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April 2020

Falling into the Iranian Regime’s Coronavirus Trap by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15908/iran-coronavirus-trap

How on earth it is in the US “national interest” to allow a regime that is kidnapping and killing Americans and their allies, and planning to attack US diplomatic facilities, to receive billions of dollars in aid?

An additional problem, based on a pattern for which Iran has only itself to blame, is that there is no evidence that Iran has the slightest intention of using these funds to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic or to help Iran’s people. The Trump administration already offered to send medical help to Iran, but Iran has continued to turn it down. “Possibly,” Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei said, “your medicine is a way to spread the virus more.”

Moreover, there have also been suggestions that a secret Iranian fund of reportedly $200 billion, controlled by Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei, could perfectly well help Iran to fund its crisis.

While the Iranian regime has been killing Americans during the coronavirus crisis and planning to kill more, a group of American politicians are urging US President Donald J. Trump to loosen sanctions on Tehran regime and refrain from blocking the mullahs’ request for $5 billion in aid.

The former vice president and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, for instance, recently called on the Trump administration to loosen sanctions on Iran.

He pointed out that it is “bad enough that the Trump administration abandoned the Iran nuclear deal in favor of a strategy of ‘maximum pressure;” he added that “it makes no sense, in a global health crisis, to compound that failure with cruelty by inhibiting access to needed humanitarian assistance. Whatever our profound differences with the Iranian government, we should support the Iranian people.”

The Palestinian Virus: Abbas’s Role Models by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15906/palestinian-virus-role-models

Abu Jihad was not assassinated by Israel because of any political activities or ideology. His assassination stopped him from masterminding more attacks and killing more Israelis.

Abbas and his Fatah officials, nonetheless, believe that Abu Jihad and other Palestinian terrorists are honorable and decent men who were fighting for the sake of their people. What contribution did these terrorists make to Palestinian society? Did they build a school or a hospital for their people?

When Abbas describes terrorists as heroes, he is actually telling young Palestinians that those who plan and carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis should serve as role models. Abbas evidently wants all Palestinians to be like Abu Jihad and the terrorists in Israeli prisons. For Abbas and other Palestinian leaders, the glorification of terrorists seems to be more important than the fight against a deadly virus.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has not been seen in public since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the region last month. His absence, however, has not stopped Abbas from doing what he does best: praising and glorifying Palestinians who kill Jews.

On April 16, Palestinians marked the anniversary of the assassination of Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), a PLO leader and co-founder of the Palestinian ruling faction Fatah, which is today headed by Abbas. Before Abu Jihad was assassinated by Israeli commandos at his home in Tunis in 1988, he had planned several terror attacks inside Israel against both civilian and military targets.

Last week, Abbas, who is supposed to be busy helping his people curb the spread of the coronavirus, found the time to publish a statement describing Abu Jihad as “one of the historic leaders” of the Palestinians who “played an important role during an “historic, difficult and dangerous phase.”

Thinking Beyond The Current Pandemic… by Gerald A. Honigman

At some point, hopefully not long from now  the current nightmare will end. Things may never be quite the same again, but we will move forward.

The world’s obsession with creating a 22nd—if not 23rd—Arab state will once again return to the front burner of international politics and forums.

And the effects the above would have on the sole, minuscule, resurrected nation of the Jews will be of little concern to most people.

While scholars and rabble will both once again vilify and practice the double standard supreme regarding the national liberation of the Jewish people—Zionism—they will still ignore the plight of scores of millions of  truly stateless and largely Arab and other Arabized (from one degree or another) Muslim-oppressed peoples in the region.

One of the main issues surely to resurface in the Arab-Israeli debate will involve the settlements. With so much ignorance–innocent or otherwise–on the actual facts regarding this discussion, it’s thus useful, especially for the younger generation often subjected to higher indoctrination instead of education, to reexamine, in depth and detail, this important topic. So, let’s begin–yet again …

As I noted years earlier, when the subject of settlements comes up, most people associate the word these days with Jews wanting to return to lands–beyond Israel’s 1949 UN-imposed, 9 to 15 mile wide armistice line existence–which they have called home, lived on, and owned property in for millennia, but which much of the world declares must once again become Judenrein.

Lockdown Theater Brings Hoopla and Amateur Epidemiologists Roger Kimball

https://www.theepochtimes.com/lockdown-theater-brings-hoopla-and-amateur-epidemiologists_3318336.html#

I know that a lot of people are eagerly awaiting the roll-out of the new Netflix compilation of all the White House pressers from the Coronavirus Task Force. I’m told that, thanks to the sponsorship of Hermes scarves, all 876 hours will go on-line at once, so those of us under virtual house arrest can binge watch it for the next month or so. Those with a premium account can opt for an edition that omits any questions from Jim Acosta.

Speaking for myself, I hope it comes soon, for it looks as though we may soon be allowed out of our houses again. I’ll like that, though I expect that there will be a period of adjustment. When you are in a dark room for a while and then go out into brilliant sunlight, the light is dazzling.

That’s one reason coming out of a movie theater on a sunny summer afternoon is so disorienting. You get acclimated to the tenebrous environment. I suspect something similar and even more disorienting when the Lockdown ends.

I wonder when the critical reassessments will start. That will probably depend on the state of the economy, though I would like to find a more emollient word for the pulsing “élan vital” that sustains us. “Economy” sounds abstract and somehow in opposition to human things, whereas in fact it is part of what makes human things possible.

An acquaintance of mine made what I think is an astute observation when he wrote that “Politicians and bureaucracies tend to respond to crises with theater. After 9/11 it was airport security theater. Following Corona it was lockdown theater. There’s some utility to it, but only some, there is much more hoopla.”

Suicide of the West Postponed Daryl McCann

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/04/suicide-of-the-west-postponed/

“Latter-day progressives recommend accommodation with all things non-Western and, more ominously, all things anti-Western. To take the contrary view, as Donald Trump has done, makes him the enemy of very powerful interests. Russiagate, the Ukraine impeachment farce and every other faux scandal laid at the White House door are the consequence of that.”

Donald Trump may have been too wilful and too much of a know-it-all to be indoctrinated by what James Burnham called, as early as 1964, “the ideology of Western suicide”. Trump-haters will loathe me saying so, but there is at least one connection between Trump and Churchill. The latter, despite the lengthening shadow of Nazi Germany, was himself too wilful and too much of a know-it-all to accept what others regarded as “inevitable”. His opposition to appeasement throughout the 1930s and his determination, as prime minister in 1940, to spurn Hitler’s overtures in the aftermath of the Battle of France might seem straightforward enough now, but that is with the benefit of hindsight. Equally, with Trump. Recall his decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, impose tariffs on goods imported from China, insist on a hard border with Mexico, call North Korea’s bluff, quit the Paris Agreement, ad infinitum. Like it or not, Trump’s aversion to mollification, which is just another word for appeasement, makes him in a sense Churchillian.

The ideology of civilisational suicide, argued Burnham in Suicide of the West (1964), had its origins in the Great War. The war was a calamity with consequences still playing out half-a-century later, and we could now say more than a century later. There was an observable decline in confidence about the merits of Western civilisation, from both internal and external points of view, during the inter-war period. This process only accelerated after the Second World War. James Burnham based his claim, partly at least, on the withdrawal of Western-sponsored governance in Africa, the greater Middle East and South Asia. As the West literally shrank during the decolonisation era, foreign policy experts had to come up with a new worldview, a new kind of liberalism, to account for this changing reality. Some of the military adventurism involved in the Cold War—for instance, the Korean War and America’s Vietnam War—disguised (and acerbated) a surge of unabashed anti-West creeds throughout the world. The Muslim Brotherhood, Maoism, Guevaraism, Khomeinism, Juche, Fanonism and so on are but a few examples. Edward Said’s Orientalism, as a radical form of liberal “broadmindedness”, has encouraged one generation after another to cast off their Westocentric and patriotic “biases” in order to accommodate themselves to a post-America global community.

American Foreign and Defense Policy: Between Scylla and Charybdis By Mark Helprin

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/04/american-foreign-and-defense-policy-between-scylla-and-charybdis/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm

Rather than react, we must chart a course

Fifteen years before the coronavirus pandemic, I wrote a speech for a world-renowned physician who was coincidentally the majority leader of the United States Senate, and thus not without influence. He went, wholeheartedly, all-in, delivering it in the Senate, at Harvard Medical School’s most important annual lecture, at Davos, at the Bohemian Grove (where the only Bohemian to enthuse sufficiently to request a copy was Henry Kissinger), and elsewhere.

And, of course, Senator Bill Frist took it to the White House. He presented a strong — one might even say urgent — case for establishing joint research and vaccine-and-curative manufacturing centers judiciously spaced throughout the country; the doubling of medical- and nursing-school outputs; incentives for commercial pharmaceutical and medical-device research and production; increasing the number of hospital beds; providing for the stocks, structures, and reserve personnel for large-scale emergency field hospitals; and laying up stores of necessaries such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and, specifically, ventilators. Given that the laws of economics were not repealed, the ancillary effect of the supply surge in some of these medical goods — such as doctors, nurses, and hospital capacity — would have lowered their cost or at least slowed its rise. He asked for $100 billion per year. Had spending kept up at that level, which it need not have to assure adequate preparation, it would have amounted to only one-quarter of the monies shoveled into the furnace of COVID-19 in the last few weeks alone. He got a total of $2.4 billion over four years for the Strategic National Stockpile that of late has proved wholly inadequate.

A Little More Light in a Vast Sea of Viral Darkness? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-little-more-light-in-a-vast-sea-of-viral-darkness/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_

Almost every day, more studies, strange data, anecdotal reporting, and theories emerge about the virus, many of which could change existing conventional wisdom. In discussions about the nature of any existing seroprevalence in California, and about how even apparently small percentages of those already infected in the population could radically alter rates of epidemic and mortality modeling, this early abstract of a recent study could be of interest. It was co-reported by a rather large team of 16 distinguished researchers conducting an early assessment of their recent antibody testing in Santa Clara County.

 

They and their publisher cite customary caution due to the preliminary nature of the “unrefereed preprint” of their findings. e.g., “This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review.” (What does this mean?) “It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.” But the concluding paragraph of the abstract could become of interest in its implications for both state and federal policy, especially when the data of such research are finished being peer reviewed and, if substantiated, and the findings possibly replicated in future such studies:

These prevalence estimates represent a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, 50-85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases. Conclusions: The population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection is much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases. Population prevalence estimates can now be used to calibrate epidemic and mortality projections. (Emphasis added.)

Early peek at data on Gilead coronavirus drug suggests patients are responding to treatment By Adam Feuerstein

https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/16/early-peek-at-data-on-gilead-coronavirus-dru

A Chicago hospital treating severe Covid-19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine remdesivir in a closely watched clinical trial is seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week, STAT has learned.

Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, in lab tests. The entire world has been waiting for results from Gilead’s clinical trials, and positive results would likely lead to fast approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies. If safe and effective, it could become the first approved treatment against the disease.

The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with Covid-19 into Gilead’s two Phase 3 clinical trials. Of those people, 113 had severe disease. All the patients have been treated with daily infusions of remdesivir. 

“The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish,” said Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago infectious disease specialist overseeing the remdesivir studies for the hospital.

Her comments were made this week during a video discussion about the trial results with other University of Chicago faculty members. The discussion was recorded and STAT obtained a copy of the video.

The outcomes offer only a snapshot of remdesivir’s effectiveness. The same trials are being run concurrently at other institutions, and it’s impossible to determine the full study results with any certainty. Still, no other clinical data from the Gilead studies have been released to date, and excitement is high. Last month, President Trump touted the potential for remdesivir — as he has for many still-unproven treatments — and said it “seems to have a very good result.”

Well, That Unraveled Quickly Jeffrey A. Tucker

www.aier.org/article/well-that-unraveled-fast/?fbclid=IwAR3ebwR3aOQhqmdmQKObvQ-AnnTukHghQ-bo-AI1dX2l3vbvraxkXTtJfXQ

Thinking back to February 28, 2020, and the New England Journal of Medicine. It published an article called “Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted” signed by Anthony S. Fauci (THE Fauci), Clifford Lane, and Robert R. Redfield.  

It reported an existing COVID-19 case fatality rate of 2% but further pointed out that infections show “a wide spectrum of disease severity.” “If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%” or perhaps as high as the flu seasons of 1957 and 1968, but is nowhere near “a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.” To be sure, they said, mitigating the disease could require “isolating ill persons (including voluntary isolation at home), school closures, and telecommuting where possible.”

Now, what precisely happened between February 28 and two weeks later? This will be studied for many years to find out precisely how governors and mayors, through a series of unscientific, panicked, unjustified, and morally egregious actions, crushed under foot the world’s strongest economy while the media cheered. We’ll be discussing the whys and whats for a generation. 

The point is that it is all unraveling as fast as it came. Donald Trump’s press conference on April 16, 2020, was clearly a turning point. In my ideal world, we would have officials up there telling the truth that the course we took as a nation was catastrophic in countless ways (except for all the panicked deregulation undertaken just so that the food and medicine could continue). But I’m realistic: we can hardly expect politicians to bow down and beg forgiveness. 

Could anti-lockdown protests be new Tea Party movement? W. James Antle III

www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/could-anti-lockdown-protests-be-new-tea-party-movement

Growing discontent with stringent state-level restrictions imposed to mitigate the coronavirus is pouring out into the streets near state capitols in ways reminiscent of the last decade’s conservative activism.

“They have a very Tea Party feel,” said Tea Party Express co-founder Sal Russo of the demonstrations.

“The current protests are because of government overreaching and infringing on our rights,” said Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin. “The protests are an extension of what the Tea Party movement has stood for the last 11 years — constitutionally limited government, personal and economic freedom. In the time of crisis and to remain on solid ground with those whom they represent, elected officials should lean on the Constitution, not abandon it.”

President Trump lent his encouragement Friday, sending three separate tweets calling on protestors to “LIBERATE” a trio of 2020 battleground states, Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia, each with Democratic governors whose approaches to slowing the pandemic are seen in some quarters as draconian.

One of these chief executives, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, has been locked in a feud with Trump and is a co-chairman of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign. She is frequently mentioned as a possible Biden running mate. Trump also used the occasion to blast gun control policies signed into law by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, urging the state’s residents to “save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”

The protests may be an early sign of burgeoning conservative sentiment in favor of reopening businesses that have been shuttered to manage the spread of the coronavirus. While polling still shows broad public support for social distancing, some partisan fissures are beginning to appear over the massive job losses. In a recent Morning Consult poll, 51% of Republicans said the public health impact was more important than the quarantines’ economic consequences to 43% who said otherwise. The split among all voters was 64-29.