The Bibiad  

By Victor Rosenthal

The idea of a hero with a tragic flaw echoes throughout Western literature. It’s found in Homer, in classical Greek tragedy, and of course in the Bible. The tragic flaw is sometimes a character defect, a particular weakness in an otherwise powerful hero, or sometimes a single insuperable sin, that brings down upon the hero his doom in an inexorable, inescapable, and dramatic process. The great Achilles meets his undoing because of his tendency to excessive and uncontrollable rage; his famous heel is emblematic of how a single flaw can be the end of an otherwise invulnerable hero.

The ambition of Lady Macbeth, the indecision of Hamlet, and in real history, the overweening self-confidence that led Napoleon to invade Russia in June of 1812, are examples of tragic flaws that bring about the destruction of the protagonist.
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April 20, 2020 | 1:38 am | 1 Comment »

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Very Good News Israel  

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
In the 19th Apr 20 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include:

  • Three Israeli treatments have saved lives of critically ill coronavirus patients.
  • Israel has given coronavirus training to PA medics from Gaza.
  • Three Israeli innovative solutions for the ventilator shortage.
  • Investment in Israeli startups continues despite the pandemic.
  • Many more opportunities to enjoy Israeli culture and entertainment on-line.
  • A different Passover as Israelis sang with their neighbors from their balconies.

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April 19, 2020 | 12:27 pm | 6 Comments »

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The European Union is Dead but Does Not Yet Know It  

by Giulio Meotti, GATESTONE INSTITUTE  •  April 19, 2020

  • The truth is that there is no “Union”.
  • The coronavirus now has put the European Union and its comfort zone face-to-face with all its weaknesses, decadence and cowardice.
  • Another merciless battle Italy fought with the EU was for protective face-masks. France adopted a policy of requisitioning them; Germany banned their export. Those unilateral decisions undermined a much-touted EU principle: the free movement of goods in the single market.
  • As L’Express exposed, France seized four million masks belonging to a Swedish company and that had been intended, in part, for Italy and Spain.
  • When Italy and Greece were overwhelmed by migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the EU countries refused to take their “share” of migrants. Lacking a policy to stop the flow of mass immigration, Europe decided to leave the southern countries to their fate.

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April 19, 2020 | 12:23 pm | Comments »

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Europe’s elderly are abandoned like lambs in Covid-19 slaughterhouse  

They are denied treatment, but also a place in victim statistics. As if not only had they lost the right to life, but as if they didn’t exist.

By Giulio Meotti, INN

It is a question of a dominant mentality, not of a judiciary that now investigates and inspects nursing homes in northern Italy. It is a sort of social euthanasia, of “seniorcide,” of large-scale triage so it is considered wrong to ask to be put on a respirator for oneself if one is “old and sick.”

According to a Sunday Times reconstruction of a Boris Johnson government meeting in late March, Prime Minister’s advisor Dominic Cummings exposed the government’s plan before “BoJo” fell ill: “Herd immunity, protecting the economy and if that means that some retirees die, too bad” (Cummings later denied saying so). On the one hand there is an informal protocol, whereby the “elderly”, especially those with pathologies, are not treated but accompanied to death with sedatives in nursing homes, as if Covid-19 was a terminal disease for them.

On the other hand there are formal protocols. The latest was released by the Financial Times.
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April 19, 2020 | 8:22 am | 13 Comments »

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Explains the discrepancy in death rates as reported.. EXCELLENT – A MUST READ  

By Martha Henriques, BBC FUTURES  2nd April 2020

In Italy, the death rate from Covid-19 is more than 10 times greater than in Germany. Why does the death rate vary so much internationally?

I. In Italy, an epicentre of the new coronavirus outbreak, the death rate at the end of March stood at a sobering 11%. Meanwhile in neighbouring Germany, the same virus led to fatality rates of just 1%. In China, it was 4%, while Israel had the lowest rate worldwide, at 0.35%.

At first it can seem surprising that the same virus – which doesn’t seem to have mutated significantly as it has spread – can lead to such widely differing reported mortality rates. And even within one country, the rate appears to change over time. So what’s going on?

Several main factors account for much of the difference we’re seeing – and perhaps the most important come down to simply how we’re counting, as well as testing, cases.

Differing death rates
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April 19, 2020 | 6:18 am | 8 Comments »

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Coalition deal between Likud and Blue and White ‘imminent’  

Negotiations have been stuck over Netanyahu’s demands for legislation to preserve him in office.

By JEREMY SHARON, JPOST APRIL 18, 2020 22:11

Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White leader Benny Gantz (photo credit: REUTERS)
Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White leader Benny Gantz (photo credit: REUTERS)

Blue and White sources have stated that a coalition deal with the Likud is now imminent and could be settled late Saturday night.

The Jerusalem Post understands the Likud and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have backed down on demands for legislation to circumvent any High Court ruling preventing him from serving as prime minister or deputy prime minister during the period of the unity government.

And Channel 12 News reported that Blue and White leader Benny Gantz told associates that a significant breakthrough had recently been made in the coalition negotiations and that an agreement could be signed in the next 24 hours.
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April 19, 2020 | 1:45 am | 4 Comments »

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The Real Numbers Show US’s COVID Response Is World-Class,  

Far Superior to Anti-Trump Media’s Portrayal

Real COVID-19 Numbers Expose Massive Lie the Media’s Been Feeding Us

By C. Douglas Golden , WESTERN JOURNALISM    Published April 18, 2020

You know the media spiel: Our response to coronavirus has been among the worst in the world.

Just look at The New York Times on April 11: “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus.” Or look at it on April 13: “Trump’s Slow Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic.” On April 14: “Criticized for Pandemic Response, Trump Tries Shifting Blame to the W.H.O.”

This is a pretty steady drumbeat, both in news coverage and opinion pieces. (I have trouble telling them apart when it comes to The Times, though, and I think their editors do, too.) The basic gist of it is this: The Trump administration caught the virus late, has mismanaged the response since and has tried to divert America’s attention elsewhere.
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April 19, 2020 | 1:09 am | 3 Comments »

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Economics 101  

[Unknown author.]

How Trudeau’s Stimulus Package Works

It is a slow day in the small Saskatchewan town of Pumphandle and the streets are deserted. Covid-19 has made things tough, everyone is in debt and everybody is living on credit.

A tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night. As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Co-op. The guy at the Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her “services” on credit. The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner. The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill and leaves. No one produced anything. No one earned anything… However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a Stimulus package works.

April 19, 2020 | 1:09 am | 1 Comment »

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The Jewish woman who entered a Nazi camp to marry the French prime minister  

T. Belman. What an incredible true story of love and bravery in the time of the Holocaust.

Film ‘An Irrepressible Woman’ depicts true WWII story of Jeanne Reichenbach, who voluntarily interred herself in Buchenwald, where she married three-time French premier Léon Blum

By Rich Tenorio, TOI

Screenshot from 'Je ne rêve que de vous,' or 'An Irrepressible Woman.' (Courtesy)

In an improbable wartime wedding at the infamous concentration camp of Buchenwald, two Jewish captives were united in matrimony: a Frenchwoman named Jeanne “Janot” Reichenbach and her longtime lover, Léon Blum, a former socialist prime minister of France. The ceremony was made possible because Reichenbach had voluntarily sought to join Blum at the camp after he was imprisoned there in 1943.

Reichenbach’s courage is reflected in a new French feature film, “Je ne rêve que de vous,” with the English title “An Irrepressible Woman.” Directed by acclaimed French Jewish filmmaker Laurent Heynemann, it was recently screened at its Midwest premiere at the Chicago JCC Jewish Film Festival on March 1.
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April 18, 2020 | 1:57 pm | 1 Comment »

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Defending Trump ‘Opening Up America Again’  

By Lloyd Marcus, AMERICAN THINKER

Perhaps I am a bit edgy due to coronavirus house arrest. Just kidding. However, this guy’s email really annoyed me. “We’re in lock down and people are hurting wondering how they will pay their bills. All this was not happening 4 years ago. Over the last 4 years we have continued to see our freedoms erode. Yet, some keep hoping Trump will be our savior. What has he done over the last 4 years? All I’ve seen was more decay.”

Here is my response: “Where do you think we would be had Hillary won? Trump has fought for our freedoms like no Republican since Reagan. He has Republicans, Democrats, never Trump conservatives and 99% of the media fighting against his America first agenda. I give the guy credit.”

Folks, I refuse to dump on the only guy with the guts to fight for us. Trump has accomplished an extraordinary list of unprecedented achievements for We the People.
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April 18, 2020 | 1:37 pm | 3 Comments »

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EDITORIAL: TRUMP – Existential Threat to New World Order  

L. Goudsmit: BRAVO!! I will add to this marvelous editorial that every attack and coup attempt against President Trump is a boomerang.

The first failed coup attempt, the Russia-collusion Mueller investigation, exposed the corrupt FBI, CIA, Obama/Clinton political malfeasance.
The second failed coup attempt, the Ukrainian affair, exposed the corrupt Obama/Biden/Pelosi political malfeasance.
The third failed coup attempt, the egregious impeachment of President Trump, exposed the corrupt Democrat party including Pelosi/Nadler/Schiff/Schumer and their equally corrupt political operatives like fired AG Michael Atkinson who changed the whistleblower rules to allow hearsay as evidence!
The fourth coup attempt against President Trump – the coronavirus “pandemic” – the economic bioweapon released by communist China to collapse the US economy and defeat Trump in November. The fourth coup attempt is already exposing the corruption of the WHO, the CDC, its IHME models, and also the glaring conflicts of interest of Fauci and Birx, both members of Bill Gates Boards.

President Donald J. Trump is the existential enemy of globalism which makes him the existential enemy of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation commitment to UN agenda 2030 and an internationalized world under the rule of a one-world government. We cannot allow the fear-mongering media, Fauci, or Birx to keep us at home.

America has got to go back to work. We cannot allow the fourth coup attempt to succeed.

By Dr. James Veltmeyer, a prominent La Jolla physician voted “Top Doctor” in San Diego County in 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019.

Cultural Intelligence

EDITORIAL – The ongoing attacks by the political establishment on President Donald Trump –which began even before he was elected – are without parallel in history. The savagery, frenzy, and outright hysteria displayed by the President’s enemies within the Democrat Party, the media, and the various power centers of the globalist elites have no prior precedent.

This President has been spied on, lied about, made the subject of phony foreign dossiers, insulted, ridiculed, scorned, mocked and threatened. We have witnessed Hollyweird celebrities advocate for blowing up the White House, demand the President be beaten, jailed or even assassinated, and his children tortured and sexually abused.

We have seen politicians in Washington try to convict the President of non-existent crimes, investigate him and his family members for everything from tax returns to guests at his hotels, project on to him crimes that they themselves have committed, and seed his Administration with leakers and double-agents.
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April 18, 2020 | 1:16 pm | 4 Comments »

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Does Google Have Hillary Clinton’s Emails? Court Authorizes Subpoena to Find Out  

JUDICIAL WATCH

If you use Gmail, you know that Google holds your messages seemingly forever. Could it be doing the same with Hillary Clinton’s elusive emails?

We’ll find out. We have served a subpoena, authorized by a DC federal court, on Google to produce all Clinton emails from a Google account believed to contain former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Platte River Networks’ IT specialist Paul Combetta reportedly used the Google account to transfer Clinton’s emails from a laptop to a Platte River server, then used BleachBit to remove any traces of the emails from the laptop.
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April 18, 2020 | 10:26 am | 1 Comment »

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Trump’s Winning Coronavirus Bet  

JUDICIAL WATCH

The anti-Trump media’s attacks on emerging and encouraging treatments for the coronavirus contagion is one of the worst scandals of the modern media age.  President Trump hasn’t been cowed by the “nattering naybobs of negativity” and his push for wider use of hydroxychloroquine may be saving lives. Our Micah Morrison has the story from our Investigative Bulletin:

Donald Trump’s bold gamble on hydroxychloroquine (HC) appears to be paying off. Medical professionals in New York tell Judicial Watch that doctors battling the pandemic are increasingly reporting benefits from the drug. They’re prescribing it for themselves, for patients, and for frontline personnel.

HC is a decades-old drug used in treating malaria, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. It’s largely untested against the coronavirus. President Trump has been enthusiastically promoting it for weeks, calling it possibly “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine” and “a very special thing.” The president’s embrace of the drug apparently began with a conversation in March with Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison and quickly escalated to exchanges with Dr. Mehmet Oz, Rudy Giuliani, Laura Ingraham, and friends in New York. A small study in France indicated the drug could be effective in fighting the virus, though French authorities later backpedaled.

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April 18, 2020 | 10:21 am | 1 Comment »

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Rules for commenting  

By Ted Belman

As Editor, I am responsible to keep keep Israpundit relevant and interesting. I try to limit the number of posts on the Coronavirus. Your comments interfer with my choices. The readers only have so much time to spend reading the posts and I want to be the one who uses the time intelligently. Your excessive commenting on CoronaVirus upset the balance I am trying to achieve.

1. Comments must pertain to the article to which they are attached.
2. Do not post whole articles as your comment. You may if you wish post the title of the relevant article and link it to the source. You can also include a quote from it.
3. You can post anything you want on Chit Chat if it doesn’t refer to any particular post. But even there do not post the whole article. Just the title linked with a quote will do fine.
4. The software (Word Press) relegates some comments to moderation trash or spam. I am not sure of what informs its choices. BUT I HAVE NO HAND IN IT.
5. I very rarely remove a comment. but I spend a lot of time rescuing your comments.
6. Do not repeat your comment.
7. the software doesn’t like it if your posts have too many links or are too long. It also doesn’t like it if your jump from one comment to another in rapid succession.

I will look intothe reasons for trashing etc and see if I can alter them I think I can whitewash all your comments, one commentator at a time but before I do so I want to be confidant that you will follow my rules.

April 18, 2020 | 8:14 am | 3 Comments »

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Pandemics, Palestinian incitement and peace  

The Palestinians, like their authoritarian brethren in Iran and beyond, drive home the difference between democracies and dictatorships. In the future, when we get confused over where justice lies, we need to look no further than how each government behaved during the coronavirus pandemic.

By Caroline B. Glick, TOI

A few weeks ago, Israel’s Health Ministry officials were calling for Israel to “medically annex Judea and Samaria” for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. The proposition was that while Israel and the Palestinian Authority are separate political entities, from a public health perspective, they are indivisible.

On a practical level, the call was superfluous. From the moment the virus arrived in Israel, the PA’s Health Ministry began cooperating in an unprecedented manner with its Israeli counterpart. The Palestinians followed Israel’s lead on virtually all aspects of the coronavirus fight. Palestinian medical teams received training in Israeli hospitals. Israel provided the PA with testing kits, protective gear, respirators and other vital equipment for fighting the pandemic. Even the Hamas regime in Gaza viewed Israel as the authority for dealing with the virus.
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April 17, 2020 | 4:17 pm | 1 Comment »

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Lapid proposes 6-month political freeze as Ya’alon says Gantz isn’t fit to be PM  

Yesh Atid-Telem leader says he isn’t happy with current caretaker government, but adds it’s better than 4th election or Netanyahu-Gantz unity deal

By TOI STAFF Today, 12:57 pm

Blue and White leaders Yair Lapid (R) and Moshe Ya’alon at a faction meeting at the Knesset on June 24, 2019. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Yesh Atid-Telem leader Yair Lapid on Thursday proposed a six-month “political freeze” to prevent fourth elections as Israel battles the coronavirus pandemic, as his ally Moshe Ya’alon said their former party chief Benny Gantz was unfit to serve as prime minister over his willingness to sit in a government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Gantz is conducting negotiations for forming a unity government with Netanyahu’s Likud, a move that caused the centrist Blue and White party to split from former allies Lapid and Ya’alon.
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April 17, 2020 | 4:07 pm | 4 Comments »

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