Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, March 20, 2020

03/20 Links Pt1: 'Jerusalem stands with the world,' city walls declare; Teva to send US millions of malaria pills with potential to help COVID-19

From Ian:

'Jerusalem stands with the world,' city walls declare

The Israeli flag lit up Jerusalem's city walls Thursday night, carrying the slogan "Jerusalem stands with the world," in a move seeking to reflect solidarity with nations worldwide during the global coronavirus pandemic.

The move followed an initiative by Israel Hayom, which called on all Israelis to fly the blue and white flag at home in this time of crisis.

"Just as the coronavirus does not differentiate between the people it threatens, our flag does not differentiate between the people it safeguards. Look at the flag and remember, we are together, always," Boaz Bismuth, Israel Hayom's editor-in-chief, wrote in an opinion piece Thursday.

Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion said in a statement, "Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Israel, lit up the Old City walls with the Israeli flag this evening [Thursday] as a sign of the tremendous strength of our society.

"Even during the coronavirus outbreak that is spreading in Israel and around the world, we will stand firm and win, as the people of Israel have done throughout history," he said.

Boaz Bismuth, Israel Hayom's editor-in-chief, praised Lion's initiative, saying, "I am pleased and thankful for Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion's response and his decision to illuminate the Old City walls with the Israeli flag.

"There is nothing more symbolic and unifying for Israelis than the flag. These challenging times call for national pride and unity. "

Netanyahu tells Israelis: Now it’s an order — you must stay at home

Netanyahu said the mandatory regulations would come into effect immediately after their overnight Thursday-Friday approval and would remain in force for an initial period of seven days.

“The purpose of these instructions — to ensure as few people will be infected and will infect [others],” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu acknowledged the move was “unlike any since the founding of the State of Israel,” but said the country has never before faced anything like the coronavirus.

There was no immediate information on what the punishments would be for violators of the Health Ministry directives, which were originally announced Tuesday.
A man wearing a face mask cycles down Jaffa Street Jerusalem on March 19, 2020. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

The regulations permit people to leave their homes only for the following activities:
1. Going to work and coming back;
2. Stocking up on food, medicine, necessary products and to receive essential services;
3. Receiving medical treatment;
4. Donating blood;
5. Participating in demonstrations;
6. Unorganized sports activity in groups no larger than five people;
7. Brief walks for a short time and to a place close to the person’s residence, without coming close to people they don’t live with;
8. Going to a wedding, funeral or for prayer;
9. Helping a person who due to their age, medical conditions or a disability, requires assistance;
10. Going out for a vital need that hasn’t been specified in articles 1-9.

During all those activities, people should maintain a distance of two meters, or six feet, from anyone, as much as possible. People staying in the same household do not need to keep that distance from one another.

Coronavirus: Infected Israelis hit 705 as emergency orders roll out

The Health Ministry guidelines to fight the spread of coronavirus will no longer be recommendations or requests. Rather, overnight Thursday the government signed existing restrictions into legally enforceable orders, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a national state of emergency.

Going forward, for the next seven days, whoever breaks these orders will be subject to fines.

"There has not been anything like this since the establishment of the state," the prime minister said. "There has actually been no such thing like this in the last 100 years."

“It is not going to be easy; I am asking for your cooperation.”

In general, the new orders include that Israelis are not allowed to leave their homes unless "absolutely necessary." Visiting parks, beaches, pools, libraries and museums is prohibited, as are all social interactions. Work that can be done from home should be.

Currently all “essential” services will remain open, including supermarkets, pharmacies and most medical services. In addition, while Israelis are encouraged to work from home, employees who need to travel to work will be able to do so.

The announcement came on the backdrop of the largest spike in the number of infected Israelis: 677, according to the Health Ministry. At press time Wednesday, 433 Israelis had been diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 - an increase of 244 patients in one day.

This comes from a comment in an article in a Moroccan news site.

According to the encyclopedic book Social Glimpses of Iraq's Modern History by Ali Al-Wardi, during a cholera pandemic in Iraq under Ottoman rule (possibly around 1852,) the Jews of Iraq locked themselves in homes by order of the rabbis - and they were saved from death.

When Muslims asked their clerics what to do, they were told to say the words, "Allah will not afflict us except for what he has already ordained."

Entire Muslim villages and cities were wiped out.

I am curious as to how true this is - I am not aware of any time before now that rabbis ruled that Jews should stay in their houses even at the expense of prayer with a quorum, but this story makes it sound like is did happen in the mid-19th century. I'd love to verify this - we definitely need more source materials on the lives of Jews in the Middle East throughout the ages.

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Salon shows that it is hard to tell the difference between antisemitism and Trump Derangement Syndrome

Salon magazine's Sarah Okeson writes:

The Kushner family is trying to cash in on the pandemic that could kill millions of us.

Oscar Health, the health insurance company co-founded by Jared Kushner's younger brother,announced Friday it has launched a testing center locator for COVID-19. It shows where more than 100 centers are in the United States. The company is also offering a risk assessment survey and means to talk to a doctor online.

How exactly is a health insurance company offering a free on-line screening test to everyone, and telling them afterwards where the nearest testing center is, "cashing in"?

Aren't those admirable? Isn't that what one would hope every insurance company - or online magazine like Salon - would do?

The rest of the article doesn't explain why this is a bad thing, or how the Kushner family is "cashing in on the pandemic that could kill millions of us." It criticizes Trump's and Jared Kushner's response to the pandemic, mentions that Mar-a-Lago is a coronavirus "hot zone," and that Oscar Health co-founded by Joshua Kushner has been losing money.

The name "Kushner" is literally the only thing negative about this story.

In fact, Joshua Kushner is a long-time liberal and not a Trump fan. Part of the reason Oscar Health is losing money is because Oscar is one of the companies working under "Obamacare" and there is uncertainty as to what Trump will do with health care.

All this has nothing to do with Jared.

The online survey from Oscar Health is not earth shaking but can certainly be useful. Just the ability to guide people to the right decision about whether to seek help without taking the valuable time of doctors is admirable. It does use the latest information to estimate one's chances for getting the coronavirus. Its list of testing centers is very sparse, only showing centers in about five states - but I haven't seen any better list yet, and Oscar Health promises to update the list continuously.

So what is Salon's problem?

This is an article about how a Jewish family is supposedly trying to get rich over a world health catastrophe. It sure sounds like an antisemitic conspiracy theory. There have been articles like this about the Rothschilds for over a hundred years. The methodology Salon uses to tar the Kushners is very familiar to those who have read other antisemitic and anti-Israel pieces, with disparate information being put together to prompt the reader to come to a conclusion that some evil conspiracy is happening when the facts show nothing of the sort.

But the same can be said for Trump Derangement Syndrome. Everything he does is assumed to be evil, and only the thinnest excuses for evidence are needed for "proof." This insanity expands the hate for not only Trump, but seemingly Trump's family, Trump's family's family, and a company owned by Trump's family's family members which is negatively affected by Trump's actions.

This isn't to say that Trump cannot be criticized - there is plenty to criticize - but the aura of hate around everything Trump is way beyond sober criticism and far into the irrational.

Just like antisemitism. Just like anti-Zionism.

This piece by Salon is, by any measure, trash. It is pure insinuation and incitement with no facts to support it. The only question that remains is whether the article is a result of deep-seated baseless hatred of Jews or of Trump. And if it is hate for Trump, the writer should explain exactly how the actions of a health insurance company whose co-founder's brother is Trump's son-in-law is remotely related to anything Trump does.

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On Thursday night I did a livestream interview with CAMERA's Dexter Van Zile about modern Christian antisemitism. Check it out!

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03/19 Links Pt2: Rabbi Sacks: "Coronavirus will change everyone"; Chief Rabbi: Leave phones on during Shabbat; Israelis take to balconies to applaud medical staff for coronavirus fight

From Ian:

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: "Coronavirus will change everyone"

Rabbi Sacks' extended BBC Newsnight interview on the Coronavirus situation

On Tuesday 17th March, Rabbi Sacks was interviewed by Emily Maitlis on BBC Newsnight about how the themes of his new book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times* relate to the current Coronavirus situation. Please find the full interview below.

"As this challenging situation continues, please follow the various guidelines being put in place by your individual Governments. Please remember that pikuach nefesh, the sanctity of human life, is Judaism's highest ideal and sits above all other commandments." (h/t Yerushalimey)

Corona pandemic opens floodgates for anti-Semitism

The Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy published a new report this week detailing how anti-Israel and anti-Semitic outlets and activists are taking advantage of the global coronavirus pandemic in order to pin blame on Israel.

In Turkey, a senior official who is close to the president said that the virus "serves Zionist interests" and Turkish bloggers said that the Jews created the virus in order to take over the world.

Iran's PressTV ran a piece clearly insinuating that Israel and the US deliberately "engineered" the novel coronavirus as a form of biological warfare against the Iranian and Chinese regimes.

In France, a local politician shared an anti-Semitic video on social media that promotes the conspiracy theory that the virus was an invention that was designed to "cement Jewish supremacy."

In the US, a torrent of anti-Semitic content flooded twitter after it transpired that about 30 students who had attended The American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual conference were forced into quarantine over potential exposure to a carrier.

"You created the virus, you started this," one user said with glee. "So you are telling me that I am going to be infected because a Zionist mother tried to talk with the pandemic manager?"

Parents Keeping Warring Children At Bay In Lockdown Ready To Tackle Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Giv'at Shmuel, March 19 - Heads of a family who have so far succeeded in preventing their offspring from killing one another amid restrictions that keep everyone housebound in the face of a deadly pandemic believe that after handling that fraught situation, they feel prepared to broker a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Udi and Linor Harel, father and mother of Pazit, Malachi, Itamar, and Hadas, announced yesterday that their experience over the last several days with the conflict-plagued children confined to the family's three-bedroom apartment has provided them with the skills and wisdom necessary to resolve even the most intractable violent disagreements, including those that have stymied or thwarted diplomats and brokers for generations, such as the century-old Arab-Jewish territorial dispute over the Holy Land.

"We can probably get the two sides to reach an agreement inside of six hours, seven tops," predicted Udi, who until Sunday worked as a driving instructor. "If we can get our children to keep their fighting to a minimum, and on occasion even cooperate, we can get ANYONE else to do the same. Intifadas, counter-terrorism operations, military incursions, blockades, and rocket attacks are peanuts compared to the hostilities we've defused here."

"The parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have another think coming if they believe they can just keep fighting," added Linor, who develops educational materials for a non-profit. "Everyone in this family knows by now that's unacceptable. Give me some time with the leaders of the parties to the conflict and I'll get them to see the correct decision, if they know what's good for them. For starters, if I hear or see evidence of a single Molotov cocktail, that's no allowance for two weeks. Uh, not that there's any way to leave home to spend such money in the near future, but still."

The Harel children offered cautious agreement. "If Mom can get Malachi to stop invading my personal space, maybe she can do better than those idiots who ran the Oslo process," assessed Pazit, 14. "He's so annoying! I swear, if I hear [the children's Passover song] 'Simcha Rabbah' ['Great Joy'] as 'sim chara bah' ['put feces in it'] one more time I'm going to shove his smartphone up his... disease vector."

"Oh my God, this nightmare has to end, and then maybe Dad can tackle smaller problems like the political conflict," concurred Itamar, 8. "That is, if Pazit sticks to her side of the bargain and shuts up about her stupid social life and how this situation is killing it. Hello? It won't be your social life that I end if I hear one more gripe about missing a friend's birthday party."

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Peace Now loves to deceive with statistics

Peace Now issued a report, and AP described it this way:

Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank surged ahead in 2019, a watchdog group said in a report Tuesday, maintaining a rapid pace that has drawn strength from the friendly policies of the Trump administration.

Peace Now, a monitoring group that opposes the settlements, said that Israel’s average annual construction rate has risen 25% since President Donald Trump took office in 2017.

Perhaps more significantly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government last year approved plans to build thousands of new homes, laying the groundwork for a sharp spike in construction in the coming years. That included an explosion in plans for new settlement projects approved early this year.

This is accurate and quite misleading. Peace Now is cherry picking the statistics to make them sound like there is a dramatic increase.

In this report, they are saying that the average number of completed structures has gone up in the past 3 years than in the 8 year previous, comparing the entire Obama term to the entire Trump term.

But the highest year was under Obama - in 2014. And in the three years of the Trump administration, the numbers have gone down by 31% from 2017 to 2019!

Yearly average of construction since Trump’s administration (2,267 units) is 25% higher than the yearly average under Obama’s administration (1,807 units). In the last 3 years there were 6,800 new units (yearly average of 2,267 units) according to Peace Now’s count. 2,783 units in 2017; 2,100 units in 2018; and 1,917 units in 2019; compared to an average of 1,807 units per year in the years 2009 – 2016: 1,174 units in 2009; 1,545 units in 2010; 1,792 units in 2011; 1,554 units in 2012; 1,684 in 2013; 3,100 in 2014; 1,800 in 2015; and 1,814 in 2016.

Here is what the last ten years looks like - hardly a pattern.

Peace Now has another chart of the same information over a longer time period - but the numbers are different, I'm not sure why.

Every year Peace Now tries another way to make it sound like there is more construction than the year before, and half the time they have to play statistics games to make it appear that way. As you can see, there is very little upward slope.

Their deceptions don't stop there:

Nearly 63% (1,200 housing units) of the new construction was in settlements east of the proposed Geneva Initiative border, i.e. settlements likely to be evacuated in a two-state agreement.

Who says that the failed 2003 Geneva Initiative reflects anything close to what a two state solution could look like? Most people would say that the security barrier was the more natural border, if Palestinians ever decide they want peace. My guess is that most of the new construction is within the security barrier - but Peace Now does not want that to be the border, so they are trying to prop up Geneva.

Here is my attempt to show an overlay of Geneva (blue areas east of the 1967 lines) and the security barrier (thin and thick red lines:)

Peace Now is careful not to lie, but they are equally careful to deceive.

See also here, which indicates that the real numbers are much different than Peace Now's.

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03/19 Links Pt1: Rattled World ‘at War’ With Coronavirus as Deaths Surge in Italy, France; China’s Ghastly Blame Game; LATMA Returns!

From Ian:

Rattled World ‘at War’ With Coronavirus as Deaths Surge in Italy, France

Hundreds of millions of people faced a world turned upside down on Wednesday by unprecedented emergency measures against the coronavirus pandemic that is killing the old and vulnerable and threatening prolonged economic misery.

“This is a once-in-a-hundred-year type event,” said Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, warning the crisis could last six months as his nation became the latest to restrict gatherings and overseas travel.

The fast-spreading disease that jumped from animals to humans in China has now infected over 212,000 people and caused 8,700 deaths in 164 nations, triggering emergency lockdowns and injections of cash unseen since World War Two.

“We have never lived through anything like this,” Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told a parliament chamber nearly empty with more than 90% of lawmakers staying away and a masked and gloved cleaner wiping handrails between speeches.

“And our society, which had grown used to changes that expand our possibilities of knowledge, health and life, now finds itself at war to defend all we have taken for granted.”

There was particular alarm in Italy, which has experienced an unusually high death rate — nearly 3,000 from 35,713 cases. It has called on student and retired doctors to help an overwhelmed health service.

On Wednesday Italy reported 475 new deaths, the biggest increase since the outbreak started and the highest one-day total posted by any nation.

France also reported a spike in deaths — rising by 89, or 51%, to a total of 264 in 24 hours.

Eli Lake: China’s Ghastly Blame Game

Amid the tsunami of dread and panic this week regarding the coronavirus, on Monday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took time to lodge an official complaint with China: Stop blaming the pandemic on America. In a phone call to the director of China’s office of foreign affairs, Pompeo “conveyed strong U.S. objections” to China’s efforts “to shift blame for Covid-19 to the United States,” according to the State Department.

Pompeo’s complaint did not come out of nowhere. In the last two weeks, Chinese officials and state organs have promoted the theory that the coronavirus was brought to their country in October when a group of U.S. army officers visited Wuhan for the world military games. It’s one element of a wider propaganda campaign by the Chinese Communist Party. The regime takes umbrage at labeling the virus as something from China or Wuhan, while presenting its mass quarantines as a model of public health and offering medical aid to countries now coping with the virus.

Like all effective propaganda, there is a grain of truth in China’s messaging. After bungling the initial response, including some truly chilling abuses of power, the regime now appears to have the outbreak under control (assuming the Chinese statistics are correct). There has also been an uptick in racist incidents against people of Chinese origin all over the world, including in the U.S. President Trump and others are wrong to stoke nativism in a national crisis by continuing to call the disease “the Chinese Virus,” even though it’s true that past pandemics were labeled by the World Health Organization were named by their place of origin.

At the same time, says Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s foreign minister, China is acutely aware of the stakes. “The Chinese understand that its national reputation suffered tremendously in the last few months because of the coronavirus,” he told Hugh Hewitt’s radio program on Monday. “And what it’s trying to do is trying to overturn that kind of situation.” China’s campaign, Wu said, is “like trying to turn black into white.”

For Beijing, this is a pattern. Whether it’s the treatment of Uighur Muslims or the construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea, China’s government demands that the world believe its narrative over the reality of its own government’s failures and aggression.

Eugene Kontorovich: To fight coronavirus spread, Israel is using cellphone technology – Could US do the same?

Israel's government this week approved the use of people's cellphone location information to help battle the coronavirus epidemic.

This has raised serious - and legitimate - concerns about privacy and governmental intrusion in the form of unseen surveillance. Placing such sweeping data about people's movements in the hands of the government is not to be taken lightly.

But in an epidemic or pandemic where strong public health measures are required, some rights will inevitably be restricted. Measures like Israel's can, on balance, be a lesser evil for individual rights. If they help contain the spread of the disease, they save lives and reduce the scope and duration of far greater restrictions, like quarantines.

Israel is using cellphone data to find out who a coronavirus patient may have exposed to the virus when asymptomatic. The vast trove of metadata allows public health workers to see where the patient went and what other cellphone users were in the same place. Those people can then be warned, limiting their unwitting ability to pass on the virus.

The broad use of cellphone data to track the movements of people infringes on the privacy of individuals and should not normally be tolerated. But the particular circumstances of a contagious and life-threatening pandemic make this an appropriate response.

Individual rights cannot come at the expense of others' rights. Individual rights are not absolute when their exercise creates significant risk for others. That is why measures are permitted in such circumstances that would otherwise be unthinkable.

Electronic Intifada writes:

Show Racism the Red Card has capitulated to demands it drop Ken Loach, after an Israel lobby intimidation campaign said to have threatened its “very existence.”

Earlier this month the charity, which works against racism in football, announced that it was standing by its appointment of the socialist filmmaker as judge of their annual schools competition, alongside children’s poet and author Michael Rosen.

But in a new statement on Wednesday, the charity said that they and Loach “have together agreed that Ken will not act as a judge” for this year’s competition.

Loach’s production company Sixteen Films said in a statement that the anti-racist charity had been “subjected to an aggressive and abusive campaign” threatening its funding.

The article goes on to repeat a litany of unsupported allegations that Loach's production company lodged against the organized Jewish community.

But if you read the original Board of Deputies letter about Loach, you can see that he is even more problematic than I knew:

Originally, SRtRC stood by Loach, even after receiving this letter. Now they say they changed their mind "following new information." Does that mean that directing a play that blames Jews for the Holocaust isn't enough? That condoning Holocaust deniers isn't enough? What new information could there possibly have been?

The haters are complaining that the new information is that "Zionists" used financial pressure on the anti-racist organization to drop the director. This information doesn't come from SRtRC but from Loach's production company. Whether this is true or not, it is pretty rich coming from people whose lives center around economically boycotting Israel.

Apparently, financial pressure is an unfair tactic only when the other side does it.

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Forget Corona - Harvard students are worried about Jew-cooties

The Harvard Crimson reports:

In recent months, a new campus organization, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, called on Harvard to divest from companies tied to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

When it comes to divesting its $40.9 billion endowment, that call marks only the latest in a series of demands activists have made of the University, including divesting from fossil fuels, the prison industry, and Puerto Rican debt.

The Crimson’s analysis of the Harvard Management Company’s latest filings found that HMC had over $194 million directly invested in Booking Holdings, a company that a United Nations human rights body ties to Israeli settlements in Palestine.

Booking Holdings — the parent company of a number of travel-related businesses, including Booking.com, Kayak, and OpenTable — is one of just nine companies in which Harvard has direct public investments.

In 2018, Human Rights Watch found that Booking.com and other services that connect travellers to accommodations — like Airbnb — list rental properties in the Palestinian territories.

Omar Shakir — the Israel and Palestine Director for Human Rights Watch — said he thinks the settlements are “at the root” of human rights abuses, criticizing Booking's decision to list properties in them.

“They basically broker rentals on land stolen from Palestinians who themselves can’t stay in those listings,” Shakir said. “Booking — by brokering these rentals in West Bank settlements — is helping to entrench the settlement enterprise.”

Shakir added that he believes the rentals listed on Booking.com — which are not available to Palestinians — are “benefiting from the infrastructure, the water, [and] the electricity” in the region.

The infrastructure that Shakir is referring to was built by Israel. The Palestinian water and electricity infrastructure was also built by Israel - it was close to non-existent in 1967. So Palestinians also benefit from it - perhaps they should be boycotted?

Booking.com also lists properties in the Palestinian territories, that Israelis cannot book. So perhaps those hotels and homes should be boycotted?

At the launch event for "Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine" last month, Harvard professor Cornel West said (starting at 52:35]

The question for me is all ways one of quite unsettling moral honesty and this is a question I've been raising since 1977.

America, US elites, European elites, fellow Jewish brothers and sisters:

What would be your response if there were an ugly vicious Palestinian occupation of Jewish brothers and sisters?

Radically different!

My hunch is Harvard itself would be in the vanguard of the BDS movement in support of Jewish brothers and sisters.

Ooooh, West thinks he has a "gotcha." However, his words prove the opposite.

Not only have Jews been ethnically cleansed from Arab countries, but they have been ethnically cleansed from Palestinian areas - which is far worse than any "occupation" you can define. But there hasn't been a peep from Cornel West or Harvard.

Arabs today want to ban Jews from their holiest sites - not only the Temple Mount but also the Western Wall, if they had the ability to, and which they claim is purely Arab/Muslim. What progressive has spoken out against that?

Archaeology proving Jewish presence in the Holy Land is being destroyed by the Arabs. Jewish history is erased from Palestinian textbooks and websites. In fact, they deny that there is any Jewish history in Jerusalem and in the entire region. Who is speaking out against that?

Certainly not Cornel West, and certainly not the "progressives" who attended this event!

Booking.com has no problem showing Palestinian hotels and houses that don't allow Israeli Jews to visit. Israeli Arabs can visit - just not Israeli Jews.

Similarly, every single international hotel booking site on the planet allows its customers to reserve rooms in Mecca - where non-Muslims are not allowed to enter. Who has a problem with that? Certainly not the "progressive" Left, who are generally hostile towards people of faith but very tolerant for Muslim intolerance.

There is hypocrisy on every level. And there is only one thread that is consistent if you look at it dispassionately - a visceral hate for Jews.

Not one of the companies on the UN list is Arab-owned, even though Israeli Arabs do have businesses in the territories. But they aren't "settlers." Only Jews are.

It would be easy to show BDS' hypocrisy in the fact that no major "progressive" group is calling to boycott China, which has imprisoned a million Muslims to the collective shrug of the Left.

But this isn't just a call to boycott Israeli companies, which would already be antisemitic. When these haters say to divest from Booking or General Mills, it is a call to divest from companies who have a small component that provides a nominal service in places that the "progressives" want to be Judenrein.

This isn't "justice" - this is obsessive hate.

(The term "Jew-cooties" was created by the great blogger Meryl Yourish back in 2005.)

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Elder live online

I started playing with live-streaming this week, since people need distractions nowadays. These are not the most polished videos, but you might find them entertaining, and hopefully they will get better.

Here is the Wednesday night edition, 8 PM EDT:

Tonight I hope to interview Dexter Van Zile, of CAMERA, at 9 PM EDT. You can watch live and comment live as well. I'll post the URL on Twitter before the show.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Is COVID-19 a blip or is it the apocalypse?

It seems to me that unless humans do something stupid, like start wars, it will be a blip (this post is based on statistical and other data on the pandemic from this site).

In many countries, it will be a vicious and tragic blip indeed, but the measures taken to reduce the damage have so far had far greater overall effects than the actual illnesses and deaths attributable to the virus. China, as of yesterday, had a total of about 3200 deaths, and the number of new cases dropped to only 13. 3200 is 0.00023% of China’s population. Obviously there will be more deaths, there may be additional waves of the disease, and other countries may not be able to or may not choose to take the draconian measures taken by China, including wide area lockdowns and millions of people in quarantine.

Italy, for example, already has 2500 deaths and almost 700 new cases as of yesterday. The number of deaths doubled in the past four days. It will get worse before it gets better. But still, it should be clear that this isn’t the Black Death, which killed 30% to 60% of Europe’s population in the 14^th century.

Within a couple of years – unless the virus mutates especially rapidly or there are other unforeseen circumstances – most of the world’s population will have immunity, either from having had the disease or by vaccination. But until then, some models predict hundreds of thousands of deaths in countries like the US and UK, unless policies of social distancing and quarantine are adopted, like the ones that have been effective in China, South Korea, and Japan – and that we hope will work in Israel.

Israel has implemented drastic measures, including closing schools and daycare, which essentially paralyzes the economy. The police have already arrested several people for violating quarantine, and they have announced that they will soon begin handing out heavy fines to anyone violating the social distancing rules, such as congregating in groups larger than 10 people. It’s possible that the next step will be a total lockdown, almost a general curfew.

When the rules were first announced, many people felt that PM Netanyahu and his advisors in the Health Ministry were overreacting, but as the number of cases grows, most Israelis have come around to the idea that tough measures are needed.

One step that is still controversial (at least among anti-Bibi politicians) is to have the Shabak (General Security Service) make use of its sophisticated cellphone data collection system, usually employed only for terror suspects, to track the whereabouts of everyone who has been diagnosed with the virus. This information will be given to the Health Ministry, which will be able to warn everyone who has been close to a carrier to enter self-quarantine. There is already an app available that will take the information provided by the Health Ministry about the location of known patients, and cross-check it with your own movements, so you can be informed if you have crossed the path of one of them.

As I write (Wednesday morning) we have 427 diagnosed cases, and the authorities are adopting new testing procedures that should make that number climb rapidly. I expect that we are in for a difficult few weeks as those currently incubating the disease develop symptoms, because our healthcare system is severely underfunded and understaffed, and is running over capacity even without global pandemics.

But from a political and economic point of view, here is the single most important fact about the pandemic:

Unlike the Black Death, which was especially fatal to children and young people, this virus is far more deadly to the old. Even if millions die, they will not be the most economically important millions. This is not pleasant to contemplate for those of us who are in the most threatened age groups (I am 77), but it is a fact.

It is also the case that ruling elites in many countries are made up of older individuals. Iran, which has been particularly hard-hit by the virus is a good example, with its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei 80 years old; it has lost several members of its parliament, an IRGC general, and other officials of various sorts. But Binyamin Netanyahu is 70, Donald Trump is 73, Joe Biden is 77, Bernie Sanders is 78, Narendra Modi is 69, and Angela Merkel is 65.

It’s interesting to speculate about how cultural attitudes influence the strategies being taken against the disease. We know that Israelis will go to any lengths to protect their children, including the ones who are already old enough to be in the army – what other country would release more than 1000 terrorists, many of them guilty of murder, in return for one young man? I often compare the way my grandchildren and their age-mates are being brought up to what I remember from my own youth in the USA: there is no comparison. Our parents loved us and did what they thought best for us, but they didn’t lavish the amount of attention, time, or other resources on us the way Israeli parents do today – both individually and as expressed by the cultural institutions they sustain. So does Israeli culture value its senior citizens as well? I think it does, although the children come first.

The strategy of social distancing and isolation is intended to prevent a collapse of the overstressed healthcare system, as occurred in northern Italy, where it has been reported that patients died because there weren’t enough ventilators available for those in respiratory failure. Since these patients are primarily (but not entirely) the older ones, adopting this strategy essentially protects the older population in return for accepting the economic losses that come from it.

Experts don’t want to predict how long it will be necessary to hunker down like this. Will it be only until the warm weather? Will it be until a vaccine is available, which may take a year or more? Will the relaxation of restrictions bring on new waves of illness? Nobody knows.

In some ways, Israel is in good shape to weather this pandemic. Israelis are resilient and creative, and are finding ways to work and study at home. Research is underway for vaccines and other forms of treatment or prevention. Israel has the ability to control its borders, so there is less worry about the introduction of infected individuals from abroad.

On the other hand, just as it is in our security situation, we don’t have a lot of room for mistakes: the healthcare system needed a big infusion of resources even before this happened. If there is a major source of concern about our ability to weather the crisis, this is it.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.