Biden Accused of Sexual Assault - Joseph Klein

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by Joseph Klein

And the eerie - and expected - silence of #MeToo.

Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted back in December 2018 that "I am a gaffe machine." That’s a gross understatement, to say the least. The Democrat establishment and the mainstream media continue to treat Biden’s endless stream of gaffes as just harmless patter from good old Uncle Joe. His supporters make excuses for Biden’s obvious mental decline and lash out at anyone who expresses concerns about his fitness to take on the rigors of the presidency. Now, however, they are circling the wagons after a story recently emerged that Joe Biden allegedly committed sexual assault against a former staffer, Tara Reade, when Biden was a vigorous 50 year-old senator. The Biden campaign has denied the allegation, claiming “these accusations are false.” Other women had come forward previously to report inappropriate touching by Biden. But Ms. Reade’s allegation shines a much harsher light on Biden’s possible predatory sexual behavior against one or more females on his staff.

Joe Biden is a self-professed champion of women who has supported the #MeToo movement’s presumption of guilt against the accused. “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally,” Biden said during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing, “you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.” Now Biden himself stands accused of sexually assaulting Tara Reade in 1993. "He said 'come on man, I heard you liked me,'" Ms. Reade told an interviewer. “I couldn't believe it was happening. It was surreal." According to Ms. Reade, Biden kissed her without her consent, proceeded to push her up against a wall, and used his fingers to penetrate her. Afterwards, Ms. Reade said, “He took his finger. He just like pointed at me and said you’re nothing to me.” There presumably were no witnesses to the alleged assault, although Ms. Reade’s brother and friend recall her contemporaneous account of the incident.

There has not been a word of support for Biden’s accuser from the Democratic Party establishment, #MeToo activists, and the mainstream media who want to see President Trump defeated no matter what it takes. Most media outlets have either ignored or buried the story, with a few limited exceptions. A staff writer for The Atlantic even tried to discredit Ms. Reade when she first came forward with allegations of Biden’s inappropriate touching. But even worse, a prominent #MeToo advocacy group rejected Ms. Reade’s pleas for help, throwing its high-minded claims of defense of sexual assault victims to the wolves in order to save Joe Biden’s hide.

The Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund boasts of its support for “the brave individuals who have come forward, at great risk to themselves, to seek the justice they deserve and to protect others” from sexual harassment. It claims that it helps to pay legal costs for alleged victims and that it connects people to and helps pay for “media and storytelling assistance.” Tara Reade contacted the organization in January seeking its help in bringing to light her allegation against Biden. Time’s Up said no. Time Up’s justification was that it feared losing its nonprofit status if it assisted in a case against a candidate for federal office. But if we look behind the curtain, we find a web of clear conflicts of interest that may well explain why Ms. Reade was rebuffed. “While all of this was out between Reade and Time’s Up,” Breitbart reported, the Biden campaign’s relationship with a public relations firm, which was also closely associated with Time’s Up, “was taking on a new dimension.”

Anita Dunn is both a senior adviser on the Biden campaign and the Managing Director at the SKDKnickerbocker public relations firm. Hilary Rosen is a Biden surrogate, who was also involved in the founding of Time’s Up and is a partner in SKDKnickerbocker. SKDKnickerbocker helped launch the publicity for Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund. On the website describing how victims of sexual harassment can get in touch with the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund for media assistance, the victims are told that, after they fill out a form, “SKDKnickerbocker (SKDK), public relations firm that works with the Fund, will email you to set up an evaluation over the phone. If the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund is able to offer you media assistance, SKDK will match you with a public relations firm in our Network.”

However, SKDKnickerbocker not only works with the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund but also for the Biden campaign. SKDK has received $881,740 from the Biden for President organization between June 25, 2019 and February 27, 2020, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The Biden campaign paid the vast bulk of this money – slightly in excess of $806,000 - in January and February of 2020. This sum is more than 10 times the amount that Biden’s campaign paid SKDKnickerbocker between June and December 2019. Tara Reade received the final word that the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund would not provide her with funding or public relations support in her case on February 11^th. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots.

Joe Biden is entitled to due process and deserves the presumption of innocence, which is more than he was willing to grant to Justice Kavanaugh. However, he is not entitled to be protected by a wall of silence, which is what his friends in the Democratic establishment and the media are doing by covering for him. Senator Kamala Harris, for example, endorsed Biden after she quit the presidential race. She is said to be on the short list of Biden’s potential running mates. Harris was among Justice Kavanaugh’s most strident critics when she sat in judgment on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Harris also released a campaign ad during her run for president accusing President Trump of being a “sexual predator.” Yet when it came to Tara Reade’s accusation against Biden of sexual predatory behavior, she says she contacted Senator Harris’s office but has received no response. As Brad Polumbo wrote in the Washington Examiner, if Harris does not immediately denounce Biden in light of Tara Reade’s accusation, she is little more than a “conniving politician willing to disregard due process for her political opponents, but not her allies.”

Tara Reade also claims to have received a brushoff from Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office, which told her simply to contact her local representative. Warren had said that one of her key reasons for opposing Justice Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation involved the allegations of sexual assault he was accused of. Yet her office found no time on Warren’s calendar for her to hear personally what Ms. Reade had to say about Joe Biden’s alleged sexual assault.

When Justice Kavanaugh was facing unsubstantiated allegations of sexual assault, Warren made an impassioned plea on the Senate floor on behalf of survivors of sexual assault. She said that many of them do not come forward because they “believe they won't be heard or taken seriously, or they think more about the impact on the perpetrator than their own safety and well-being, or they think the people with power - the ones who can actually do something - will instead 'plow right through’ them. We never hear the stories of millions of sexual assault survivors. But some make the very difficult and personal decision to come forward and tell their stories. They, like all survivors, are courageous, and they deserve to be heard and treated with respect. Not dismissed, not attacked, not threatened.”

Tara Reade finally worked up the courage to come forward with her story of sexual assault. Unfortunately for the rally around Biden crowd, it pointed directly to the current presumed Democratic nominee for president. But Joe Biden’s connections have helped him ‘plow right through’ Tara Reade’s story. She was rebuffed by a leading #MeToo advocacy group with close ties to the Biden campaign. She has been vilified or simply ignored in the mainstream media and by faux feminist politicians. Biden, meanwhile, continues to hold forth on what he would do as president, including with respect to the coronavirus. CNN gave him airtime last Friday night in a televised town hall. CNN listed 5 takeaways from the town hall. Tara Reade’s allegation was not among them. 

If Joe Biden does become the Democratic nominee for president, it will be up to the voters to decide what weight to give to Ms. Reade’s story. If true, it should add further doubts regarding Joe Biden’s character, on top of questions about his current mental condition. The jury is still out on what the former vice president may have done while he was the Obama administration’s point man in Ukraine to run interference for Burisma. This highly corrupt Ukrainian firm was under investigation by the Ukrainian prosecutor who Biden caused to be fired while his son Hunter was on Burisma’s board.

Joe Biden likes to speak of restoring the soul of the nation. First, it appears that he has some serious repair work to do with his own soul. He can start by coming clean.

Joseph Klein

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/biden-accused-sexual-assault-joseph-klein/

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The Troll in the Bidenbunker - Daniel Greenfield

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by Daniel Greenfield

Biden promises to stop a pandemic, but can’t even do a webcast.

Last year, Joe Biden had been renting a $6 million miniature version of the White House with crystal chandeliers, a home theater, and parking for 20 cars in McLean, Virginia.

The former home of Secretary of State Alexander Haig, the estate was perfect for schmoozing Beltway insiders, courting donors, and letting an elderly politician play house with his own White House.

But coronavirus cases have been rising steadily in Northern Virginia. And the little Biden White House with its gourmet kitchens, its 7 fireplaces, and its huge seashell driveway would go on standing empty, and costing the Bidens a whole lot of money, while potential donors fled and the pandemic closed in.

With Virginia's restaurants shutting down and the cocktail party circuit fading, Biden headed back to wait out the coronavirus in his Bidenbunker in Delaware.

There are worse places to wait out the end of the world than Delaware, but few worse places to run for the White House. And Biden’s efforts to retrofit his Wilmington mansion into a Bidenbunker from which the presumptive Democrat nominee can run his campaign and speak to the nation were disastrous.

Construction got underway on the Bidenbunker by turning the mansion’s rec room into a TV studio. Despite sitting on a pile of money, the campaign managed to botch the Bidenbunker every step of the way. The few people who watched Biden’s “shadow” briefings were confronted with Joe Biden standing in front of a blue campaign podium in what looked like a thrift store with books, photos, and posters randomly arranged on every shelf. A nightstand contained a lamp and three photos jockeyed for space.

What might have been a nice touch in a homey campaign ad is not remotely reassuring in a crisis.

If a desk is a metaphor for the mind, Biden’s background was a perfect metaphor for a badly aged politician with a scrambled mind full of disarranged stuff who can’t find anything or finish a sentence.

And then there’s the technical bugbears bedeviling the Bidenbunker.

Even though the Bidenbunker’s internet seems to have been upgraded, the sound has been a mess. Since its first virtual town hall, the Biden campaign has been making its boss sound even more confused and incoherent than he naturally is with audio glitches, equipment breakdowns, and bad cues.

It’s not just that Joe Biden is confused. His campaign seems to be even more confused.

Biden’s first shadow briefing was supposed to be at 11.30 AM. At least that’s what he told donors and supporters. Then it actually arrived at 10.30 AM. Biden didn’t realize he was live. There were audio problems and his teleprompter broke. Far more Republicans ended up watching clips of what looked like Biden having a breakdown in the Bidenbunker than anyone tuned in for the original shadow briefing.

The shadow briefing idea had been stupid and inappropriate. The implementation made it even worse.

America is not a parliamentary democracy. We don’t have shadow governments. The Constitution set forth a strong chief executive to handle emergencies. Once elected, he’s in there for the duration. We can have elections during a crisis, but Thomas Dewey didn’t deliver shadow briefings on winning WW2.

Biden has no role in making policy during the crisis because he hasn’t been elected to anything since 2012. By evacuating to Delaware, he moved far out of the Beltway and the actual government. He isn’t offering a briefing because he doesn’t know anything and can’t brief anyone on what he doesn’t know.

Instead he’s trolling actual elected officials from the Bidenbunker of his rec room to score political points. And, in a true embodiment of his entire career, he’s managed to somehow fail at doing that.

Maybe it’s because President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis is at 60% in a recent Gallup poll. Meanwhile a majority of the country has polled as disapproving of the media’s handling of the crisis.

With a lot of the country afraid, out of work, coping with shortages, and distancing from loved ones, there’s less patience for the media’s brand of toxic garbage. Most of the country wants to see politicians pull together to resolve the problem. And that’s very bad timing for the Bidenbunker routine to go live.

Nobody’s in the mood to see Biden moping around his cluttered rec room while criticizing Trump.

“I want to be in daily or at least significant contact with the American people and communicate what I would be doing, what I think we should be doing, and how we should be doing it,” Biden claimed.

Rambling sentences like this pop out of Biden's mouth like spent kernels. And just as pointlessly.

Do the American people regularly need to hear what Biden would be doing if he weren't in his bunker in Delaware, and if he were an elected official, and if any of the words leaving his mouth actually mattered.

Nothing Biden says actually matters. He isn’t in charge of anything and he isn’t being briefed by anyone.

When Biden contradicts President Trump or Governor DeSantis, he’s undermining actual elected officials whose decisions are informed by expert briefings from government officials, in the middle of a crisis.

Imagine a candidate trying to pull this routine during evacuation warnings about an imminent hurricane.

Opposition candidates usually offer their support during a crisis. Instead, Biden is trying to undermine President Trump, and Congress, at every turn, echoing MSNBC partisan talking points, and sabotaging relief efforts, in a desperate bid to keep his name in the news during a pandemic.

Joe Biden has the nomination sown up. He could easily take a break. Hang around his Wilmington mansion, phone up Hunter for some hot stock tips, and work some more on his V.P. pick. There’s still plenty of time until the election and voters are in no hurry to hear from Biden. They never were.

Giving President Trump the space to deal with the coronavirus, and succeed or fail on his own terms, instead of trying to impotently second guess him, would be the smarter move. It’s also what the country wants. What the country does not want are panicked broadcasts from the Bidenbunker thrift store.

If Joe Biden wants to have an impact on the coronavirus crisis, he has to leave the Bidenbunker.

The Biden clan is wealthy. And much of that money come through government access and foreign contacts. This would be a nice time to disgorge some of both and secure mask and ventilator supplies. The primaries are winding down leaving behind a huge activist base that could volunteer to help the elderly (not counting its 77-year-old presumptive nominee) or clean hospitals.

But these shadow briefings in which Biden addresses the nation from his Delaware Bidenbunker while offering no actual help with anything are inept trolling by a selfish politician and his incompetent campaign which can’t control his gaffes or even figure out basic audio and video equipment.

There’s nothing like a politician who can’t manage to successfully take part in a webcast, something much of the country that’s still at work is doing, claiming that he can save America from a pandemic.

The troll in the Bidenbunker has become a public health hazard.


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

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/troll-bidenbunker-daniel-greenfield/

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The Israeli Development That Could Produce Hundreds of Ventilators a Day - Adi Pick

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by Adi Pick

The ventilator is being developed at Microsoft Israel’s research and development center’s recently launched Garage Innovation Lab

A medical ventilator. Photo: Przemysław Jahr via Wikicommons.

CTech – Microsoft’s research and development center in Israel, in collaboration with Israel’s emergency service Magen David Adom (MADA), the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov Hospital), and the Israeli Air Force, is working to develop a low-cost ventilator that can be mass-produced in labs without the need of dedicated factories, Microsoft Israel announced Friday.

Ventilators have been proven to be a bottleneck in treating the more serious symptoms of the coronavirus (Covid-19) in many of the countries currently experiencing an outbreak. Critical patients can experience severe respiratory distress and mortality rates rise even further when ventilators are unavailable. According to the Israeli Ministry of Health, Israel currently has just 2,173 ventilators in stock, 28 of which are faulty. The ministry is currently making efforts to obtain new machines.

The ventilator Microsoft Israel is developing uses a manual respiration balloon and operates it autonomously. The product is open source, meaning that all of its assembling instructions will be open to the public, both in Israel and worldwide.

The ventilator is being developed at Microsoft Israel’s research and development center’s recently launched Garage Innovation Lab, which is providing university students with the equipment and materials needed to develop the ventilator.

As of Sunday morning, Israel reported 3,865 confirmed coronavirus cases, 66 of them in serious or critical condition, and of those, 54 are dependent on ventilators. So far, 89 people have recovered and 13 have died from coronavirus in Israel.

Adi Pick

Source: https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/03/29/the-israeli-development-that-could-produce-hundreds-of-ventilators-a-day/

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INTO THE FRAY: Back from the brink! - Dr. Martin Sherman

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by Dr. Martin Sherman

Hat tip: Dr. Carolyn Tal

The false façade of the Blue & White party was even more friable and fragile than anyone imagined; under the assault of recalcitrant reality, even the fast-drying Bibiphobic glue proved unable to hold things together.

Just over a year ago, immediately after the announcement of the union between Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, and the establishment of the Blue & White party (Feb. 21, 2019), I published a column, entitled: Gantz-Lapid’s directionless ad hoc political concoction (Feb. 22, 2019). 

Perverse political entity

In it, I predicted that “… it is not easy to envisage great cohesion and sense of purpose in the party ranks regarding multiple issues that are bound to arise after the elections–whether in the security, diplomatic or socio-economic spheres—and whether the Blue & Whites find themselves in government or opposition.” 

This of course, was not really a difficult conclusion to draw. Indeed, any mediocre political scientist, with a minimal grasp of the fundamentals of his professional discipline, should not have had any problem arriving at it. After all, as I pointed out, even a cursory “glance at the composition of the Blue & White list reveals it to be a highly anomalous—the less charitable might say “perverse”— political entity”. 

Indeed, rather than being a body that “coalesced around some ideo-intellectual credo or consensus—however remote—on some socio-political or strategic agenda, there is now little doubt that the centripetal forces that brought Blue & White’s disparate components together, comprised little more than an anti-Netanyahu sentiment: Some bear him a grudge because of a past affront they felt he had inflicted on them; others appear to harbor an aversion to him, on a personal basis rather than due to any substantive disagreement over policy.” 

Thus, within the “same political framework, we find a Labor Union leader alongside a champion of free market competition; hardline hawks as well as left-leaning doves….”
 
Zionism poised on a knife edge. 

As it turns out, the false façade of Blue & White was even more friable and fragile than I thought it to be. For it cracked and crumbled even before any substantive decisions on security or socio-economic policy were called for. Indeed, under the assault of recalcitrant reality, even the fast-drying Bibiphobic glue proved unable to hold things together. 

Thus, on Thursday (March 27, 2020), barely thirteen months after its inception, and the great fanfare and Bibiphobic hope that accompanied it, Blue & White ceased to exist as a serious competitor to the Likud. Benny Gantz threw his political lot in with a Netanyahu-led Right-wing coalition. 

But until that dramatic and unexpected moment, it would be little exaggeration to say that the entire Zionist endeavor was poised on a knife edge. Indeed, it appeared increasingly likely that the Blue & White leadership was prepared to undertake precisely what it solemnly undertook not to—in repeated pledges to the electorate. 

For, there seemed little doubt that the party had crossed the psychological and ideological Rubicon and was prepared to provide the anti-Zionist, dominantly Arab Joint List unprecedented access to positions of governmental power and influence in charting the future of the Jewish nation-state—in ways hitherto unimaginable.

“Disgraceful decision”

Thus, last Tuesday (March 24, 2020), the Joint List was assigned chairmanship of the Knesset Labor, Welfare and Health Committee, the  responsibilities of which include a number of security-related matters pertaining to the handling of wounded IDF veterans and victims of terrorism. 

The decision to establish the committee was made by the Knesset Arrangements Committee, which was chaired by Blue & White.

In recent years, the committee has overseen the regulation of compensation for wounded Israeli soldiers and veterans, as well as medical and income benefits for soldiers, members of the Israel Police and the Israel Prison Service. The committee also oversees pension funds and savings plans for government institutions, into which the pension funds of everyone who serves in the IDF and Israel’s other security branches are deposited. 

The committee also has the authority to revoke the National Insurance benefits and other stipends of convicted terrorists and their families.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the decision to entrust the work of the committee to representatives of the Joint List, which opposes Israel being defined as a Jewish state and whose members openly identify with its most vehement enemies, a “disgrace.” 

“…female soldiers not my issue.”
Making the appointment even more outlandish was the fact that the person selected to head the committee was Joint List MK Aida Touma Suleiman, who not only publicly called for the “Law of Return” to be revoked, but prescribed that the way to reduce Jewish victims of Arab terror would be for Jews to leave their ancient home land—apparently unmindful of how “splendidly” that formula worked in Gaza…Indeed, Suleiman even had the gall to accuse the late Ari Fuld of “executing” his Arab assailant--who fatally stabbed him in the back—when, despite his wounds, managed to shoot his attacker preventing any further victims. 


Just what might be expected from Suleiman as the newly appointed chair, can be inferred from her past conduct as chair of the less influential Knesset Committee for the Advancement of the Status of Women and Gender Equality, where she refused to allow a debate on the issues facing female IDF soldiers.

Her “reasoning” for this was, according to Suleiman: “I didn’t serve in the military, there’s no one in my vicinity who is serving in the military, I don’t know what the problems are there and it’s not on my agenda…The issue of female soldiers is not my issue.”

Of course, none of this was unknown to the folks at Blue & White. However, undeterred, they proceeded to appoint Suleiman to the Chair of the influential committee.

Near metamorphosis: From Blue & White to Red & Green

But it is not only the radical views of some of the Joint List MKs that makes Blue & White’s near affiliation with the Red & Green (Leftist-Islamist) alliance of Joint List so puzzling and perverse.

Indeed, as a collective political faction, the official party platform of the Joint List not only blatantly violates the conditions for participation in Knesset elections, as set out in Clause 7A of the Basic Law: The Knesset; but if anything it violates—to an even greater degree—Blue & White’s professed Zionist credentials.

Thus, in Article 1 in the platform, under “Fundamental Principles”, we learn that the Joint List supports (among other things) (a) Israel relinquishing the Golan Heights, (b)  the Right of Return; (c) uprooting all the Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria; and (d) the division of Jerusalem. It reads: “The Joint List will fight for a just peace in the region, based on the United Nations’ resolutions, and calling for: an end the occupation of all territories conquered in 1967; the dismantling of all Israeli settlements and the racist separation fence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; the release of all political prisoners; the establishment of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state within the June 4, 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem; and finding a just solution for the problem of the Palestinian refugees which assures the right of return in accordance with [the] UN General Assembly Resolution 194.” 

From Blue & White to Red & Green (cont.)

In Article 2, The Joint List clearly rejects Israel as the nation state of the Jews: 
“The Joint List will fight for full national and civic equality for the Arab-Palestinian public in Israel as a native minority with collective and individual rights. The list will demand recognition of the Arab public as a national minority with the right to self-administration in the fields of culture, education, and religion, as part of the Arab-Palestinian people and the Arab nation. [emphasis added – MS.]”

But the Joint List not only rejects the Jewish character of Israel, it also opposes any effort on the part of the Arab sector to contribute to it defense. Thus, Article 2 continues: “[The Joint List] will fight to annul compulsory military service for the Arab-Druze community, and against all programs of military recruitment and national service for young Arab people…” 

Yet, astonishingly, despite all this, Blue & White MK Moshe (Bogey) Ya’alon, former IDF Chief-of-Staff, and ostensibly the leader of the hawkish faction in the party, came out with the staggering post-election declaration: “The election results put us in the position of choosing which election promise to break. In this situation, removing Netanyahu is the main goal. We have no choice but to rely on the Joint List.” 

 
 Strange political bedfellows

Indeed, arguably, one of the saddest spectacles in Israel’s political theater today is the unravelling of Yaalon’s public image .

Driven by a sense of personal affront at the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu, who due to coalition exigencies, replaced him as Defense Minister with Avigdor Liberman, offering him the Foreign Affairs portfolio (which he refused), Yaalon has descended into mire of petulant pique and pettiness, coupled with a vicious vindictiveness--that has lost him the esteem of many who once held him in highest regard.

Indeed, today Ya’alon is so infused with a desire to inflict vengeance on Netanyahu that he would rather to collaborate with the anti-Zionist “Red-Green” Joint List, than support a unity government headed by Netanyahu—including a rotation arrangement with his hitherto colleague, Benny Gantz. 

Thus, although Netanyahu has guided Israel for over a decade through stormy seas, notching up numerous noteworthy (even remarkable) achievements, Ya’alon apparently sees his continued incumbency as a greater danger to the Jewish state than the Joint List, a faction openly committed to dismantling Israel as a Jewish state.  Moreover, some of the Joint List members, such as Mansour Abbas, publicly call for introducing Sharia law in Israel, permitting polygamy for its Muslim citizens and lifting the quarantine on the Hamas ruled Gaza—see also here.

They and Ya’alon certainly make strange—indeed, bizarre—political bedfellows. 

The perils—and curse—of “baseless hatred”

Watching the emergence of these astounding political developments, one is inexorably drawn to the words of the Babylonian Talmud, (Yoma 9:B) on the gravity of the perils—and the curse—of baseless hatred among the Jewish people: Why was the First Temple destroyed? Because of three things which prevailed there: idolatry, illicit sexual relations, bloodshed... But why was the Second Temple destroyed, seeing that in its time they occupied themselves with Torah, mitzvot [religious observance] and acts of charity? Because baseless hatred prevailed. This teaches you that baseless hatred is equal to the three sins of idolatry, illicit sexual relations and murder.

There seems little more to add.


Martin Sherman is the founder & executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25451

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Israel and the demise of the global village - Caroline Glick

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by Caroline Glick

Israel’s ability to protect itself and adapt its economy to the new post-global-village reality will in large part determine how it survives and prospers in the post-global-village world now taking shape.

In the face of the steeply rising number of coronavirus patients and the breakneck speed of political changes in Israel, few people have stopped to notice that the world we have grown accustomed to living in for the past generation is falling apart. The global village is collapsing under the weight of the pandemic. 

How Israel deals with this dramatic turn of events today, and in the coming weeks, months and years will determine both how we emerge from the present crisis and how we manage in the new world now taking form. 

Israel’s food supply system is a perfect example of the global changes being wrought by the virus. In Israel, five basic foodstuffs are produced locally: fruits, vegetables, eggs, poultry and milk. Most grains, sugar, rice, salt, meat and other foodstuffs are imported. 

Out of a total agricultural workforce of 70,000, 25,000 are migrant workers from Thailand and another 25,000 are from the Palestinian Authority. According to Agriculture Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, concerns over the coronavirus prevented 1,500 workers from Thailand scheduled to arrive at the beginning of the month from entering the country. The Palestinian workforce is down to 18,000 and dropping due to the quarantine the P.A. has placed on its population.

The labor shortages couldn’t come at a worse time. Currently, there are a half-billion shekels’ worth of fruit and vegetables ready for harvest. If they aren’t picked in the next three weeks, they will rot on the trees and in the fields. 

Three weeks ago, the HaShomer HaHadash organization began getting flooded with calls from farmers for help. HaShomer HaHadash is a volunteer agricultural support organization founded in 2007 to protect Israeli farmers from Arab and Bedouin criminal gangs who extort farmers and ranchers and carry out agricultural theft and sabotage on a massive level.

“These calls were different,” explains HaShomer HaHadash’s leader, Yoel Zilberman. “We are used to receiving calls about sabotage, and extortion and sending our volunteers to guard and herd. These calls were about the harvest, the national food supply.”

Zilberman and his colleagues realized the implications of the loss of a harvest for Israel’s food supply and began drawing up a plan to help the distressed farmers. Two weeks ago, Zilberman approached Hanegbi and offered to organize a corps of volunteers to save the harvest. Comprising the organization’s roster of volunteers, cadets at pre-military leadership academies, youth movement alumni and twelfth graders, Zilberman’s volunteers would work in shifts in the fields. With government financing, Hashomer Hahadash would provide for all their needs. Hanegbi agreed.

Last week, the government approved an emergency order to organize the corps of volunteers. The first hundred young people arrived in the fields on Tuesday. Operating in compliance with Health Ministry guidelines, HaShomer HaHadash launched a smartphone application called “Sundo” where prospective volunteers can join the operation. Zilberman plans to expand his list of volunteers to include foreign students stranded in Israel with nothing to do after the coronavirus caused their programs to be canceled. He assesses there are up to 20,000 foreign youth in Israel who could potentially join in the effort.

To be sure, this initiative, which will hopefully enable Israel to surmount the coronavirus-induced international labor shortage, is intended to be a short-term fix. All parties to the initiative assume that once the crisis abates, labor flows will return to their pre-coronavirus levels. But there is no way to know whether this assessment is correct. The coronavirus-induced shortage in migrant, agricultural laborers points to a much wider phenomenon that is unlikely to disappear when the quarantines are over.

The coronavirus pandemic won’t destroy global markets. But it will change them radically and reduce their size and scope. In the case of agriculture, the coronavirus has exposed large-scale vulnerabilities in both agricultural import models and domestic production. At the outset of the crisis, cargo ships laden with foodstuffs from China and Italy were laid up in the ports for weeks until port workers and the Health Ministry could develop protocols for safely offloading them. Dozens of shipments were diverted to Cyprus, at great cost to importers.

Who is to say that food supplies in China or other countries won’t be compromised again in the future? And what happens in the event of war? Naval warfare can easily endanger food imports to Israel over a prolonged period. The model of dependence on foreign suppliers needs to be adapted in the face of what we are learning.

As to domestic production, according to Hanegbi, over the past decade, the number of Israelis engaged in agriculture has decreased by 60 percent as the children of farmers are choosing other professions. Obviously, this is a major vulnerability. Israel needs food security and food security means expanding our domestic agricultural capacity. The incoming government needs to develop a national plan to support domestic agriculture and inspire young people to choose agriculture as a profession and way of life. In Israel, the next crisis is always just around the corner. And the next war or pandemic may make our current endangered harvest look like child’s play.

What is true in relation to agriculture is doubly true in relation to manufacturing. As we are finding in our race to purchase more respirators, it is ill-advised in the extreme to depend on foreign suppliers for food, medical equipment and medicines in times of crisis. Until January 2020, it seemed perfectly rational to outsource manufacturing to China. Now, as we face global shortages in respirators and other medical equipment, it is obvious that China is not a trustworthy supplier.

This week Jim Geraghty published a timeline of China’s deception of the world regarding the nature of the coronavirus in the National Review. Geraghty showed that Chinese authorities in Wuhan realized the virus was spread between humans in the first week of December. But it wasn’t until January 20 that the Chinese admitted that this was the case.

In the intervening six weeks, the Chinese lied repeatedly about the infectiousness of the virus and jailed doctors and citizen journalists who tried to warn the Chinese people and the world of the danger. Also during those six weeks, five million people left Wuhan. Scores of thousands of them got on airplanes and flew to Europe and the United States, bringing the virus with them.

Still today, the Chinese are apparently hiding critical information about the virus from the world. While the Western media heralds the Chinese success in bringing the infection rate down to zero inside China, Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported this week that the Chinese data are phony. Physicians in Wuhan told the agency’s reporters that the reason the rate of infection has dropped to zero is because the Chinese authorities have banned testing.

The coronavirus exposed a truth that global village fans have spent the past generation denying: Borders are important.

From 1997 until the coronavirus, Europe’s internal national borders were all open. Over the past few weeks, 15 E.U. member states have shut their doors and thrown away the key. Germany—the birthplace of the vision of the European common market and nation—initially banned the export of protective medical equipment to its European “brethren.”

When the Italians begged for help, no E.U. member state sent in medical teams to save their fellow Europeans.

If just last month, the heads of the European Commission had the last word in all discussions among EU member states, today no one cares what they have to say. As Professor Thomas Jaeger from the University of Cologne told The Los Angeles Times, “We’re seeing an enormous delegitimation of the authority of the EU government in this crisis. The longer the crisis lasts, the more nationalism will return.”

In many ways, regardless of how long it lasts, the pandemic has already taken a permanent toll on the European Union. E.U. members have taken one another’s measure and realized that when push comes to shove, they have only their own peoples and governments to rely on. The Italians and Spaniards aren’t likely to care what the feckless bureaucrats in Brussels or the selfish Germans have to say about their national policies after this is over.

The same goes for the United Nations and other major international governing institutions.
U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon wrote on Wednesday in Israel Hayom that this is the U.N.’s finest hour. In his words, “U.N. institutions, particularly the World Health Organization, are proving that the organization remains the main body that the world needs in its struggle with [the coronavirus].”

Danon is mistaken, however. The WHO has played an unhelpful, indeed destructive role in this crisis. As Geraghty and others have shown, the WHO was a full partner in China’s dissimulation efforts. The WHO waited until January 21, after the first coronavirus patient was diagnosed in the United States, to admit that it is transferred between people despite the fact that WHO officials knew that humans infected one another in early January. Last week, an Oxford-based research group announced it will no longer base its coronavirus assessments on WHO data, which it considers not credible.

Also last week, Walter Russell Mead noted in The Wall Street Journal that international organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization are playing no significant role in the global fight against the coronavirus. National leaders and agencies, who are directly responsible for protecting their people, are calling the shots irrespective of WHO rules and IMF spending guidelines.

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the critical failings of the global-village model for international integration. International labor markets, global trade and international governing institutions have proven vulnerable to shocks, unreliable and of limited use. It has also reminded us of foundational truths that have been shunted aside since the end of the Cold War. National borders protect nations. National authorities and fellow citizens are far more reliable and helpful in times of crisis than transnational and international organizations.

To survive and protect themselves from global shocks, nations must have autarkic agricultural and manufacturing capabilities. China is not a reliable industrial base.

Israel’s ability to protect itself today, and adapt its economy to the new post-global-village reality, will in large part determine how it survives and prospers in the post-global-village world now taking shape.
This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.


Caroline Glick is an award-winning columnist and author of “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.”

Source: https://www.jns.org/opinion/israel-and-the-demise-of-the-global-village/

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Number of coronavirus cases in Israel rises to 4,247 - Gary Willig

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by Gary Willig

Confirmed cases of coronavirus shoot over 4,000 as death toll rises to 15. 74 patients are in serious condition.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Israel rose to 4,247, the Health Ministry announced Sunday night.

74 patients are in serious condition, 82 are in moderate condition, and 3,944 patients are in mild condition. 132 patients have recovered from the coronavirus.

500 patients are being treated in hospitals, while 551 are being kept in special 'coronavirus hotels' across Israel. 2,100 patients are being self-quarantined at home.

Two Israelis died from the coronavirus Sunday, bringing the death toll to 15.


Gary Willig

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/277981

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Once again, Trump was right and the media were wrong - Andrea Widburg

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by Andrea Widburg

The moment Trump touted his optimism about chloroquine, the media turned it into a poison – but new data say that Trump was right again.

In February, China reported that chloroquine could fight coronavirus, which led to a burst of media optimism. However, when President Trump said he hoped that chloroquine might cure coronavirus, the media instantly turned on the drug. Unsurprisingly, the media were wrong. The lead doctor of the latest study on the drug says chloroquine is so helpful it would be unethical to deny it to control groups. 

We first learned about chloroquine in mid-February, when Sun Yanrong, the deputy head of the China National Center for Biotechnology Development, announced that it was one of three drugs that the Chinese had successfully used to treat coronavirus. For a month, the media thought chloroquine could be the answer. 

For example, in early March, UPI reported favorably that South Korean experts recommended anti-malarial drugs to treat coronavirus. On March 17, NBC News reported that chloroquine was one “of the options being explored” because it was “useful in blunting the effects of coronavirus.” 

Everything changed, though, on March 20 when, in a press conference, President Trump said he was optimistic that chloroquine would be a magic bullet against coronavirus:

But I will say that I am a man that comes from a very positive school when it comes to, in particular, one of these drugs. And we'll see how it works out, Peter. I'm not saying it will, but I think that people may be surprised.
By the way, that would be a game-changer. But we're going to know very soon.
[snip]
It may work and it may not work. I feel good about it. It's all it is. It's just a feeling, you know, I'm a smart guy. I feel good about it.

President Trump tweeted out the same message the next day:

Almost instantly, the media stopped touting chloroquine’s potential and, instead, threw shade on the medicine. The media reported on Dr. Fauci’s more cautious view as if he had said Trump was lying, instead of merely saying that there were still studies to be done. One Arizona outlet even called Trump’s optimism “bizarre, even delusional.” Science Magazine published an article proclaiming, “‘This is insane!’ Many scientists lament Trump’s embrace of risky malaria drugs for coronavirus.” 

The media now described chloroquine as deadly (as all drugs are if misused). The best known of these stories was the claim that a man died and his wife took ill after following Trump’s “advice.” What really happened was that the couple ate fish tank cleaner because they were stupid. (In an Agatha Christie mystery, the truth would have been that the woman cleverly figured out how to kill her husband.) 

The media even went as far afield as Nigeria to report that two people overdosed after self-medicating with chloroquine following Trump’s press conference. In fact, the Nigerian press had already reported in February that chloroquine could be a potential coronavirus treatment. 

As always, when it comes to the media’s obsessive need to contradict Trump, the media were wrong. It was the hopeful Trump who was correct. A new study from the French doctor on the forefront of coronavirus treatment shows that 97.5% of patients who received hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin improved (emphasis added):

Today, Prof. Didier Raoult and his team published results of their new study. The study was supported by the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire (IHU) Méditerranée Infection. Unlike the previous small study trial, the new observation study has a larger sample size of 80 COVID-19 patients. The objective of the study was to find an effective treatment to cure COVID-19 patients and to decrease the virus carriage duration.
In 80 in-patients receiving a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, the team found a clinical improvement in all but one 86 year-old patient who died, and one 74-year old patient still in intensive care unit. The team also found that, by administering hydroxychloroquine combined with azithromycin, they were able to observe an improvement in all cases, except in one patient who arrived with an advanced form, who was over the age of 86, and in whom the evolution was irreversible, according to a new paper published today in IHU Méditerranée Infection.

Indeed, the chloroquine and azithromycin treatment was so successful that Dr. Raoult refused to use a control group. He believed that doing so would be unethical insofar as it would deny people a proven life-saving treatment. 

And Trump once again scores against a hostile media. 

Andrea Widburg

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/once_again_trump_was_right_and_the_media_were_wrong.html

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IRGC Cyber Division confirms Khamenei’s claim that ‘demons’ are assisting Iran’s enemies - MEMRI

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by MEMRI

2016 American film “Suicide Squad” shows the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence apparatuses “using demons in order to steal classified documents from the Iranian Defense Ministry” • Khamenei: America “being accused” of creating COVID-19 virus.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei attends the Great Conference of Basij members at Azadi stadium in Tehran, Iran, on Oct. 4 2018. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

 Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said during a recent live television address that the United States “is being accused” of having created the COVID-19 virus, and that “demons” are assisting the enemies of Iran. Iranian news agencies omitted the latter quote from their coverage of the speech.

Following criticism of this omission, the Telegram channel of the Cyber Division of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) posted, on March 22, a full video of Khamenei’s statements. As support for his assertions about the demons, the Cyber Division also posted video clips of two two seminary lecturers who are well-known in regime-affiliated ideological circles, Ali Akbar Raefi-Pour and Hojatoleslam Valiollah Naghi-Pour, claiming that Israeli and American espionage agencies are using “demons” to carry out intelligence operations against Iran and against the resistance organizations affiliated with Iran. 

Associates of Khamenei have previously accused Jews of using sorcery. Mehdi Taeb, a close Khamenei associate and the head of the Ammar Headquarters think tank that advises the supreme leader, said in 2013 that the Jews’ sorcery is the most powerful in the world and that they are using it to attack Iran. Also in 2013, the Rasanews website, which is associated with the seminaries in Iranian city of Qom, published an article arguing that the Jews hand down their knowledge of sorcery from generation to generation in order to use it to control the world, nature and even God’s decisions. 

In Islamic and Iranian folklore, the world’s sentient beings are divided into ins ­(mankind) and jinn (demons). Jinns, which are mentioned in the Koran, are supernatural beings with free will, and can be either good or evil; evil jinns can lead humans astray. According to Shi’ite tradition, when the Mahdi, the Hidden Imam, is revealed, he will bring all the jinns under his command.


MEMRI

Source: https://www.jns.org/irgc-cyber-division-confirms-khameneis-assertion-that-demons-are-assisting-the-enemies/

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Arab world on verge of collapse as Gulf States blame Iran - Eitan Divinsky

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by Eitan Divinsky

With the Arab world enveloped in a struggle for survivual, local regimes' biggest fears are coming to fruition.

30/5000 Disinfection of mosque in Iran from the coronavirus                                        Reuters

According to a report that appeared in Israel Hayom today, The Arab world has seen its fair share of the international scourge known as coronavirus. It's enough to take a look at the catastrophe taking place in Iran, where the virus, according to stats published by the regime, has already infected over 35,000 individuals with the death toll currently at 2,500 and climbing, to comprehend the scope of the calamity.

Experts have estimated, however, that actual numbers of infected and diseased in the Islamic Republic are significantly higher and that the regime has claimed thus far, intentionally covering up the full scope of the tragedy out of fear that chaos and anarchy will ensue if the general public learns of the extent of the disaster. With most Arab states just a few years removed from the traumatic events of the Arab Spring, alarm over regime stability remains the common thread across the Middle East when it comes to facing the pandemic.

It is not without reason that the regional director of the World Health Organization in the Middle East, Ahmed Al-Mandhari, declared that much of virus-related data in the Arab world has been poorly communicated in the best case scenarios, and intentionally covered up at worst. The latest reports, he said, point to contradictory data that doesn't add up. Additionally, Arab nations have demonstrated a lack of responsibility in their efforts to curtail the spread of the deadly virus.

Fear of regime change has led to a delayed response in the coronavirus fight. In Lebanon, for example, flights from China, Iran and Italy were suspended only as of March 11, provoking social unrest and accusations against Hezbollah for taking orders from Tehran. Neighboring Syria, still mired in a nine-year civil war, finally ordered a partial lockdown in recent days, along with a curfew in only some provinces after the local health system reported the first virus infection in the country. Jordan seems to be the only Arab nation that took necessary steps for avoiding catastrophe on par with those ravaging Italy and Iran, closing borders, declaring a general lockdown, imposing curfew, and placing soldiers at entrances and exit points to the capital and other major cities in the kingdom.

Throughout the Arab world, healthcare systems are shaky at best, suffering from severe medical shortages when it comes to critical equipment such as: respirators, test kits, and essential drugs for providing life-saving functions. Collapse of health systems and local economic in wake of the pandemic would likely amount to angry crowds taking to the streets demanding immediate ouster of their leaders. In some Arab states, senior government officials have already begun making attempts to deflect blame for their inability to cope with the virus. Government-organized protests have been staged in Egypt, Jordan and other countries raging against the "American-Zionist corona conspiracy".

As the pandemic spreads throughout the region and the number of infected and dead continues to climb, a marked difference can be noted between the wealthy Gulf kingdoms that can afford large-scale acquisitions of respirators, test kits and life-saving medicines, and Arab states failing due to a virtual void in public health. On top of that, Gulf states have begun pointing the finger at Iran for flaming the outbreak as a result of the regime's poor approach to handling the virus while concealing crucial information.

Then, there are those who believe the global pandemic will put an end to the long-standing conflicts in the region, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict, thanks in part to close cooperation between Israel and the PA, as well as the one between Jordan and Egypt, as efforts to curtail the virus lead to closed borders and increased internal security.


Eitan Divinsky

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/277973

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