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)
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?"
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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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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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.
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.
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.
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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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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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.
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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 14th 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.
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The news cycle has been dominated by COVID-19, and a number of advocacy NGOs have made statements linking their agendas to this issue. In the Israeli context, this is consistent with previous attempts by NGOs to capitalize on prevailing public discourse, for instance manipulating narratives of climate change and LGBTQ rights as part of their anti-Israel campaigns.
The most notorious example today is a tweet from Sarah Leah Whitson, currently at the Quincy Institute and previously head of the MENA division at Human Rights Watch. Whitson used the classic antisemitic blood libel in responding to a cynical tweet about “6 million jewish israelis” understanding life under “occupation” due to the virus, stating “such a tiny taste. Missing a tablespoon on blood.” (March 14, 2020).
NGO statements relating to Israel and COVID-19 deal with a few common themes:
- “Occupation”: COVID-19 has been appended onto the standard anti-occupation rhetoric and existing campaigns that, for some NGOs and activists, are presented as the most pressing and real global concerns. Tellingly, complaints about Israeli policy in the West Bank do not seriously grapple with whether they will effectively curb the spread of disease, but rather presume that Israel must be acting in bad faith because “occupation.”
- Responsibility for Gaza: 15 years after the withdrawal, NGOs continue to blame Israel for a “humanitarian crisis” based on a unique standard of international law applied to Israel alone that denies Hamas and other actors agency for diverting resources to weapons, tunnels, and terror, instead of public infrastructure. In the current context, NGOs have been using COVID-19 as an excuse to criticize legitimate anti-terror policies and to preemptively blame Israel for an outbreak in Gaza.
- Human Rights Watch (HRW): On March 15, 2020, Executive Director Ken Roth tweeted, “The coronavirus will test the wisdom of Israel’s policies for crippling the economy and health systems of Gaza and the West Bank. As the occupying power (for Gaza, too, given Israel’s severe restrictions on movement), Israel is responsible for health care.” (March 15, 2020)
- Omar Shakir retweeted an article in +972 magazine titled “West Bank lockdowns didn’t start with the coronavirus pandemic.” The article argues that Israel’s quarantine regarding anyone who had been in Bethlehem is harmful to Palestinians working in Israel. This ignores the implementation of the same policies for the entire Israeli population, as well as tourists and anyone who had been in the vicinity of infected individuals – causing many to miss work. (March 11)
- Amnesty International: A local Amnesty UK group in Mid Gloucestershire published an article using coronavirus as a hook to further Amnesty’s antisemitic campaign that attacks international tourism companies (see NGO Monitor’s report). The article states, “This year many people’s holiday plans will be affected by coronavirus, and travellers will obviously want to get proper advice before they book. However, holidaymakers should also consider whether their vacations could negatively impact the people and places they visit. One example is holidays and activities in Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem…Please support our petition calling on TripAdvisor to ‘check out’ of the settlements – www.amnesty.org.uk/actions/checkout.” (March 14)
Suddenly, influential voices blame the COVID-19 virus not on Communist China but on the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel. This shift fits a pernicious medieval pattern that needs to be taken seriously and refuted.
That pattern goes back to about 1100 A.D. and the Crusaders in Europe. Since then, confused folk hoping to make sense of unexpected and malign developments have the permanent option of conjuring up a world conspiracy. When they do, they overwhelmingly blame just two alleged conspirators: members of Western secret societies or Jews.
Secret societies include the Knights Templar, Freemasons, Jesuits, Illuminati, Jacobins, and the Trilateral Commission. Jews are supposedly ruled by a shadowy authority, the "Elders," that strictly keeps them in line through such front organizations as the Sanhedrin, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
In modern times, conspiracy theorists have added countries to the organizations: secret societies spawned the United Kingdom and the United States, Jewish Elders became Israel. Invariably, this trio of states is blamed for shocking surprises such as the JFK assassination, Princess Diana's death, 9/11, or the Great Recession.
And so it is with COVID-19. The virus demonstrably originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, perhaps at a "wet market" with live animals awaiting human consumption, perhaps at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or perhaps a mix of the two (infected animals from the institute sold for food at the market). That the Communist Party of China (CPC) went to extreme lengths to cover up the virus both facilitated its growth and then obscured its source.
But what happened next is known to nearly every sentient person alive today: the virus spread from Wuhan to other parts of China, thence to the world. Everyone reading this has lived through and experienced that recent history; no mystery surrounds the CPC's unique responsibility for the pandemic. Wuhan virus is not a racist slur but an accurate description.
Recent days have seen an outbreak of antisemitism related to the coronavirus and Covid-19.
The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization that fights bigotry, reports, “Extremists hope the virus kills Jews, but they are also using its emergence to advance their antisemitic theories that Jews are responsible for creating the virus, are spreading it to increase their control over a decimated population, or they are profiting off it.”
The actress Rosanna Arquette claims, falsely, that Israel has been working on a coronavirus vaccine “for a year already,” indicating advance knowledge of the virus, and that a Jewish-run company is poised to profit from it. A speaker from the 2016 Republican National Convention, David Clarke, blames Jewish-born billionaire George Soros for the virus and associated panic.
The head of a Turkish political party, Faitih Erbakan, declared, “this virus serves Zionism’s goals,” according to the Middle East Media Research Institute.
If history is a guide — and there’s no reason to think it shouldn’t be — expect even more of this as the pandemic worsens.
In the 2017 book Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, Laura Spinney reports that in 1919, when “an international bureau opened in Vienna with the express mission of fighting epidemics,” one of the first things that happened was that “antisemitic elements started lobbying for Jewish refugees to be quarantined in eastern European concentration camps.”
Earlier pandemics yielded similar hatreds. The Jewish Encyclopedia entry on the Black Death that raged in Europe from 1348 to 1350, for instance, reports, “The Black Death not only resulted in the immediate destruction of hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives and the loss of Jewish homes and property in hundreds of communities, but had more far-reaching consequences. Popular imagination invested the already odious image of the Jew with even more horrible characteristics. It was this image that helped to shape the stereotype of the Jew represented by antisemitism and racism in modern times.”
Corona virus is shutting us
down. This is common to all of us. Here in Israel, we are seeing the COVID-19
directives coming down in stages. Though not everyone sees a stage as I do.
Some take the directives one at a time, as they come. I, on the other hand, am
a gamer. In a game, the levels get progressively harder. You have to see the
next move coming, which move will put you ahead of the curve, if you plan to win.
For this reason I canceled out
on a wedding last minute, before they were limiting gatherings to 200. It was
why I told my book club that I would not attend the next meeting, though they
were not yet limiting gatherings to ten, or instituting social distancing. It’s
why even before they asked us to avoid libraries, I’d stayed away from the library,
though I had just 19 pages left of Rebecca before I’d
run out of reading material.
(And it was a Friday morning.
And I read fast. And it’s hell for me to go without books.)
It is clear to me: I can see
the stages of the corona lockdown directives coming before they come, so unless
I have to, I will not be leaving my home for some time, maybe months.
But it was hard when my friend’s
husband died and I couldn’t hug her. It was already weird and surreal (as
nighttime funerals are, anyway) when an announcement was made, “Twenty people leave
the room.”
I could have looked around the
room and hoped that someone else would leave. But I didn’t. I left. Because if
that is what we have to do, we have to do it now.
I believe in being smart and prudent,
in staying ahead of the curve.
Not everyone agrees. Why come down harder than the current decrees and
directives? Perhaps they are only changing the rules of the game as the danger
increases. That it’s not dangerous to do something until they tell us not to do
it.
But who really knows? The
decisions and directives, for all we know, are subjective. Or maybe the experts
are changing their minds as they learn more about the disease. Take the
library, for instance: Maybe Israeli experts hadn’t yet thought of libraries as
a source of contagion. Until they did.
But I thought of it as soon I read that the virus lives on surfaces for days.
What is handled with the hands more than library books? I knew this without a
directive or an expert. They just hadn’t thought of it yet, or perhaps they’re
breaking us in slowly, in stages. Getting us mentally used to one stage of
lockdown before the next.
Who really knows?
It doesn’t matter. I know how
hygiene works, how contamination and contagion do their thing. And hopefully so
do you.
It’s why I asked the
technician, “Did you wash your hands?” before a recent medical procedure,
though she was insulted.
Again: it doesn’t matter. Her feelings are irrelevant.
In fact, they hamper her ability to deal with the public and I submitted a
complaint to Israel’s Ministry of Health.
We all have to do the best we
can do to stay ahead of the curve, to beat this thing, this corona virus. This
is what I believe. So use your gut sense and institute good practices before
the directives come down. Don’t wait for them and don’t be afraid to stick to
your guns.
It’s how it has to be right
now.
If we want to win.
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.
I received a fundraising email from UNRWA-USA which starts off:
While being in quarantine may be new to most of the world, this has been the devastating reality for Palestine refugees in the Gaza Strip living under a crippling land, sea, and air blockade for over a decade.
The feeling of isolation from family, friends, and the world, facing empty shelves or limited access to basic resources, and an overwhelming fear of what the future holds. This is our new reality, but just a fact of life for refugees.
Facing empty shelves? Here are photos from the Metro Market in Gaza City taken last week, including showing them cleaning it to allay fears of coronavirus:
Not an empty shelf to be seen.
Here's another lie:
This is especially the case in Gaza, where two million residents are crammed in one of the most densely populated places in the world and there is no option for social distancing.
By that logic, there is no option for social distancing in Brooklyn or Tel Aviv either, both of which are far more crowded than Gaza. (The five boroughs of New York are twice as crowded as the Gaza Strip.)
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.
As the world faces the threat of the coronavirus (COVID-19), many commentators and national leaders around the world are beginning to recognize it as a genuine national security threat.
In human behavior terms, however, the threat is not from an external enemy but from citizens who refuse to comply with guidelines and instructions and fail to change their behavior to adapt to the developing situation. With the coronavirus, the individual refusing to comply is an active and ongoing threat to others as well as or sometimes more than to themselves.
The obvious threats are the outright refusers. From a psychological perspective, these are people who are either oppositional in their attitude or in denial regarding the effects of their refusal. While the former understand that by intentionally violating guidelines they are creating risk for others, the latter deny it, at times adopting an "it won't happen to me" attitude.
Classifying the refusers' behavior as a risk and treating them as a genuine threat is a national priority. Since the cadre of those who intentionally or unintentionally put the public at risk cannot be eliminated solely through education and social pressure, law enforcement and government authorities may have to intervene.
While understandably not popular with those that value the protection of civil liberties, the suspension of these protections in times of national emergency may prove to be central in reducing mortality, as well as in limiting the economic consequences of a protracted battle with an unseen enemy hiding in a friendly population.
As of Wednesday afternoon, 433 people in Israel have been confirmed positive to the coronavirus, the Health Ministry informed, with six new cases registered since the previous update.
Earlier in the day, the Ministry revealed that the number of patients had spiked in the country, with over 100 new people confirmed positive in the previous 24 hours.
Moreover, it was announced that over 2,200 tests were performed on Tuesday, more than double the amount of the previous days, highlighting a significant rise in the number of tests executed.
Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan said on Wednesday morning that a total lockdown in Israel is inevitable given the situation of the novel COVID-19.
Erdan instructed the police and other security forces in Israel to prepare for the decision of a total lockdown in a phone call with the heads of internal security bodies throughout the country on Tuesday evening.
Of the 427 people infected in Israel as of Wednesday morning, 236 are hospitalized, 26 are in the process of being hospitalized, 71 are isolated at home or in a designated hotel, and 83 tested positive but the decision on how to treat them is yet to be made, while 11 already recovered and were discharged.
"I'm 85 and live in Tel Aviv. I was born in Galicia, which is now Ukraine," Shosh Trister tells Israel Hayom.
During the Holocaust, she says, she and her family were sent to a labor camp, from which they escaped and managed to make it back to the area where they had lived. They found various hiding places – including the forest, and with gentile families.
"For two years, we lived underground, nine people underneath a pigpen," Trister says.
In 1950, Trister made aliyah.
"At first, we lived in a ma'abra [immigrant camp] in Kfar Saba. Mom and Dad got typhus there and were hospitalized. I remember it as a very hard time, because I was far away. I thought it would be a day or two, but it was a few weeks. After the Holocaust, it was a major blow. I stayed in tent and cried."
Now, as the novel coronavirus outbreak is posing a new kind of threat to the Israeli population, Trister is confined to her home.
"It's very hard for me. Hard isn't the word – the distance makes me cry. When I'm alone, I remember the loneliness, my mother and father, and my husband, Shlomo, who died four and a half months ago," she says.
"I'm used to being an active person, going out, speaking to students, painting. Every day, I [usually] walk to our local community center and meet my friends. Now, I'm forced to stay home alone. Every morning I exercise on at home, water the plants, take care of the apartment, and then I sit down to write or paint my memories.
"I have a son who takes care of me. He comes and does my shopping. The rest of the kids also call, but it's terribly hard not seeing them."
Despite everything she has experienced in her life, Trister says she is "an optimist by nature."
"What we went through dwarfs everything. We might be stuck at home, but we have the freedom of being in Israel. We survived the Holocaust. In the end, we won. We'll beat corona, and get through it. We are strengthening everyone around us and taking strength from them. It will all be over – they'll find a cure and we'll go back to our daily routines. We overcame everything, and so will you – we owe it to future generations.
"We will send a message to the ICRC to ask them to work to release the prisoners and ensure their safety, as well as ensure that Israel Prisoner Service maintains public safety measures to protect our prisoners," Shtayyeh said in a Facebook post.
Releasing terrorists has always been a major goal of the Palestinians.
Today, Saeb Erekat added to the demand, asking the Red Cross and WHO to intervene and ask Israel to release prisoners, with no evidence that they are in any less danger from the virus if they were free.
Erekat and the head of the prisoner authority of the PLO, Qadri Abu Bakr, met with Red Cross and WHO officials in a meeting set up by Mahmoud Abbas.
Abu Bakr gave a litany of lies about the conditions of the prisoners, claiming they are already suffering from extreme crowding in the prisons, saying that Israel deliberately neglects their medical needs.
A few years ago before Israel cracked down on prisoners having smartphones, some even had Facebook accounts where we could see the "overcrowding" and other terrible circumstances of their imprisonment:
I've also documented how prisoners are far less likely to die in Israeli prisons than they are free in Palestinian society.
The coronavirus is just another excuse for Palestinian leaders to bash Israel and try to make political gains. In fact, a prisoner release would result in more net deaths - both from the coonavirus and from the Israelis who would be victims of terror attacks from the released prisoners.
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.
Egypt has withdrawn the licence of a correspondent for the Guardian newspaper after a report suggested that cases of coronavirus in the country are likely much higher than official statistics.
According to an official statement by the State Information Service (SIS), an agency linked to the Egyptian presidency, the government has also issued a warning to the New York Times's Cairo bureau chief Declan Walsh over tweets citing research by Canadian disease specialists estimating the actual number of COVID-19 cases in Egypt to be closer to 20,000.
The health ministry has so far reported 166 cases and four deaths from the novel virus, which has killed over 7,500 people globally.
But infectious disease specialists at the University of Toronto believe the number of infections in Egypt is likely to be much higher than the official figures.
On Tuesday, the SIS said it had cancelled the licence of the "Guardian correspondent", without naming her, over "repeated and deliberate offensive behaviour", and accused the NYT correspondent of "professional violations". It also demanded that the Guardian newspaper publish an apology for the article, which it described as "full of professional mistakes". If the newspaper does not issue an apology, the SIS said it will withdraw the newspaper's permit to operate in the country.
SIS emphasized that the reporters’ hastily published wrong info with only one obscure source that is not recognized by any prestigious entity and without getting back to the concerned parties, especially the Egyptian Health Ministry and the WHO bureau in Cairo. The service considered these actions as proof of their “ill intentions” towards Egyptian interests and the perception of conditions in the country.
The paper extrapolates from the number of Egyptians who were found to have the virus after traveling from Egypt and estimates from there that things are far worse within Egypt than is being reported. One of the authors say that it is more likely that there are 6000 cases rather than 20,000.
There is a big difference between publishing false information that can mislead people into panic - which in times of emergency can arguably be prohibited - and publishing information that a government does not want the public to see, especially in autocratic regimes that want to control all information.
This study that Egypt wants censored is based on real statistics and is important for the world to know.
Both the Egyptian and Syrian stories show that for many Arabs, "honor" is still more important than human lives. They are afraid that if the truth comes out it will reflect badly on their nations, and innocent people are caught in the culture of honorable lies versus shameful truths.
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.
Human Rights Watch issued a report about the dangers of the novel coronavirus to Syria's damaged health care infrastructure, especially for the many prisoners in Syria.
At one point the report says:
The Syrian government maintains that there have been no confirmed cases of coronavirus in Syria thus far. But its neighbors have all reported cases and it is clear how catastrophic even one case in Syria’s overcrowded prisons would be.
The link goes to a Syrian news agency report from March 5 that is laughable by even their standards:
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced Thursday that no Coronavirus (COVID) case has been registered in Syria so far.
WHO underlined, in a statement for WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, that no coronavirus infection has been registered in Syria, as the WHO categorically refutes false news posted on the social media regarding the coronavirus infection in Syria.
WHO reported what Syria told them. They didn't verify anything and their reporting Syria's claims do not refute anything.
And Syria is lying. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights last week reported on the coronavirus in Damascus, Tartous, Lattakia, and Homs, saying that there were some deaths. Most chillingly, they reported that doctors confirmed the reports, but that they had received strict orders from the authorities of the regime of the need to keep quiet and refrain from talking about the spread of the coronavirus there.
A Chicago doctor originally from Syria reported last week that unofficial sources said that there were 2470 cases of the coronavirus resulting in 427 deaths, which would make Syria among the hardest hit countries.
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.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Thursday, March 19, 2020
