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April 2020

Why Is Turkey Embracing Hamas? by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15706/turkey-hamas

If the reports about Erdogan’s readiness to invite Hamas leaders to live in Turkey are true, that would also turn Erdogan into the spiritual father of a terrorist group that seeks to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic state.

It now remains to be seen whether the international community, including some Arab countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, demand that Turkey distances itself from Hamas.

A Hamas move to Turkey would mean the terrorist group would continue masterminding and carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel — but this time, under the protective eyes of the Erdogan administration.

The leaders of Hamas living outside the Gaza Strip are desperately searching for a country that will agree to have them. According to a recent report, one country seems prepared to play host to the Hamas leaders: Turkey.

Two senior Hamas officials, Ismail Haniyeh and Saleh Arouri, have already decided to settle in Turkey, apparently after getting the green light to do so from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Three other Hamas officials, Zaher Jabareen, Musa Abu Marzouk and Nizar Awadallah, have also relocated to Turkey, from Qatar and Lebanon respectively.

Haniyeh’s wife and children, who are based in the Gaza Strip, are expected to join him in Turkey in the near future.

Haniyeh, who left the Gaza Strip in December 2019, has reportedly been banned by the Egyptians from returning to the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave, home to some two million Palestinians. Reports in the Arab media have suggested that Haniyeh fell from Egypt’s good graces when he broke a promise not to visit Iran after Egypt allowed him to leave the Gaza Strip through the Egyptian-Gazan Rafah border crossing.

We Need A Manhattan Project To Create a Coronavirus Vaccine Chris Buskirk

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/16/we-need-a-manhattan-project-to-create-a-coronavirus-vaccine/

It’s a sign of institutional failure and a lack of cultural vitality that we resort to the most draconian, most primitive response to a virus. And instead of science, we get scientism—the ritualistic display of competence rather than truth. We can and must do better.

There are only two ways human action can get the SARS-CoV-2 virus permanently behind us and return to normal life: we either develop a knock-out therapy that kills the virus dead in people who have contracted it, like powerful antibiotics do with bacterial infections, or we need to develop herd immunity. Without one of those, we are left hoping that the virus simply burns itself out and disappears. That would be foolish. But a knockout drug—a cure—is highly unlikely. There is no such drug for the seasonal flu or for the rhinoviruses that cause the common cold. So while effective therapies should be a part of the strategy to combat the ill effects of this virus, and sensible precautions like masks can prevent its spread, the only way to permanently defeat it is through herd immunity.

Doctors and public health officials all know this. So do politicians. Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) said during a press conference describing his plan for reopening California: “Normal it will not be. At least until we have herd immunity and a vaccine.”

Most people think, having “flattened the curve” and avoided the dire predictions of millions dead made just weeks ago, that we’ve defeated the virus. We haven’t. What we did was slow the infection rate and that’s good; but the virus is still circulating and countries with much better testing and tracing systems like South Korea and Singapore have experienced further outbreaks after reopening which, in turn, have led to more lockdowns. We want to avoid both of those things. Escaping that unhappy fate means getting to herd immunity quickly.

The Tyranny of ‘Scientism’ and the Subversion of Science Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/16/the-tyranny-of-scientism-and-the-subversion-of-science/

Let’s not pretend we’re being guided by “science.” It’s tyranny disguised as the common good to rationalize authoritarian tactics employed by politicians like Phil Murphy and his like-minded colleagues. And too many Americans are falling for it, no questions asked.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy unintentionally defined this critical moment in America’s history. “We weren’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this,” he explained about his draconian decrees, including a ban on religious gatherings, to fight coronavirus. “First of all, we looked at the data and the science and it says people have to stay away from each other.”

Murphy’s comments undoubtedly buoyed the egos of academic “experts” across the country. A leading politician boasted, without the slightest sense of remorse, that his fidelity to the almighty deity of “science” prevailed over protecting the rights of his state’s citizens.

The first 10 amendments to the Constitution? Meh. The six-foot distancing rule concocted by a handful of careerist bureaucrats in Washington? Bow and scrape.

“Science” is a one-word cudgel wielded by dishonest elected officials, journalists, and yes, scientists, to force us to conform to their political whims; this is particularly true of climate change. The Democratic Party, we are assured, is the “party of science.” Democratic lawmakers and candidates routinely promise that they “believe in science.” The idea that humans are the main (or sole) drivers of global warming is “settled science.”

Hillary, Comey And Brennan Must Face Justice For Deep-State Spying On Trump

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/17/hillary-comey-and-brennan-must-face-justice-for-deep-state-spying-on-trump/

The media have been saturated with coronavirus news for weeks now, with literally hundreds of stories each day about the pandemic. But while you’re quarantined and self-distancing yourself from the dreaded COVID-19 virus, you might not have noticed something big: the investigation into the Russian spygate fiasco is coming to a head.

As the old saying goes, the wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine. Some time after our nation reopens for business in a few weeks, the wheels will turn when the Durham report on the Russian collusion case will be released and hit the front pages.

If recent revelations are any indication, it will be a blockbuster, potentially leading to indictments of former senior intelligence and justice officials.

By now, most of us know that top officials in the Justice Department, FBI and CIA pursued an investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign for alleged “collusion” with Russia to tilt the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor.

The main premise of that investigation proved to be false, as the subsequent Mueller report showed conclusively.

That’s bad enough. But new revelations show that not only did U.S. officials wrongly pursue the investigation and spy on the Trump campaign, they did so knowing that it was based on Russian disinformation.

And why did they do it? To aid the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, which financed the spurious anti-Trump “dossier” put together by former British spy Christopher Steele.
Damning Footnotes

As investigative reporter Sara Carter recently noted, “Newly declassified footnotes from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December FBI report reveals that senior Obama officials, including members of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team, knew the dossier compiled by a former British spy during the 2016 election was Russian disinformation to target President Donald Trump.”

The FBI used the bogus evidence anyway to convince a FISA court to let the FBI spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Page resigned as a Trump adviser in September 2016. But by spying on him, the FBI opened a backdoor into Trump’s entire campaign.

Let the irony of that sink in. U.S. officials knowingly colluded with Russian intelligence using tainted evidence to prove that Trump colluded with the Russian government to weaken Clinton’s campaign.

If so, they were willingly duped by former KGB agent Vladimir Putin.

In addition, the footnotes show that these same senior officials “were aware of the disinformation when they included the dossier in the Obama administration’s Intelligence Communities Assessment.”

Under the legal “fruit of a poisonous tree” doctrine, evidence obtained illegally cannot be used as a predicate for legal action. That means the whole Trump investigation, including the tapping of Trump campaign officials’ communications, was illegitimate if not downright illegal.

The upshot of all this is that former FBI chief James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA top spy John Brennan and an array of their underlings knew the information that came from the Steele dossier was tainted, but used it anyway.
Spying On Trump To Help Hillary

They did so again not for reasons of justice, but to prop up Clinton. In essence, the FBI, CIA and Clinton campaign formed a cozy little cabal using taxpayer money and federal investigative agencies to take down Trump’s campaign.

Moreover, it never ended. Even after Trump was elected, a ring of senior officials plotted ways to remove Trump from office. To us, it was little more than a silent coup attempt.

But ask an attorney: That’s called “conspiracy,” and it’s a felony.

Just look at how Steele, who worked in Moscow for Britain’s MI6, got paid for putting together his bogus dossier. He was paid $168,000 for his work with the political opposition research firm GPS Fusion. But that came from an even bigger chunk of money, $1.02 million to be exact, paid to Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., a business intelligence firm staffed by former spooks.

All this money came from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. To hide its true source, payments were “facilitated” by the left-leaning Seattle-based Perkins Coie law firm, which worked both for the DNC and Clinton.

Contrary to later reporting in the mainstream media about Steele being “trusted” and “professional,” the FBI had repeated warnings going back all the way to 2015 that Steele’s contacts included sketchy Russian underworld characters and untrustworthy intelligence sources.

Spying on a presidential campaign was one of the most disgraceful episodes of recent American history, exceeding even the burglary of the DNC by former President Richard Nixon’s campaign.

For those who engaged in this unlawful and unethical behavior, things just got real, as the saying goes.
Barr’s Shot Across The Bow

Speaking to Laura Ingraham earlier this week, U.S. Attorney General William Barr called the FBI-Clinton spying on Trump “one of the greatest travesties in American history.”

He promised that the current investigation of wrongdoing by U.S. Attorney John Durham would “bring to justice people who were engaged in abuses” in the Russia investigation, and that those who broke the law would be “prosecuted.”

This should include Clinton, who has become an increasingly unhinged and vocal critic of all things Trump. If there was indeed a Deep State conspiracy, wasn’t she at its very center?

In addition to resolving the Russia spygate mess, which Clinton helped set in motion, the Justice Department said it will not block depositions by former Secretary of State Clinton and her deputy Cheryl Mills, as recently ordered by a federal judge.

The depositions are in response to a Freedom Of Information Act suit brought by the legal watchdog group Judicial Watch over Clinton’s possibly illegal use of an unsecured private email server to conduct State Department business.

Stay tuned. The Russian collusion investigation, which was in fact a partisan witch hunt funded by public money, is coming to an end. And it may lead to one or more major former public officials being indicted and going to prison.

For a nation based on the idea of one standard of justice for all, this reckoning is long overdue.

Fixing College Corruption Eliminating all classes with the word “studies” is a good start. Walter Williams

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/fixing-college-corruption-walter-williams/

America’s colleges are rife with corruption. The financial squeeze resulting from COVID-19 offers opportunities for a bit of remediation. Let’s first let’s examine what might be the root of academic corruption, suggested by the title of a recent study, “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.” The study was done by Areo, an opinion and analysis digital magazine. By the way, Areo is short for Areopagitica, a speech delivered by John Milton in defense of free speech.

Authors Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian say that something has gone drastically wrong in academia, especially within certain fields within the humanities. They call these fields “grievance studies,” where scholarship is not so much based upon finding truth but upon attending to social grievances. Grievance scholars bully students, administrators and other departments into adhering to their worldview. The worldview they promote is neither scientific nor rigorous. Grievance studies consist of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, gender studies, queer, sexuality and critical race studies.

Relinquishing Freedom for the Warm Embrace of the State The country I thought I knew is distorted beyond all recognition. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/relinquishing-personal-responsibility-warm-embrace-katie-hopkins/

“Get your bloody heads up! Get your heads up! Hopkins, you have a face that could melt glass, but I still want to see it – get your head up now!”

The Academy Sergeant Major at Sandhurst drilled this into us pretty hard. As the military knows well, if heads drop bodies do too, so they demand you keep your head up so the men you are leading will look to you and know it will be OK, that you have your eyes on the horizon.

But right now who knows what OK looks like? Like many others, my first concern is for my elderly parents and what would happen if they caught this thing. It’s all very well me being bolshy for my own health, but my heart is glass in their hands, waiting to be dropped.

When we do get our heads up, the faithful horizon is a blur, our path ahead is a jumble of unknowns and all the signposts, once so clear, seem to have been taken down.

Even the biggest billboard, the Presidential Election November 2020, is a little wonky with talk of a postal vote. Countless dates in our diaries – speeches and rallies, events to mobilize voters and bring in undecideds – have all moved from confirmed to pending, as if our email router had gone down. Such dates were our handrail to steady us through life.

It’s not just politically that we are untethered, but personally too. School end-of-term dates are meaningless when the term will not even begin. There are no exams for my teens to force their concentration. My eldest’s birthday surprise was cancelled by the venue, and our booked vacation now feels strangely wrong in a time of eternal holiday. These things were a gravity of our own making that kept our feet on the floor.

But the thing that has really kicked the legs from out underneath me is the willingness of the majority to swallow “news” as if they were hungry for more fear to amplify the panic, and to use it to make others more anxious. Why do people insist on sharing the worst of it by WhatsApp like cats bringing in their bird kill?

Progressives Want Mail Voting Here’s why. J. Christian Adams

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/progressives-want-mail-voting-j-christian-adams-0/

Federal data show that in the 2016 and 2018 elections, millions of ballots sent through the mail were never counted as valid votes.  Many were sent to invalid addresses.  Others were rejected for errors. And in 2018 alone, 10,475,573 were just listed as vanished for reasons “unknown.” 

It’s no surprise then, to some, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made federally mandated vote-by-mail requirements her top legislative response to the Coronavirus pandemic.  Democrats have long lusted for federal mandates over our elections.  They want Washington D.C. controlling the rules for elections.  They hate how the Constitution gave power over elections to the states. 

They also never let a crisis go to waste.

When the Coronavirus pandemic exploded, the entire institutional architecture of the Left awakened and began to demand the same thing: federally mandated all-mail elections. 

Never before have we seen such sudden and uniform frenzy around a single issue on the Left.  From abortion activists, to green energy zealots, to the Sierra Club to even the Union of Concerned Scientists, federally mandated all-mail ballots became the rallying cry.  The latter group had evolved from serving as a mouthpiece to echo the Soviet Union on defense issues all the way to demanding that we election the next Congress through the mail.

Fauci time and the coronavirus vaccine By Howard Richman

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/fauci_time_and_the_coronavirus_vaccine.html

The American coronavirus vaccine’s Phase 1 clinical trials are bogged down. They began on March 3 and are not scheduled to end until June 1, 2021.

Why fifteen months for the first American vaccine’s clinical trials? The reason is simple. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases), is conducting them in Fauci Time.  (Fauci is also conducting the clinical trials to see if Remdesivir is effective against COVID-19 in Fauci Time – those trials are not scheduled to end until April 1, 2023.)

Normally, during a health emergency, the U.S. gets out a vaccine within months. Take the H1N1 (Swine Flu) pandemic of 2009. The CDC has published a timeline:

April 15. First human infection.
May 5. School closings affect 607,778 students.
July 22. Clinical trials begin.
September 15. Four vaccines approved.

WHO and the Chinese By Silvio Canto, Jr.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/who_and_the_chinese.html

It’s becoming more and more difficult to defend the WHO and now the UN.  In other words, don’t expect the UN to stand up to China anytime soon.  

This is from FOX:   

President Trump ignited a firestorm on Tuesday after announcing that the U.S. would temporarily cease funding the World Health Organization (WHO) after accusing the agency of dangerous “political correctness” in embracing China’s cover-up, thus paving the way for the coronavirus pandemic.   

But WHO is only one patch of an increasingly fragile fabric that is the United Nations.

“China is in a position to veto and stub out any effort by the U.S. to pass a resolution against it in the Security Council,” Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, an Israel-based attorney who specializes in suing terrorist regimes and state sponsors who orchestrate human rights abuses on behalf of victims, told Fox News.

“As an economic powerhouse with the ability to punish smaller countries that rely on its trade and markets, most of the 190 countries that are part of the General Assembly would be loath to join in a U.S.-sponsored resolution that would condemn China for its role in the pandemic.

Remember Federalism? COVID-19 Takes us Back By Shoshana Bryen

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/remember_federalism_covid19_takes_us_back.html

States, jealous of their power and prerogatives when it suits, have been furious over what some governors call federal inaction on COVID-19, deliberate or not. But equally, each state has a department of public health, a director of that department and staff. Each state is presumed to have a plan for emergencies: floods, forest fires, airliner crashes (the last fatal crash in the U.S. occurred in 2009, but it used to be on the “prepare for” list) or pandemics. Closing schools and parks is not handled in Washington. Calling out the state National Guard is, as its name suggests, a state prerogative.

Emergency plans are expensive, and states are often strapped for cash; so is Washington. And, now that the feds and the states are beginning to plan for “reopening,” each will look for a way to take credit and lay blame. President Donald Trump has pre-empted some of this with his announcement that the White House will work with all 50 governors to create reopening plans. Governor Andrew Cuomo conceded that New York cannot manage without Washington when he announced that he won’t fight with the President. If he won’t, no one outside the media will.