York City so badly unprepared for the arrival of the coronavirus? The answer was radical politics. And Barbot and Zweig embodied the public health mismanagement of a radical administration.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, the disgraced figure at the center of the city’s coronavirus meltdown, had graduated from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in 1991. She had worked as a pediatrician, before being selected as the Medical Director for the Office of School Health in New York in 2003. Her qualification for the job was unclear and her bio doesn’t list any administrative degrees.

In 2010, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake chose Barbot as Baltimore’s health commissioner. Blake would later become infamous for announcing that she had given the city’s race rioters “space to destroy”.

The city’s murder rate has continued hitting new highs since.

A few years later, Barbot came back to New York City and began working her way up through the Department of Health. When she was named Health Commissioner last year, the big news was that the city had its “first Latina commissioner” who had come out the Bronx housing projects.

Barbot succeeded Mary T. Bassett: a 17-year veteran of the University of Zimbabwe. Bassett had launched the Center for Health Equity and spent her time warning of the public health threat from racism in talks, “Why Your Doctor Should Care About Social Justice”, articles, “How Does Racism Affect Your Health”, and research papers, “Uprooting Institutionalized Racism as Public Health Practice.”

As Health Commissioner, Barbot’s bio boasted that “she uses a racial equity lens” and credited her with “spearheading the creation of the Center for Health Equity which operationalizes the Department’s commitment to racial justice.”

As the coronavirus bore down on New York City, Barbot and the Health Department were busy operationalizing social justice while remaining oblivious to the scientific realities of the pandemic. The department’s focus on health equity required it to discourage recent arrivals from Wuhan from going into self-quarantine or avoiding large public gatherings like the Lunar New Year celebrations.

“We are very clear: We wish New Yorkers a Happy Lunar New Year and we encourage people to spend time with their families and go about their celebration,” Barbot insisted.

A week later, Barbot appeared at a press event promoting Lunar New Year celebrations in Chinatown.

“As we gear up to celebrate the #LunarNewYear in NYC, I want to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for anyone to change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts of the city because of #coronavirus,” she insisted.

By then there had already been over 17,000 cases of the Wuhan Virus in China with nearly 3,000 new cases in one day. For the first time, someone outside Mainland China had died of the disease.

Manhattan’s Chinatown, where Barbot had appeared, is one of the densest parts of the city. The old core community where the Lunar New Year celebration is based is a maze of cramped tenements, narrow streets, tiny stores whose counters extend far into the street, and other unsafe conditions

Barbot went on urging people to participate in the parade while spreading misinformation about the risk. “You won’t get it merely from riding the subways – you get it from secretions,” she even claimed.

The commissioner went on with the happy talk in March.

After the first coronavirus case in the city, she claimed that “disease detectives” would prevent the spread of the coronavirus and that New Yorkers were “at low risk”.

“As we confront this emerging outbreak, we need to separate facts from fear, and guard against stigma and panic,” Commissioner Barbot signed off: warning that the real enemy was prejudice.

“There’s no indication that being in a car, being in the subways with someone who’s potentially sick is a risk factor,” she told New Yorkers.

Four days later, she finally admitted, “It’s not just prolonged household contact as we initially thought. We have evidence that there are other types of interactions that can occur that can transmit the virus.”

Barbot and her boss, Mayor Bill de Blasio, had been spreading dangerous nonsense with no scientific basis. When asked about some of her claims at a press conference, she said, “This is a novel virus that we’re still learning a lot about.”

That was better than Bill de Blasio who, when asked how Barbot’s Department of Health had decided that the virus dies quickly in the air, rambled, “All information is valuable, but the information that we’re gleaning from our own direct experience is the most valuable to us.”

Had New York City’s health authorities lost their minds? Not exactly. They had enveloped their medical decisions in a fog of identity politics pseudoscience which had redefined medicine around equity.

That was Barbot’s real job. The obsession with equity in everything had been the signature of the entire De Blasio administration. Just as Marxists had used class as the master theory explaining all the problems of human history, radicals in this country had redefined racism as the explanation for all ills.

To Barbot and De Blasio, the coronavirus wasn’t the real threat, racism was. Their job was to suppress overreaction to the coronavirus by persuading New Yorkers that there was no real risk of contagion.

The actual science, objective research, was irrelevant compared to the city’s own truths about racism.

In the midst of the pandemic, this may seem inconceivable, but all that happened was that New York City’s leaders applied the same approach to the coronavirus that they had used for crime and terrorism.

When it came to terrorism and crime, the policy had been to minimize the risk, cover up actual cases and to warn against prejudice toward communities likely to engage in crime or terrorism. This approach had failed miserably in preventing crime or terrorism, but the actual scale of the damage had not been so devastating as to actually make a major dent in daily life in New York City.

New York City’s Health Department had already medicalized this approach with HIV. Last year, the Health Department was back to running ads encouraging sex with HIV positive people.

“This new U = U campaign underscores the fact that people living with HIV have more choices than ever before,” Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot boasted. “With a sexual health plan that includes taking HIV medication, regular medical care, and using condoms, New Yorkers with HIV can live long, fulfilling, and healthy lives with the options they have now.”

“People living with HIV are lovable, touchable, and should feel confident that, with effective treatment, they can live free of the concern of transmitting the virus,” Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, Deputy Commissioner for the Health Department’s Division of Disease Control added.

The difference with coronavirus was how quickly the risk of a disease outbreak turned into the reality.

New York City’s politicized government had inhabited its own bubble in which filling the streets with criminals, protecting terrorists and illegal aliens, or encouraging unsafe sex, was ideologically correct. And the casualties of this ideological destruction, whether bicycling tourists in Manhattan, young gay men, or young women in Central Park, were easy enough to bury in press releases full of Newspeak.

But the coronavirus crisis did not work that way. And Barbot and De Blasio were behind the curve. The radicals running the city were not only out of step with science, but with the rest of the country.

By the time reality, in the form of angry editorials, state action, local protests, intruded, it was too late.

The coronavirus outbreak has exploded in New York City. And everyone has gone all in on the cover-up. The inept De Blasio administration, which didn’t bother ordering protective equipment until March, when it was still assuring New Yorkers that there was nothing to worry about, has been blaming Trump.

But that’s a mistake.

The coronavirus pandemic contains important lessons. Trying to suppress those lessons will carry an even heavier price. The price can be postponed, but the interest rate on it will be even higher.

New York City’s dense grid, its cramped public transportation, and large foreign population put it at risk, but it was an ideological contempt for objective science by identity politics radicals that left it naked.

The Chinese Communist leadership had refused to believe that a virus could take off in their perfect system. Ideology blinded them to the outbreak the same way it did their leftist counterparts in New York City who were obsessed with making sure that the Lunar New Year celebrations went forward in their perfect utopia to prove that science doesn’t matter and that the only real virus is racism.

Mayor Bill de Blasio had dismantled the city’s Department of Health, replacing its personnel with unqualified hacks whose job was to medicalize social justice, and warn of the public health threats of the police, or hair discrimination, while assuring city residents that they had nothing to fear from COVID-19.

New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot warned New Yorkers that brief contact with the police was dangerous, but that brief contact with people infected with the coronavirus wasn’t.

Identity politics lied. New Yorkers died.

16.

Iran and the Consequences of Coronavirus

Will the devastating health disaster bring an end to the Islamic Republic?

Wed Apr 1, 2020 

Joseph Puder

It is perhaps ironic that the coronavirus epidemic in Iran started in the holy city of Qom, the seat from which the ayatollah Khomeini rose to power. Qom is where the epidemic began and spread throughout Iran. Apparently, Iran’s Mahan Air, owned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in a flight back from China to Iran, carried passenger(s) harboring the coronavirus. They were probably the vectors who spread the virus that has made Iran second only to China in the number of dead from the virus. Perhaps it is not only ironic, but rather prophetic that the city that spawned the Islamic dictatorship may be the city that will cause the regime’s demise. What is unfortunate is that innocent Iranian people are paying with their lives for the duplicity and callousness of the regime. The regime failed to inform the Iranian people of the outbreak of the Coronavirus and did not provide instruction to the people on how to protect themselves.

According to the Washington Post (March 19, 2020), there were more than 17,000 confirmed cases in Iran, a number thought to be a serious underestimate. As far as many Iranians are concerned, the Ayatollahs leadership initial refusal to impose a lockdown, and its hesitation to release an accurate death toll is now adding to its lack of credibility. Time Magazine reported that as of March 17, 2020, almost 1,000 deaths have occurred from Covid-19 in Iran. It also revealed that the Iranian Health Ministry announced that around 15% of those who died were under the age of 40.

Mahan Air continued its flights to and from China, even after the Iranian authorities announced in February, 2020, the end of the flights to China. The mullah regime failed to take preventive measures that could have slowed the spread of the deadly virus, such as closing schools, postponing sports and cultural events, and forbidding massive gatherings, especially in the case of the city of Qom, the center of the disease.

When the regime finally admitted to the severity of the situation, and began reporting the number of infections and deaths, it created public skepticism among Iranians. Only when foreign media outlets and social media reported on the scope of infections, and deaths in Iran, did the public got alarmed. It created widespread panic, especially when an Iranian member of parliament from Qom, revealed that the number of infected, and dead in Iran, is far greater than the government reported.

In recent months, a series of regime lies have eroded the public trust. The concealing of the true facts about the Iranian military downing of the Ukrainian jetliner on January 8, 2020, preceded by the regime hiding from the public the number of Iranians killed in the December, 2019, gasoline demonstrations, created public mistrust in the current official proclamations regarding Covid-19. This was reflected in the low turnout for the parliamentary elections held on February 21, 2020. Although Iranians were urged by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to go to the polling stations, and cast their votes, only 42% of Iranians complied. It was the lowest rate of voter participation since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Newsweek reported (March 23, 2020) that, “China has claimed to have passed the peak of its (coronavirus) outbreak, and that there have been now more reported cases of death outside the country than inside (China). The number of new daily cases in Iran however, is still increasing.” Yet, China has silenced whistleblowers who first warned of the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic. At the same time, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, suggested that the U.S. military was behind the outbreak.  Another conspiracy theory was echoed by Ayatollah Khamenei, who is quoted as saying that, “the U.S. is accused of producing the virus. I do not know how true this claim is if it is true, why we should trust them and get help from them.” This came about following the Trump administrations offer to help Iran fight the coronavirus.

The coronavirus crisis exposed the incompetence of Iran’s ruling clerical elite. It has placed Iran in the throes of a profound political and ideological crisis. The religious elite, which rules the country, has rejected modern medicine in favor of “Islamic medicine,” considering the latter as being inspired by divine knowledge. This has clearly been shown to have disastrous consequences for Iranians. It is rather ironic that in the holy city of Qom, the site of the original outbreak of the coronavirus in Iran, mosques and shrines have not entirely stopped holding worship services for visiting pilgrims.

According to Amir A. Afkhani, a medical doctor at George Washington University and an Iranian native who studied the Iranian responses to previous epidemics, “The government of Iran is putting religious prestige and public image ahead of public safety.” He added, “It is unprecedented even in the annals of the Islamic republic.”

Back in November, 2019, the protesters against the fuel subsidy cuts grew into a full-blown uprising throughout Iran. Cries of “Death to the dictator,” were scrolled all over Iran, and given the oppressive dictatorship of the Ayatollah Khamenei regime, the fear factor gave way to a “there is nothing to lose” attitude. And it was not only the gasoline increases that jarred the Iranian people, they expressed their outrage at the regime’s foreign interventions. Some cried, “not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life only for Iran.” Since its inception 41-years ago, the Islamic Revolution in Iran has brought nothing but crushing poverty, graft, and depletion of the treasury to fund foreign interventions and terror.

Now, along with the common chanting encouraged by the regime of ‘Death to America! Death to Israel! One may hear not Gaza! Not Lebanon! My life for Iran!’, perhaps an even scarier chant against the regime is, “Reza Shah! Reza Shah!” as a reference to the late shah’s son residing in the U.S.

In an I News UK interview with Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Iranian crown prince (January 30, 2018), Pahlavi stated that, “poverty, political corruption, bribery, substance use disorders, economic injustice, youth crimes, suppression of women, irreverence of military veterans and heroes, imprisonment, humiliation, torture and execution of Iranian citizens of various political ideologies, or gender movement, and harassment of political prisoners’ families by the government, have become the norm.” He added, “The regime is weakening so it is just a matter of time before the implosion occurs. My concern is not whether this regime will collapse – that’s an historical certainty. The question is when, and at what cost.”

The full consequences of the coronavirus on Iran is hard to predict. What is clear however, is that deepening domestic discontent, a failing economy hit hard by U.S. sanctions, gross corruption and mismanagement, as well as a soaring inflation, will impact on the regime adversely. What began in Qom as a devastating health disaster called coronavirus may bring an end to the regime whose ideological antecedents also came out of Qom.

* * *

Photo from YouTube