RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15931/coronavirus-china-cuba-venezuela

China and its Latin American allies are aggressively attempting to convince the world that the U.S. is secretly the original source of the virus and that China is the only country that can save us. This state propaganda is enforced through a digital army of upwards of two million state-backed internet trolls dubbed the “Wu Mao” or “50 cent” army, named after how much the PRC reportedly pays per pro-China post.

China and Cuba have been complementing their propaganda with “medical diplomacy”, which appears to serve as a gateway to enhance their strategic positioning in Latin America. Efforts include aggressive propaganda, such as the fake news that Cuba has the cure for the coronavirus. The message is then spread in Spanish through social media and messaging platforms. Meanwhile, Cuba has been sending medical missions, manned by physicians who are evidently victims of human trafficking, to Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Belize, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil.

The Cuban and Chinese medical diplomacy also stretched to Spain, where, on March 30, shortly after Spain’s Health Minister Salvador Illa announced the purchase of $467 million in medical supplies from China, 39 Cuban doctors were dispatched to neighboring Andorra. The shipment from a Chinese manufacturer included “quick result” COVID-19 tests that were faulty and had to be sent back.

Cuba has been touting its Alfa 2B drug as a potential cure to COVID-19 in state media platforms, which are parroted by China. This claim…. prompted a South African spokesman to warn that “there is still no cure for the killer virus.”

Cuban state media loves to boast that the export of Alfa 2B is in demand in more than 15 countries and has been used to cure 1,500 cases of the coronavirus in China. What it is actually exporting is the propaganda around the drug. Several fabricated “news” clippings have surfaced in recent weeks on Spanish social media saying that Cuba has a cure for COVID-19. This propaganda is being spread by Cuba’s allies in the “Bolivarian network” led by Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

The increasing evidence that SARS-CoV-2 might have originated in a Wuhan laboratory is sparking an intense global battle of credibility between Washington and Beijing. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), however, has already been fighting this war through an aggressive disinformation campaign against the U.S. in various parts of the world, including in Latin America.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/pope-francis-calls-relaxation-sanctions-against-robert-spencer/

Throughout his papacy, Pope Francis has again and again shown himself to be an enemy of the West and the Judeo-Christian tradition, and a friend of those who oppose and would destroy them. And so it came as no surprise when the Islamic Republic of Iran’s state-controlled Mehr News Agency reported this week that after receiving an appeal from a senior member of the Academy of Sciences of Iran, Ayatollah Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad, Pope Francis has called for the relaxation of international sanctions against Iran.

The Pope issued his call in the course of his solemn Urbi et Orbi blessing on Easter Sunday, saying: “In light of the present circumstances, may international sanctions be relaxed, since these make it difficult for countries on which they have been imposed to provide adequate support to their citizens.” The Pontiff didn’t say anything about the fact that the Iranian mullahs used the bulk of the billions Barack Obama showered upon them not to improve the economic plight of their people, but to support jihad terror groups worldwide. He was likewise silent about the likelihood that if sanctions were relaxed, the mullahs would probably spend the money on jihad terrorism yet again.

Why is the Pope siding with those who routinely chant “Death to America,” and who likely don’t look kindly upon the Catholic Church, either? One clue may be in the fact that the Pope has given numerous indications that he really does hate the West and the Christian tradition. Some time ago, used the French epic The Song of Roland to issue yet another mea culpa to Muslims, saying: “A scene from The Song of Roland comes to me as a symbol, when the Christians defeat the Muslims and line them up in front of the baptismal font, with one holding a sword. And the Muslims had to choose between baptism or the sword. That is what we Christians did.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/lessons-unlearned-have-come-back-haunt-us-david-horowitz-0/

As I write this, there are over a quarter of a million recorded deaths from the corona virus and many many more to come. We know now that the virus originated in Wuhan China, probably in its virology lab, and that the Chinese concealed the fact that it was contagious between humans and deadly for weeks. They allowed a Lunar New Year celebration in Wuhan that involved tens of thousands of people, and also permitted 5 million inhabitants of Wuhan to leave the city and spread the virus. Moreover, they permitted hundreds of thousands of Chinese to travel abroad to celebrate the Lunar New Year and infect people in more than 200 countries across the globe.

Whatever one may say about the origin of the virus – it could have been the result of an accident – what cannot be denied is that the cover-up by the Chinese Communist dictatorship was deliberate and calculated, as most likely was its failure to close its borders until the virus was contained. In other words, this was a hostile attack on an innocent world, justified most probably as an effort to protect the Chinese Communist regime. So ferocious is this self-preservation imperative that the regime has launched a global campaign accusing the United States military of creating the virus, a lie so monstrous it is reminiscent of the lies promulgated by the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.

For almost twenty years since China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001, the Chinese regime has been mistakenly regarded by western leaders as a worthy member of the international community of nations. American leaders have regarded it as worthy of being entrusted with the supply lines of medicines and other health supports vital for survival during a pandemic like this one. Prior to 2001, China was treated as a pariah state, a policy that took root when the Communist Party seized power in Beijing in 1949, and proceeded to murder more than 100 million Chinese in the process of transforming China into a socialist state. China’s 1950 decision to go to war with the United States and prop up another totalitarian regime in North Korea was also a warning to the West to treat China as the hostile power it most self-evidently still is.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/25/who-another-deadly-failure-of-globalism/

Bloated international bureaucracies such as the World Health Organization have demonstrated their inability to fulfill their enormous mandates—and other countries around the world should follow our president’s lead and find a better use for their taxpayers’ resources.

It’s time to be brutally honest about the World Health Organization (WHO)—the institution is a daily testament to the deadly failures of globalism.

The WHO was designed to keep humanity safe from disease outbreaks and epidemics, but it’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has only made the crisis worse. From the earliest days of the outbreak, the United Nations-backed organization blatantly parroted Chinese government propaganda, helping the communist regime spread misinformation at a tremendous cost in human lives.

On January 14, for instance, the WHO tweeted that the novel virus is not spreading between people, attributing the findings to the Chinese government. “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China,” the group wrote.

Clearly, this was not the case—and the experts at the WHO should have known better than to believe China’s baseless claims, much less issue a statement that only could have been interpreted as a call to resist any efforts to prevent the spread of the new virus. At the time, Chinese authorities were already silencing doctors and researchers who tried to raise an alarm about the virus—which should have served as a clear clue that the regime should not be trusted. Doctors who posted information about the coronavirus on Chinese social media were confronted and reprimanded in late December, and at the start of January, the Hubei Provincial Health Commission ordered labs to stop testing virus samples. Both actions should have raised immediate red flags at the WHO.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/25/protecting-the-precious-nhs/

It can be hard to persuade free people to allow their government to intrude into their lives; in the UK, the chief means by which the government convinces the people of their need for that intrusion is the nonstop propaganda telling them that their very lives depend upon the government.

Eight years ago, I wrote about the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics, which presented in song, dance, and spectacle a history of Britain so ideologically tendentious as to rival the Communist propaganda of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. 

The basic narrative, in case you missed it, was this: a green and pleasant land is mutated by capitalism into a place of dark satanic mills and then, thanks to leftist agitation, metamorphoses into a glorious welfare state whose crown jewel is the National Health Service. Featuring a veritable army of children in sickbeds and women in nurse’s outfits, and leading to a climax in which the letters “NHS” were spelled out in lights, the whole thing had the feel of an unusually fervent worship service.

As Andrew Gilligan observed in the Telegraph, the NHS had finally undergone its “final transformation from a healthcare system into a religion”; a Tory MP who dared to call the show “leftie multicultural crap” quickly caved under pressure, assuring the BBC that “we all love the NHS.”

Two years ago, spurred by a word in a Theresa May speech, I was moved to revisit the topic of the NHS. The word was “precious.” May used it to modify “NHS,” as in “our precious NHS.” As I wrote at the time, “one might easily forgive her for describing, say, Britain’s finest doctors and nurses as—oh, I don’t know—how about ‘treasured’? Or for using such language to celebrate modern medicine—robot surgery, wonder drugs, cutting-edge diagnostic technology.” But the woman was referring to a government bureaucracy!

As I soon discovered, May was far from the first to call the NHS “precious.” In fact, “our precious NHS” turned out to be something of a cliché. I found this depressing.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15935/denmark-fake-bible

Unperturbed, in 2020, the Danish Bible Society (DBS) published a complete and revised Bible with the same anti-Israel New Testament version intact, plus a translation of the Old Testament, replacing the word “Israel” with “us”, as in Psalm 121:4 (“He who watches over Israel [DBS: ‘us’] will neither slumber nor sleep”), as Jan Frost reports.

As in this case, trading “Israel” for “us” is not simply replacing one word for another; it switches the concept. DBS pretends that we get the divine watchfulness. It has been stolen. The original recipient, Israel, has been replaced and robbed of its privileges.

DBS seems to be attempting to discard Israel. The Society appears to be emulating the current social attitude that develops from the anti-Israelism of Muslim immigrants and that is picked up by other Danish parts of society. Who commissioned this Bible edition? Who paid for it? Who profits from a fake Bible? Who stands for the truth of the Christian faith in Denmark?

With the authorized 1992 Danish Bible translation in place, the Danish Bible Society (DBS), nevertheless, issued a revised New Testament in 2012 completely omitting the word “Israel” or replacing it with “Jews” or “us”. The strange reason for this extraordinary action was, as Danes recall, to prevent Danish Lutheran Christians from confusing biblical Israel with the modern State of Israel. Danish Christians protested vehemently. Unperturbed, in 2020 DBS published a complete and revised Bible with the same anti-Israel New Testament version intact, plus a translation of the Old Testament, replacing the word “Israel” with “us”, as in Psalm 121:4 (“He who watches over Israel [DBS: ‘us’] will neither slumber nor sleep”), as Jan Frost reports.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15933/china-coronavirus-winning

Last January, no doubt underestimating the threat to France itself, President Emmanuel Macron made a gift of five million surgical masks to the People’s Republic. When it became clear, just three weeks later, that France itself might urgently need the masks, Beijing came out with a barrage of excuses to avoid restitution. And when the French agreed to buy masks at three times the price, China signed the contract but sold a good part of the masks at five times the price to last-minute private buyers from the United States. Beijing has played the same trick on a number of other countries, notably Chile, which last week lodged formal protest.

One thing is certain: public opinion in many countries is today more hostile to doing business with China. And that could adversely affect both normal trade and “sweetheart” deals like the one Britain planned to conclude with Huawei.

Campaigns to boycott Chinese goods have already started in more than 40 countries on all continents.

“Is China Winning?” This was the cover headline that the British weekly The Economist unfurled earlier this month for a lengthy report on how the major powers might emerge out of the current coronavirus crisis.

This is not the first time that a section of Western media, often including The Economist, pronounce the Western democracies, especially the United States, as losers in comparison with rivals and/or enemies.

In the 1980s, the magazine beat the drums for “Japan As Number One”, echoing Ezra Vogel’s book-length rodomontade for the so-called “faultless economic model.” In the 1990s, The Economist, with President Suharto on its cover, predicted the rise of Indonesia as one of the world’s top economic powers. And in 2005, the magazine offered another sensational cover with the headline: “Has Iran Won?”

https://www.foxnews.com/world/kim-jong-un-vegetative-state-china-experts-north-korea

Kim Jong Un’s health appears could be more serious than initially believed, according to reports.

Reports emerged earlier this week that Kim was gravely ill following heart surgery, although that has since been disputed. However, Japanese media now claims that Kim is in a vegetative state following a stent procedure.

Japanese magazine Shukan Gendai reported that Kim collapsed during a visit to a rural area in April. Kim reportedly required a stent procedure following the incident.

Shukan Gendai subsequently detailed how the surgeon in charge of Kim’s operation was not used to dealing with obese patients and was too nervous during the operation, leading to delays that left Kim in a “vegetative state.”

The magazine cited an unnamed member of Kim’s medical team.

https://www.publishedreporter.com/2020/04/24/ascent-to-the-summit-two-men-meet-in-the-name-of-peace-declare-themselves-capable-what-is-right-and-just-for-the-entire-world/

Early February 2019 ushered in a momentous event, the joint signing of a covenant, “The Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” by the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed el-Tayeb, the head of Sunni Islam, and the Roman Pope Francis for a One World Religion. The historic ceremony was held in front of religious leaders of other faiths as a call for peace between nations, religions and races, although historically, Islamic peace is never achieved and it is they who continue to wage war. The declaration of peace, freedom, and women’s rights is indeed a beautiful document as described by Vatican News. Yet the imam is one man and the Islamic blood lust has maintained its presence in our world for 1400 years as a tribute to its founder, affecting even its own with intimidation and rules of torture, murder and suicide. Islam is the one religion that has been incompatible with the others and the Pope would do well to question whether Catholicism and the others would be willing to relinquish their own laws to accommodate the one that demands their elimination, in the quest for peace and a one-world religion.

Indonesian Muslim scholars also agreed to boost harmony and spirituality over the violence of the past by encouraging a school curriculum for “teaching Islamic history that contains the compassionate character of the prophet.” The suggestion is hardly comforting if it is the same prophet who beheaded the 600 to 800 Jewish men of Medina and enslaved the women and children, and whose descendants continue to engage in the same art of decapitation by the sword and bondage into the perpetual future.